“You’ve Got a Lot of Friends, Charlie Brown: Creating Crowds in Peanuts” by Adams, Mourino, Evans and Edzenga
Conference:
Type(s):
Entry Number: 47
Title:
- You’ve Got a Lot of Friends, Charlie Brown: Creating Crowds in Peanuts
Presenter(s)/Author(s):
Abstract:
Late this fall, Blue Sky Studios will release The Peanuts Movie, based on Charles “Sparky” Schulz’s iconic comic strip Peanuts. Schulz’s distinctive style created a wonderful challenge for us, the Crowds department, to re-imagine exactly what constitutes a crowd character. Every part of the crowds pipeline had to be adjusted for greater character directablity. The usual crowd concerns such as terrain adaption, flocking movement, and large crowd groupings didn’t apply. However, staying on model relative to the camera, cycles animated on 2’s, and tracking the stylized “drawn” action lines that turn off and on within a cycle are just a few of the new concerns the crowds team faced on this film. The resulting system was one where we could easily micromanage individual characters, while still simulating large numbers of characters matching the Peanuts aesthetic.
