Destiny 2: The Final Shape – Cinematics

Crowds – Alleyway

The crowds in the alleyway were one of the easier ones, since most Midground and Foreground Characters were from Animation. The challenge was diversity but continuity across shots. For this especially I built some custom tools for non repeating scattering as a base, which then gets properly adjusted with the Crowd Composer.

Another challenge was managing all the walking cycles (since all crowds on this project are Alembic Instance based) so that character would not intersect each other on longer shots and would seem to be moving in various directions.
Also figuring out ways to vary and instance Grooms efficiently.

Crowds – Supplicants

The supplicant crowd also had a different / custom setup, which I would extend with the Crowd Composer (timing changes, shot specific placement of single characters).

This crowd was much more reliant on breathing live into the rhythmic swaying and balancing unity with little time offset or revolutions.

All the falling sequences have been a lot of fun to construct and to set up and easy to adjust in the viewport with the timing offset from the composer.

Crowds – Both Armies

The army crowds (the allied forces and the scorn) have been quite a challenge due to a number of reasons:

1. The sheer size of the lineup of characters and the needed variation to make the look organic.

2. The massive setup for crowds spanning through all distances even immediate foreground

3. The closeness to Hero Characters

This required my supervisor to lay out a rough solid plan of what we might see in which shot, to which quantities with proposed actions.
Once again, the Crowd Composer came to the rescue as this cinematic needed all its functionality and was the best test case. Getting feedback on bespoke shot changes was a lot more manageable with this, even the more movement heavy shots such as the entrance and the ending.