crowd sequence

[Nicool]

For LOTR II a big application was coded called Massive. Evidently you can't get it... But a students group are working on building an application for maya to manage crowd animation (I don't remember the website adress, but I remember it was a serious project). I think with mel and expressions you can build a simple crowd manager (if you know mel)... Reply me about it;)

On 3dsudiomax, a man coded Mayem. An application using Character studio and Maxscript to manage crowd too.
http://www.adamwatkins.com/mayhem.htm

Nicool :beer:

[modi]

Woah, ok, i'm an animator, i need a simple solution.
my short film is about basketball. The scene has my character, the hoops a ball and a nurbs plane. Thats pretty much it. The stadium is really big.
I need a crowd for the background pic and for points of reference at times. They can be totally stylized, yeah stick figures are fine, i just need to know if i can make an animation of one guy in silhoutte jumping up and down, is there a way to make that a texture map and wrap it around this gigantic sphere and duplicate them and offset them to be a crowd. I can't offord to duplicate the gemoetry as that would be too heavy. The crowd appears relatively small and the camera is always in front of the crowd.

[Nicool]

Cool doc on crowd study
http://depts.washington.edu/cmmr/Students/current_students/kazuko_hass/april_23_2002/Proposal.pdf

Priced plugin
http://www.fess.de/prod_plugins_aiimplant.html

Birds crowd (french)
http://www.pixelcreation.fr/pixel/pixel/tutorial.asp?idCat=2&idSoft=13&idSub=71&idTut=417

[Nicool]

By searching on this forum...
http://www.ai-implant.com/prod_maya_demo.html

[Nicool]

I've seen your animations on your page... It's cool! I add it !

http://www.kolve.com/mp_brainbugz/brainbugz.htm

[steveblake]

Hi Pramod

Dunno if this'll help, but I very recently worked on a commercial that involved a large crowd (400+ characters). Due to time constraints, we chose not to use any specilised software (MASSIVE etc), since we wanted everything setup in Maya, easily modifiable and as simple as possible.

However our method may not be completely suitable, since it's fairly time time consumming and the files are quite large (taking ages to load) Still I thought I'd outline it here, just in case...

Basically, the method I used was to rig a very low res character and animate a 15-30 frame cycle of jumping & waving etc. I used a character set and converted the sequence into a Trax clip.

I then created a poly surface, with each vertice positioned where I'd like a crowd memeber placed. Thus creating a reference 'grid'.

Opening the original rig I then created 7-10 more cycles (each as a seperate file) - each time I did this moved the new character to a position on the poly 'grid' and I saved it out seperately under a different name, also converting them to Trax clips.

The final (longwinded*) method is to import all of these files into one block of crowd members, save out this master file and re- import. Do this a couple of times and you'll get a nice large crowd going...

The 2 things I noticed were:
a. You could get away with very few characters instanced across the scene.
b. The edges of the crowd need to be randomised as much as possible, as it's the silhouette that people notice most.

However, if you then go into the trax editor and offset, scale and blend the clips you get a very convincing crowd...

*We are fortunate to have a TD who eventually wrote most of this into a mel script that I could run at the beginning of each shot. It took my animation files from a directory, imported and then instanced them onto the reference grid (1 at each vertice) then added a random jump on the Y value of each character root...

Lastly, I belive there's a couple of random crowd/ flocking mels at highend3d. Have you taken a look at those?

[steveblake]

Just reading your last reply I realise my method wouldn't be totally suitable.

I'm agree that a set of mass-duplicated nurbs planes with animated textures would probebely be enough. (The textues could be rendered from original 3d characters)

Hope all of this give you some ideas :)

[aydinu]

That depends on how close you will be to your crowd. If not use particles, render them as sprites. And the easiest way to get a waving sequence is capture yourself and voila

Aydin

[TheWraith]

they have some cd's you can buy that have animation cycles of real people performing certain acts. might be something you could use if you choose to go with the sprite method. would probably be the easiest solution, but not sure if it would be the most realistic or best solution. if you wanted a more cartoon feel you could always run a simple filter over them in post as well. or maybe even flash would be worth takin' a look at.

[Ewan Lee]

Hi

I did something similar, a crowd in a circus... If you have access to a comp program after effects / combustion:

Model and rig a low poly character and render 4/5 cycles of different angles (3/4 left, front, 3/4 right)

Make a 2D comp, it's much faster and you can vary the crowd by just offsetting/mixing the cycles on the timeline and using color correction (different colored clothing & so on)

Render a clip and use it in maya as a animated texture, or even faster render the scene in layers and have your 3d character and foreground on a 2d background plate.

good luck

[modi]

hey guys, thanx for the replies.
Nicool, i'm glad u liked my animations.
Steve - thanx for explaining the process. Sounds very interesting, i'll think about the trax editor thing.
Ewans idea sounds simple enough , i'll def give it a thought using a comp package. I'll start animating cycles for the crowd. I'll keep u posted on how this turns out. I'ts probably going to be very stylized. My film is totally cartoony and exaggerated so it has to match that.
Cheers.

[Nicool]

Does anyone have the adress of the student Massive-like project site ?

[altruizine]

in the book "Maya: Secrets of the Pros" there is a chapter on creating crowd scenes.

It details creating a script that dupicates a character, changes proportions and textures to randomize the indiviual's shape, it then places the crowd onto stadium seating and has them doing random actions and eventually doing the wave... sounds like it might work for you and it's all spelled out in the book.

Here's the book on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0782140556/qid=1055282981/sr=2-1/ref=sr_2_1/103-0641648-8415010)

This book also shows up in major bookstores, so run down to one, check it out. Could work out great.

lata.

-JF

[roguenroll]

Originally posted by modi
hey guys, thanx for the replies.
Nicool, i'm glad u liked my animations.
Cheers.

thats great I see that nail fungus guy all the time on the commercials.

funny it comes up, but what is the first thing he says, something like, .............hi, i'm bigger.

other than that it one of the cool ones on TV. Ive noticed the killer crackle marks, thats a great effect.

Rogue

[modi]

Originally posted by roguenroll
thats great I see that nail fungus guy all the time on the commercials.

funny it comes up, but what is the first thing he says, something like, .............hi, i'm bigger.

Rogue

"Hi, i'm digger, don't mind me i'm just a dermataphite, u know a nail infection"
Its funny, when u animate to a dialogue, its sticks it ur head. I'm just scared that someday i might just introduce myself as digger the dermatophite. Cheers.

[roguenroll]

ha ha , cool, thx a great little spot, I like it alot.

Rogue

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