Did someone say crowds?

OK, I was enjoying a pleasant walk in the Oboe district when suddenly out of nowhere this huge crowd of people appeared!

( Unfortunately Youtube's compression does't do the picture any justice )

So here are some stills with less compression:

If you study the picture more closely you may see characters intersecting each other (especially in the third example because I made it too dense), however most of the time it's completely unnoticeable due to the flat line art nature of the characters.

And no, I don't have a render farm up my sleeve. This is thousands of 3D characters in a scene rendered in a matter of minutes rather than hours.

So in the first example we have:

• just 1 mental ray rendered background (less than a minute)
• 200 frames of characters rendered in the viewport (another couple of minutes)
• 200 frames of shadow pass rendered in mental ray at half the resolution (20 to 25 minutes)

As you can see, it was only the shadow pass that took longer to render. However, for some shots you may get away without casting any shadows at all. And rendering shadows at half resolution seemed to work well, without loosing much quality.

At some point soon I will write up exactly how to do this.

Ethan Shilling

Animation: Commuter Rushed Walk Cycle

"Yellow" is going to be late if she doesn't pick up the pace.

Animation: Commuter Sad Walk Cycle #1

The daily commute isn't always enjoyable.

Animation: Commuter Angry Walk Cycle #1

This is usually my mood when I commute so it felt right to start with this one.

Animation: The Clarinet District - Squash Deformer Tests #9-12

Animation: The Clarinet District - Squash Deformer Tests #5-8

Animation: The Clarinet District - Squash Deformer Tests #2-4

Animation: The Clarinet District - Squash Deformer Test #1

The buildings in The Clarinet District need to bounce and move, so I was looking at which deformers would work best to achieve this. So far the Squash Deformer gives the best results, but I'll continue testing with the other buildings to see how it goes.

Animation - First Play with Red's Rig

Here's a glimpse at the first play with Red's rig. He's a fun little character to bring to life, Ethan's hard work pays off brilliantly here. 

For this first animation sample, I've animated Red into a normal walk cycle. He seems quite confident here so in the next cycles, I'll include a bit more of his personality as portrayed in the animatic. 

For this next sample I had the lovely, bearded Phil Gomm as my live action reference!

Animation : Red : Run Cycle

A couple of clips of an energetic Red running around