Crowd Rig

Preface
above image created by me (not accurate to show)

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CROWD RIG Breakdown Two identical MASH networks:
 1. Crowd_VP - for playblast and viewport
 2. Crowd_Render - for lighting and rendering III. MASH Rig One of the goals of the crowd was to make sure the animation was subtle and didn't distract or take viewers eyes away from the main characters.

VI. See the crowd in the show here: From there I rendered out EXRs with Deep data so I could add a bit of a tilt shift blur in DaVinci Resolve Fusion: Directs the crowd to one of a number of predefined locations around the stadium giving the ability to cheat characters in the crowd toward camera. The third attribute turns on semi-transparent cubes. These can be resized and placed around characters in the crowd to remove/subtract those characters from the rig. Enum offering preset locations for crowd orientation    a. Focus Vis    c. Subtract Meshes I was responsible for creating the Crowd Rig for the stadium in the Kamp Koral episode, Lake Crashers. This page documents the process and steps behind creating the rig and some additional work I did for my portfolio renders.

Character Animation: Created by Animation Supervisor, Pablo Smith
Environment Model (as seen in show): Created by Environment Artist, Julio Vega


Rig Goal: To utilize mash to instance a high number of animated characters for the crowd, and make it light and simple for animators to use as well as keep the render times as low as possible. V. Portfolio Prep I. Character Animations
cheering background characters on boat On Kamp Koral, we settled on the three animations below created by Pablo Smith, the animation director. Each animation was duplicated a couple times and the animations offset so the duplicate animations were not in sync. character a character b character c Some of my references: Alembic Caches Mash Instancer for Viewport/Playblasts Redshift Proxy Sequences with matching Mash Network Rig Attributes (3):
  a. Focus Vis - makes the Focus_Ctrl visible.
  b. Focus - where the Focus_Ctrl resides, predefined locations in a dropdown list.
  c. Subtract Meshes Vis - reveals cube controls that subtract/remove characters from crowd rig.    b. Focus For my portfolio I mocked up a version of the stadium, slightly different from how it appeared on the show, and added some props that give a sense of scale for a wideshot.

The goal being to have a more appealing presentation for the crowd rig, and to explore some ideas I had.

I mocked up the tire, anchor and fishing spears you see in the sets 2d designs. From there I added some low res boat cars, some fishing hooks, barnacles, soda can, soup can and some mufflers in the foreground to help give the stadium a large scale. VI. Final Presentation: Street Fighter II was a point of reference. Limited animations that don't take attention away from the main action. This allowed the animators to replace characters in the crowd with shot specific character animation: Once you composed your shot in Maya to match the storyboard, you identify crowd characters that need to be removed for shot specific characters Two subtraction meshes, one placed on each side, shaped around the identified crowd characters: The final shot with the custom characters replacing the crowd characters on both sides of Squidward: