Crowd stuff

[YoyoBoy]

I'm wondering what people think of the Max Crowd system, since there's a good chance a big job will come in for me that would require thousands of people fighting, shooting at each other, riding horses, etc. Is it good for any of that, or is it just for mindless masses?

Thanks!

[Da_elf]

i dont think max would be able to handle that. massive might be your only hope

[super gnu]

yes.. the max crowd system is a bit antique. once you get past the smallest possible "crowd" it starts taking AGES.. and its, well, a bit sh*t.

massive is great, but damned expensive.

assuming you have the facility to actually animate these characters, why not prepare a few groups of them doing stuff, then export as animated proxies. you can then scatter them using forest or something, then use a random offset on the keyframes to give them variety. probably the cheapest way to do lots of people.

[joconnell]

I wrote a fairly simple distribution script based on splines for my bits on game of thrones, it's pretty much based around having looping clips of motion cycles and figuring out roughly how quickly they should move along paths for all the run / walk bits. Fighting has to be placed as a cluster of people so that it makes sense but the one bigger factor is how close are these people going to be? If as you say there's thousands, there'll be almost too much detail to pick out one individual thing and you can get away with fairly simple stuff. The first shot here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jyjto2RqSLI and another shot around 2:28 give you an idea of what we got from it. Literally just low poly meshes with motion capture files and then point cached - if you're doing this use the pc2 format for point cache, xml is dog slow to render.

[super gnu]

also iirc pc2 allows retiming, and xml doesnt. its a pain in the arse as you have to manually choose pc2 as the filetype each time you save.

[YoyoBoy]

Thanks, everybody.

I have been told that the shots will largely be based on what is doable with the tiny budget. I'm just one guy, so there is a BIG limit to what I can take on (though obviously I would want to hire at least one other person to help with this). It may turn out that what they want just can't be done without a lot more money, or outsourcing to a cheaper country.

[super gnu]

hmm, tiny budget - huge animated crowds, fighting and horses? i see a potential conflict. however you attempt it, its quite a lot of work, mainly in the modelling and animating of the characters. populating with lots of instances and rendering is the smaller of your issues.

[joconnell]

I'm not sure how tiny is tiny as regards budget but I'd see two options - gareth edwards did a pretty good job of big crowd scenes by shooting actors running against a green screen, keying them and making a looping sequence, then mapping that on to a card and using a simple particle system to have huge hordes running across a plane - it didn't allow much movement off axis since the card look'd fall apart but it was very effective. You have the hassle of organising a shoot though. On the other side you've more flexibility in 3d but you've also got the setup time of building models and making the animation cycles, and then rendering the shots after. It's a tough one since clients will always want to fiddle with shots after they see a render.

[Sawyer]

Battle of Blackwater?

[joconnell]

I can't even remember which one that was! I'm up on book 5 at the minute but when I read book 1 I was in hospital with glandular fever so it's not the sharpest thing in my mind. Oh and I also read it on an iphone which I'm sure took about 5 years off my eyesight