Executing this commercial was an interesting mix of setting up procedural combat, and carefully timing animated vignettes together to get believable motion. I created a special kind of ‘paired’ placer, that was smart about randomizing some things but not others to have diverse, but sensible combat. I also wrote a clever flag-carrying system that blended flag-carrying motion with more basic motion. The CG sups could literally choose by hand which characters had flags, and I could switch their upper bodies and attach a flag simulation with a simple point attribute switch.

The first shot has one of my favorite lighting challenges. We didn’t have enough time to simulate grass, but the soldiers feet looked fake because they had a crisp outline. Working on a Saturday close to delivery, another Houdini artist and I prototyped a custom AOV that mimicked different grass outlines in 3D space, and used the distance of the crowd agent to the ground to drive the shader. This let comp artists later subtract from the bottom of the crowd agents with different degrees of grass height to help better sell the effect of them being in a field.

“Big Taste” represented an extremely ambitious revamping of the stadium crowd pipeline I had developed. The assets were rebuilt from the ground up to include higher quality models and textures, and incorporated dozens of custom hair grooms. I also had to teach the other artists working on the project how to light and lookdev the stadium in Houdini—years before Solaris made that the norm.

Many post-simulation props were added into the crowd. Dynamic thunder clappers, foam fingers, and pom poms that were previously developed were sprinkled in to the crowd. Newer, more complex props were also developed including ‘letter-per-person’ signs, allowing me to procedurally ‘spell’ words into the crowd. I also added draped banners, where multiple crowd characters could flap around a cloth sim. I also implemented a procedural signage system that used Houdini’s compositing operators.

Much time was spent crafting a high-performance ragdoll simulation for soldiers running and gunning with the ‘King’ character. It was a lot of fun directing the ragdolls so close to camera, and timing the ragdolls with explosions created by other artists. There was also an interesting artistic balance to hit, where the ragdolls had to look explosive and violent, but at the same time more closely resemble stuntmen in movies than actual war.

The end shot was challenging in many respects. There are actually several different crowd character types that were built specifically for this commercial with assets from the various Playstation game vendors including zombies, soldiers, and aliens from Destiny. They were placed in a massive matte painting, and given lots of detailed behaviors like ‘get blown up’, ‘run x distance and fire’, ‘run x distances then ragdoll’, 'and ‘shoot wildly into the air’.

I spent several weeks building a combat agent from scratch using game models and animations from DICE. The agents had a clever targeting system where they would aim at enemies using agent vision, shoot at them with a real simulated blaster, and then trigger ragdolls if an enemy was hit. Additionally, Each snow trooper had a simulated cape.

After the basic agents were created, they were delicately placed by hand in a ‘battlefield’ ecosystem that modified their behaviors very specifically. Environmental triggers like explosions from the AT-ATs were carefully coordinated, while other agents were given directions like ‘run and shoot’ or ‘overwatch’, or ‘shoot at target’.

Almost all stadium crowds I create not only have people, but also have a lot of attention given to the chairs they sit in. Agents who are standing up have seats up, and all agents have a ‘chair profiles’ that they are configured to match.

While the crowd characters themselves were challenging, these shots had a particularly difficult ask in terms of lighting and rendering. Close collaboration between myself, the 3D team, and the compositing team was necessary to make these shots shine.

Locomoting giant crowds presents interesting challenges. MASSIVE Lanes were used to influence the speed of characters overall, and agent fields were used to distance characters of different sizes from each other.

I had to create ballerinas, graduates, children in soapbox racers, cyclists, soccer players kicking simulated soccer balls, women in dresses, business men, and many other crowd character types to properly simulate the diversity needed to represent a pharmaceutical company.

After the successful Rule Yourself campaign, I worked on a similar 30-second TVC starring Tom Brady. We made big strides in developing the crowd look-development and Arnold crowd lighting pipeline.

Artistically, the crowds in this TVC had to toe a delicate line where every digital character had to look like Tom Brady doing his workout routine, but at the same time not look like cheap clones. Many iterations adjusting the agents to get frame-perfect offsets was necessary to strike the right balance.

I was responsible for all the crowd behavior and a majority of the shot work. Rule Yourself won the AICP award for VFX, and it was nominated for a VES for Outstanding Compositing in a Photoreal Commerical.

One of coolest aspects of working on this TVC was working with unusual motion capture clips. Steph Curry’s basketballs required special handling to make sure they followed the agent when changes were made. Locomoting Misty Copeland’s ballet was an interesting, one-in-a-lifetime challenge.

I spent two months of developing a new crowd pipeline in Houdini, and this TVC was my first chance to it through its paces. After working two weeks straight, I think it all came together, and it also got a mention in Adweek.

To help bring this crowd to life, and take advantage of Houdini in ways I couldn’t before, I developed several secondary simulations to add that X Factor. Dynamic pom poms, foam fingers, thundersticks, and flags were all created to add interesting noise and excitement into the crowd.

While many advertising clients prefer crowds that are wildly ecstatic and enthusiastic, the direction on this spot was to make the crowds more believable. This meant pulling back on the props, and cheering cycles used, but to me makes this crowd a lot more realistic than most I’ve done.

The largest shots exceeded 35,000 agents. While some very distant shots used a simplified and cheap to render crowd agent, many shots were rendered at fairly high LOD at great scale and cost.