Crowd Animation: Tools, Techniques, and Production Examples

Friday, 18 December | 5:30 AM - 2:30 PM | Room 502

The tools and techniques for producing synthetic crowds for film, television, and video games continue to evolve as content creators realize the vast production value provided by crowd animation. By examining the use of crowd animation across several production pipelines at different studios, this course reveals various methods and solutions for animating, simulating, and rendering crowd animation. It presents an overview of the history and concepts of crowd animation, a review of the current state of the art in crowd animation, and some thoughts on the future of this growing field of computer graphics. 

Level

Intermediate

Presentation Language

Presented in English

Prerequisites

Familiarity with computer animation, rendering, and 3D concepts is helpful but not required.

Instructor(s)

Craig "Xray" Halperin
ImageMovers Digital

Ken Anjyo
OLM Digital, Inc.

Mihai Cioroba
Digital Frontier Inc.

Paul Kanyuk
Pixar Animation Studios

Stephen Regelous 
Massive Software

Takashi Yoshida
Digital Frontier Inc.

Marc Salvati
OLM Digital, Inc.

Instructor Bio(s)

Craig "Xray" Halperin
Craig "Xray" Halperin is the crowd animation lead at ImageMovers Digitial. His first crowd animation used a custom system he wrote to drown passengers falling off the Titanic for James Cameron's film of the same name. IMD's first production, "A Christmas Carol", uses crowd animation to populate victorian London. He was the crowd lead on "Bee Movie" and created crowd animation for several award-winning television commercials.
Ken Anjyo
Since 2000, Ken Anjyo has worked at OLM Digital, Inc., where he heads the Research and Development Division, which is responsible for creating effects and in-house software tools. He was technical director for the Pokemon movies ("Pocket Monsters Diamond & Pearl: Dialga vs. Palkia vs. Darkrai", "Pokemon Ranger and the Prince of the Sea-Manafi", "Mew and the Wave-Guiding Hero: Lucario") and the TV series "Monkey Turn" (2004). His research focuses on construction of mathematical and computationally tractable models. Most of his research work has been published as international journal papers or at major computer graphics conferences such as SIGGRAPH and Eurographics.

Mihai Cioroba
Mihai Cioroba is a crowd-animation researcher and digital artist who helped re-create the Battle of Sekigahara using custom crowd animation techniques to generate 10,000 samurai warriors. For this two-minute, 4K movie production, the continous battle flow is simulated with a custom crowd animation system.

Paul Kanyuk
Paul Kanyuk is a technical director at Pixar Animation Studios with credits on "Cars", "Ratatouille", "Wall-E", and "Up". His specialty is crowd simulation, and he has been responsible for the procedural animation of numerous crowd spectacles including the hordes of rats in "Ratatouille", the deluge of falling passengers in "Wall-E", and the vicious pack of dogs in "Up". He earned his BSE in digital media design at the University of Pennsylvania and teaches courses in RenderMan and Crowd Simulation at the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. He is also an avid musician and plays bass guitar in the Bay Area rock band Halcrow.

Stephen Regelous
Stephen Regelous received an Academy Award for Scientific and Engineering Achievement for the design and development of Massive, an industry-first system utilizing AI-driven autonomous agents to generate animation. Stephen conceived of the basic concepts for the software in the early 1990s after studying artificial-life-agent-based systems, and developed Massive years later for "The Lord of the Rings" trilogy, where Massive transformed audience expectations for epic crowd and battle scenes in feature films and television. He began his software career  writing solutions for particle-animation muscle-based facial animation, morphing, and an L-system used to synthesize plant life that has been widely used in the motion picture industry. He was named one of the top 50 New Media Producers and Innovators by the Producers Guild of American and nominated for a World Technology Award, which recognizes high levels of innovation in the fields of biotechnology, space, energy, and design.

Takashi Yoshida
Takashi "Tak" Yoshida is a Massive supervisor and technical director at Digital Frontier, where he is involved in making images for games and film. His credits include game movies such as Fire Emblem. Radiant Dawn for the Wii, Shirokishi (White Nights) for the PS3, and feature films like "Appleseed: Exmachina". As the Massive supervisor, he handles direction of motion capture, Massive, and rendering crowds using RenderMan-compliant renders.

Marc Salvati
Marc is a tool developer at OLM Digital, Inc., working on software development 
for crowd animation tools.