Artist-driven crowd authoring tools

Abstract

While crowd simulation frameworks can be very powerful for virtual crowd generation, in a VFX context they can also be unwieldy due to their chaotic nature. Small changes on the inputs can produce markedly different results, which can be problematic when attempting to adhere to a director's vision. Artist driven tools allow much more flexibility when constructing scenes, speed up turn-around time and can produce extremely dynamic crowd shots. To generate virtual crowds, Double Negative VFX (Dneg) has recently transitioned from an in-house standalone simulation-based solution to an artist-driven framework integrated into SideFX's Houdini.