“Other Worldly Crowds in Coco” by Yen, Gustafson, Lo and Northrup

  • ©Jane Yen, Stephen Gustafson, Aaron Lo, and J.D. Northrup

  • ©Jane Yen, Stephen Gustafson, Aaron Lo, and J.D. Northrup

  • ©Jane Yen, Stephen Gustafson, Aaron Lo, and J.D. Northrup

Conference:


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Entry Number: 19

Title:

    Other Worldly Crowds in Coco

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Abstract:


    Coco, Pixar’s largest human-based crowds film to date, was ambitious both visually and technically. Over a third of the film contains crowd scenes, ranging from a mansion-filled dance party to thousands of skeleton families journeying across a bridge, to a colossal cheering stadium. This complexity required vast amounts of both animation specificity and look variation in our characters.

    Asset management, animation directability, and rendering would have been extremely difficult with our previous pipeline for human crowds at this scale. An array of techniques were developed to tackle these challenges, including crowd asset and workflow improvements; a new skeletal rigging and posing system to procedurally control animation; more automated, aggressive shading and geometric level of detail; and optimized geometry unrolling in Katana to significantly reduce scene processing time and file IO.

References:


    Moe El-Ali, Le Tong, Josh Richards, Tuan Nguyen, Alberto Luceno Ros, and Norman Moses Joseph. 2016. Zootopia Crowd Pipeline. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Talks (SIGGRAPH ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 59, 2 pages.
    Stephen Gustafson, Hemagiri Arumugam, Paul Kanyuk, and Michael Lorenzen. 2016. MURE: Fast Agent Based Crowd Simulation for VFX and Animation. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2016 Talks (SIGGRAPH ’16). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 56, 2 pages.

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