Beautiful work, Alan.
On Sep 13, 2013, at 11:59 AM, Alan Fregtman <alan.fregt...@gmail.com> wrote: > Rodeo FX has just put up a short reel of the crowds we did for "Now You See > Me" to fill the MGM Grand stage with the help of ICE and Arnold... > > https://vimeo.com/74393635 > > > It's not done with CrowdFX as SI|2013 was in beta while this was being made > and they didn't need to be too intelligent, so we went with a bunch of nice > cycle instancing tools and stationary particle instances. There were various > variations of animation clips of various different variations of people. > > Animation was mocap captured with iPiSoft's playstation-eye-based mocap > software, then cleaned up in MotionBuilder, brought back into Softimage > (thanks to the MotionBuilder template rig) and caches exported out. > > The cycles were in one long timeline of one clip after another and we stored > start & end frame numbers along with an array of ICE strings (of the cycle > names.) We might have "clappingA", "clappingB", "clappingC" with different > frame ranges and then we had a neat ICE compound where you could give it in a > substring (eg. "clapping") and it would find all variations for that name and > randomly assign those frame ranges and cycle. > > If I recall correctly the general behaviours were: standing idle looking > around, clapping normally, clapping hyperenthusiastically with bonus > fistpumping, and grabbing money bills from the air. There were three or so > variations of each. > > Furthermore, the crowd on the floor near the stage is CG, but the one in the > stadium seats is actually 2D cards of footage of real people -- Rodeo > employees, in fact -- doing various motions, instanced in Nuke with some > scripted magic. (I was not involved with the 2D crowd so that's as much as I > know.) > > The 3D crowd models are Rodeo folks too, by the way. I'm among them, as are > most of my coworkers. We used some software with the Microsoft Kinect to get > some general 3D scan meshes of us as a reference for volume/form, but they > were modeled by hand as the scan wasn't quite perfect as-is. It was super > helpful to have the scans though! Its pretty amazing how often you can tell > people apart from their silhouette/stance alone. > > I co-developed the ICE side of it together with Jonathan Laborde (who is in > the list and probably reading this.) Hats off to my other fellow coworkers > who modeled, textured, lit and comped everything so well. :) Teamwork! > > > Cheers, > > -- Alan > Michael Clarke Design Blue C Studios 713-927-9835
