Crowd simulation in Astroboy

Abstract

One of the major technical challenges in the animated film Astroboy was the creation of believable crowds of town citizens in the battle arena scene. In order to speed up the performance of converting citizen behavior into RIB format, the pre-baked RIB method proposed in Tutorial on Procedural Primitives [Hery and Sutton 2001] was applied. By using motion-editing techniques, our crowd characters are able to interact with the environment efficiently. Making use of techniques of Procedural RIB Generation, lighting artists were able to apply secondary masks on crowd characters, and the new motion which is generated on-the-fly during simulation can be rendered efficiently.