William Bobant
ABSTRACT
From the original TV show to the feature film adaptations, the universe of SpongeBob is very well-known for its unique characters, whether lead or secondary. To deliver dynamic and directable crowds for “SpongeBob the Movie: Sponge on the Run”, the teams at Mikros Animation had to think of a new approach from the ground up for the Crowd department to populate hundreds of shots as quickly and effectively as possible. Several challenges were faced: the crowd population was made of dozens of unique morphologies of cartoon characters instead of a generic and classical bipedal one; the locations to populate were huge and diverse; the resulting animation had to remain faithful to the 2D-stylized original show.
In this paper, we detail the array of techniques and tools which were developed to tackle these challenges. First, a rig creation automation tool was developed to process any hero character rig from the movie and retarget any cycle done by the Animation department. Then, a generic behavior tree and simulation templates which can be instantiated for thousands of entities in any location were created.
- Hemagiri Arumugam, Michael Frederickson, and J. D. Northrup. 2013. Crowds at Monsters University. In ACM SIGGRAPH 2013 Talks (SIGGRAPH '13). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 51, 1. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2504459.2504523 Google Scholar
Digital Library
- 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). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 59, 1–2. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2897839.2927467 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yann Pinczon Du Sel, Nicolas Chaverou, and Michaël Rouillé. 2015. Motion retargeting for crowd simulation. In Proceedings of the 2015 Symposium on Digital Production (DigiPro '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 9–14. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2791261.2791264 Google ScholarDigital Library
- Building up the Bikini Bottom population - The Crowd challenges for “SpongeBob The Movie: Sponge on the Run”
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