Forgot to add: The MGM Grand spinning shot is actually 3 different plates
stitched together.



On Fri, Sep 13, 2013 at 12:59 PM, 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
>
>

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