Creating the flying armadas in Guardians of the Galaxy

For Guardians of the Galaxy, we were required to create an epic space battle spanning hundreds of shots, with tens of thousands of ships dogfighting. As characters unto themselves, significant effort was spent in designing unique flight characteristics for each type of spaceship. This required improvements to MPC's technology to allow for quick iterations and compelling results for the bulk of the ships via our crowd tools, while streamlining the process for fine-tuning the motion of any ships which didn't match the director's vision. The vast increase of geometric complexity for these "crowd agents", compared to MPC's previous shows, forced us to rethink our rendering pipeline, developing new tools and workflows.