Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1540269
of what the end shot would be. Did you utilize any other soware tools for the horde work? Dennis Yoo: We used Massive quite a bit. Massive is great in the background, but we rarely put it in front of the screen anymore. We actually had to start transferring that motion into our real puppets so that we could have simulation on top of that. That made things a lot more heavy, but we had processes in place. On top of that, we used Ragdoll, which is simulated dynamics on top of things where you can add influences to them. It gets a little goofy when you add too much, but it's just that subtlety that you need. Then from there we use motion edit on top, using Nuance. That's a dedicated animation soware that deals mainly with FK [forward kinematics] puppets. And then Maya, where the animators like to make new motion, bespoke motion, and things in that nature. With Nuance we tend to preserve motion, but we can bump things around and move things. It was a combination of all of them. Not everyone can use all the tools—they usually specialize. So there's a lot of jump- ing back and forth between different motion departments. I'm im- pressed with how we did it, to be honest. It was real. We all worked quite gracefully. Nick Epstein: It was a very interesting mix of disciplines on the mo- tion side and also on the effects side as well—the simulation side. Crowd work sometimes conjures up images of compromises or cut- ting corners because there are so many of them. You know you're not really going to see them, so you don't need to simulate the cloth or the hair, or you can get away with coarser simulations. We ended up with the highest number of bipeds that we'd ever simulated at Wētā in terms of cloth and hair. If you look right towards the back of the horde, I think it really made a big difference. You'd see these profile breaks where the cloth would sort of billow in the wind and the hair would flap around and so on. I think that adds this level of realism that you would expect to observe in a plate, so we should have it in our CG as well. In terms of soware, Loki is our in-house proprietary solver. You could call it a universal solver. It's more like a framework of lots of solvers that talk to each other. So you can have a cloth solve that also has air influence. It can be influenced by water and vice versa. You can have a cloth solve and, in our case, a snow solve interacting with each other. So for things like that creepy clicker head where it's rotating into the ground, we'd be able to simulate the snow and then have that also simulate the cloth and the hair at the same time. I think that just adds to it a bit. It gives you much more of a cohesive result because you're simulating all of these things at the same time. Dennis Yoo: For the explosion shots, the crowd's running through and it's on an angle. There's no place to hide in our plates, so there was no place to hide in our shots either. It wasn't dynamic fire light- ing where you get these dark contrasts. It was all diffused and all daylight. On set they shot it practically, and there's no shockwave or anything. Just people running through flaming balls of fire. Later on, Craig said they needed to be falling, flying, and exploding. So we're not matching the plate here at all. That went on to using simulation to get explosions, and keyframing to handle some of the bigger ex- 18 cgw j u ly • a u g u s t • s e p t e m b e r 2 0 2 5