Animation Guild | We are 839 Digital Magazine
Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1535742
THE CROWD GOES WILD In traditional animation, most crowd scenes were tackled by a few artists hand-animating dozens of characters, which was both time-consuming and creatively limiting. Introducing crowds was a complex challenge in CG animation, but Antz addressed this issue in a foundational way. The effects team pioneered large- scale digital crowds, featuring tens of thousands of independently moving ants, thanks to a proprietary crowd simulation system called MOB. This was a novel rule-based par ticle-style system, capable of things like blending motion cycles and triggering head turns to avoid uniform behavior. Lighting Technical Director Yasser Hamed dealt with different kinds of motion issues on Tangled, one of the first films he worked on for Disney. He noticed that the animation department constructing the dance scene was creating up to 30 characters by hand. "It was exhausting," he says. "When Wreck-It Ralph (2012) came on board, it was clear from the story that we were going to have a lot of characters, [and] we can't hand- animate all those characters." The film featured complex crowds at Game Central Station and the Candy Crush races, not to mention a couple hundred-thousand flying Cy-Bugs. This meant a new approach was needed. Hamed, now the Crowds Technical Director, collaborated with the Effects Animation and Production Technology departments to add an animation cycle layer on top of any particle system that offered more sophisticated behaviors. Simplified rigs could accommodate head turns, eye gestures, spine deformation, and other features to distinguish characters from each other. "At the time, it was still very limited because the computing power wasn't strong enough to do more than maybe five or six joints at a time," Hamed recalls. "But for every show after that, as the computing power increased, we were able to push it even further and add more layers of animation." What was originally a small operation at Disney turned into the Crowds Animation department, paving the way for technical solutions tackling exponentially bigger shots. Hamed points to Strange World (2022) which features 56 million crowds elements, including millions of flowing blood cell-inspired creatures that created a bloodstream characters could walk on. "That was our biggest shot ever," Hamed says. "It was a big change from animating [a few dozen] dancers on Tangled." F E AT U R E Images courtesy of Walt Disney Animation Studios 38 KEYFRAME