I was curious what are some crowd solutions people have without having to go big with Massive. I am open to a lot of ideas. Just some heads up I have crowds that go from 10 to 40 people in the background without having to animate each and every single one.
I work in maya 2008/2011.
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michalf
[ Editor ]
One of easiest way is to record people with a cam, and populate scene with sprite particles. This is easy to do, but quite limited - works best for static and massive crowds, like stadium spectators etc.
Another, (more involved) route that I know of is to control agents with particles, export data to files (possibly per-frame files) and use renderman to instantiate prebaked animation cycles for each particle. There's a great article on this on renderman.org (siggraph papers, ILM crowd on starwars). Some knowledge of renderman and python scripting can give nice results.
carsten kolve
I'd go as simple as possible - especially if its just a few shots. I'd try animating 4 or 5 guys overlength (maybe 1.5 times as long as the shot) or use some mocap. Mesh-cache their geometry and then instance the geo as often as you want, changing the positions and time offsets (you can easily key the time of each individual mesh cache instance). That should give you some nice variations without a lot of overhead.
But Julian is right - a lot depends on your shot and performance requirements.
Unfortunately MoCap data is out of the question because of very creative requirements to use hand animation. The Mesh caching is a good idea but I feel it would limit to characters who stand still
Mesh caching (as long as it contains animated meshes, of course) does not limit you to characters that stand still – you can use the technique for all types of motion. Many simple crowd systems I know of in use at various vfx houses just use instanced mesh caches (or the respective rib caches) to generate crowds.
Julian Mann
[ Admin ]
If you have only 40 agents and they are just hanging around doing non-specific stuff in the background you may be able to find some free motion capture files that work for you. There are tons here.
Estimates of the number of agents needed for a crowd shot tend to be way off though. 40 people doesn't look like much. Are you sure that will be enough?
And how close do you get to the agents? What are the camera moves like? What are the crowds doing - fighting, standing around, running, cheering? Do you have access to any live action actors? All these factors make a difference to how you might go about it.
yann
You may also look at some other crowd software, that may be more easy to use and also less expensive. For instance: www.golaem.com/crowd It is fully integrated in Maya, and seems doing exactly what you want to do.
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