Computer Graphics  

The studio Method Design was tapped by production company RSA to concept and create this year’s AICP Sponsor Reel. The AICP awards celebrate global creativity within commercial production. Method Design wanted to create an entertaining piece of design that encapsulates the innovative and prolific nature of this industry.

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"Our aim was to showcase the AICP sponsors as various dancing avatars, which playfully reference the visual effects used throughout production. Motion capture, procedural animation and dynamic simulations combine to create a milieu of iconic pop dance moves that become an explosion of colorful fur, feathers, particles and more,"write the creators of the creative new video short.

Method Design was hired by production company RSA to concept and create this year’s AICP Sponsor Reel. The AICP awards celebrate global creativity within commercial production

SOURCE  Method Design

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 Special Effects  

To achieve the mass crowd effects in the movie World War Z, the film makers turned to a form of artificial intelligence. Visual effects firm Motion Picture Company picked up on an idea that WETA used for the Lord of the Rings movies - to make each zombie an individual actor with goals and behaviors.

For the Brad Pitt film World War Z, London-based VFX house Moving Picture Company had to make enormous zombie hoards behave with a bit of intelligence.

World War Z is an apocalyptic horror film directed by Marc Forster. The screenplay is loosely based on the 2006 novel of the same name by Max Brooks.

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Animating the sequences by hand would not have allowed the thousands of zombie 'actors' to be in the shots, so the company turned to artificial intelligence.  Using digital creatures, whose movements came from motion-capture performances of real people running up nets and falling down ramps, the team programmed a kind of artificial intelligence, a proprietary crowd-simulation program called Alice.

This type of crowd animation intelligence was pioneered in the Lord of the Rings movies by WETA Digital's Massive software. Through the use of fuzzy logic, the software enables every agent to respond individually to its surroundings, including other agents.

These reactions affect the agent's behavior, changing how they act by controlling pre-recorded animation clips, for example by blending between such clips, to create characters that move, act, and react realistically.

For the movie’s massive piles of Zs in Jerusalem, the VFX company—one of a handful that worked on World War Z—had to build zombie “agents” that could “act” on their own. The
“All complex crowd shots got layers of hand-animated zombies,” said MPC senior CG supervisor Max Wood. “We’d start off setting the shots up in Alice, our in-house crowd tool, then we’d work out where we wanted to add the additional animation detail.”

How long before such crowd software makes it's way into video games and virtual worlds?

SOURCE  Wired

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