“Building Crowds Of Unique Characters” by Prescott, Alexander, Hendler, Hodgins, Szew, et al. …

Constructing realistic shots with hundreds, or even thousands of completely unique, fully animated, deforming, and realistically shaded characters poses an entirely different challenge than the traditional character pipeline. Workflow, Level of Detail (LOD), and current hardware/software limitations require unique solutions to achieve the goal of a usable crowd animation and rendering suite. Although the system described in this sketch was initially developed and used specifically for the blockbuster effects film, The Day After Tomorrow, at the time of writing this, it has also been successfully used in 3 feature length films, and one commercial.