Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/997232
F E A T U R E 14 cgw | e d i t i o n 2 , 2 0 1 8 ILM'S NEW CROWD SOFTWARE FACILITATED CG CHARACTERS ALIGNING AND WORKING IN GROUPS. THE PARZIVAL AND ART3MIS CHARACTERS COMPLEMENT EACH OTHER. V I R T U A L R E A L I T Y V-Ray. We also use Maya and Arnold quite a bit as well – we have some amazing Maya Arnold artists in London." A separate team managed the set dress- ing, adding newspapers on the ground, trash cans, lightbulbs, billboards, and so forth to the New York City environment, for exam- ple. Easter eggs to Aech's garage. And, on through the 63 highly detailed environments. "We use instancing as much as possi- ble," Williams says. "We use procedural textures as much as possible. We do matte-painting tricks where we can. We try to incorporate all the cost savings possible. One of the cool things we did for the New York race was to look-dev all the buildings in Maya using procedural shaders in Arnold. Then we translated it to Katana/ RenderMan to render everything else. We did that for the end battle, as well." Avatars In addition to creating the rich and stunning environments, the team at ILM also worked on character design and animation. "Parzival looked the most human, so the challenge was to have him not look like a dude in makeup or get into that Uncanny Valley of creepiness when you make a digital human," Jaeger says. "We went through hundreds, if not thou- sands, of pieces of artwork. He was every thing from having metal scales for skin to a T-Wolf. Eventually, we honed in on who the character was and who Steven wanted him to be: an '80s reluc- tant hero. We chiseled his cheeks and gave him stylized anime hair that clumps unnaturally. But, we locked Art3mis's design early. Parzival and Art3mis had to look good together – if you didn't know humans were behind them, you could imagine them getting together, not be- ing in two dif ferent movies." In addition to the main characters, ILM artists created massive crowds of avatars and performed them with the help of a new proprietary Side Effects Houdini-based crowd system. "The crowd system is based on mocap vignettes, on cycles," Cofer explains. "We captured people fighting, walking, running, and with various interactions. The rule- based system can instruct different crowd characters to do different things, like avoid obstacles and work cooperatively. We wanted to explore the idea that the avatars can work as a group, not just fight alone, as in other crowd systems." Working from Stockhausen's art direc- tion and Cline's book, the artists broke the crowds into clans in like-minded games: sports, fantasy, medieval, and so forth. Each clan had a kit of parts. The crowd tool could do random permuta- tions of kit parts to generate thousands of different versions and map them onto different body types. "We have shots in the film with a half million characters," Cofer says. "Steven really enjoyed watching and discovering the little vignettes happening across the