Crowd simulation

[Devhill]

Hi guys.

Can a crowd simulation be done entirely within Fusion ?

Which techniques ? Is crowd a mix of keying / paint / 3d cards of CG from Massive (e.g.) ?
Can someone explain a typical correct pipeline ? Or has some video tutorial somewhere ?

thanks
bye

[pingking]

cmivfx has/had a tutorial on crowds in fusion

and as always it depends on the crowds your trying to build:
- a crowd to fill a stadium can be done via the particle system, where the particles are sprites from (keyed) moving people
- a crowd which fills up a scene without many camera movement can be done via 3d cards or 2d transforms of the new people. the cameramovemnt is import because it will change perspective on the cards

but a army of fighting orcs will be impossible

[Devhill]

Good pingking!
This is a good info in any case. Just to know what kind of approach to use.
Yes i was talking about a stadium of simple camera movement.

Does army of orcs need are entirely made in a 3d package combined with crowd simulation software ?
So a compositor will receive the multipass rendered sequence and eventually a geo of the scene to insert cards of shot elements ?

[radders]

I doubt you would ever give the compositor the geometry from a crowed sim. You would kill Nuke/Fusion. You might use the environment geometry. If you had an Orc army I would want the FX guys to render me dust and ground interactions. I'm not going to stick elements down for every foot step.

[Devhill]

Yes radders, i was referring to the compositing for environment.
Shot elements like explosions, fog, othe smoke, some particle, matte painting...
Every foot of every orc must be supplied with dust from FX guys.

Ok now.. let's say..
What happens if an army of orcs is rendered WITHOUT dust around foot ??
How this problem can be solved if a compositor can not import the full geo and stick elements for every foot ?

[pingking]

you go to your supervisor and tell him that you need some more elements from the fxguy

[tommy138]

http://www.fxguide.com/featured/one_...ttila_the_hun/

check that out, for some cool cheats for building crowds...

[jkenko]

How about a simpler solution like using the depth pass to integrate some fusion's
particle fog (or the new fog in 6.3)?
I mean overall dust fog, not contact dust on every step...