Animating a crowd

[bleupencil]

Gah. I have to animate a crowd of people (in a busy street). The problem is, I have bugger all time to do it in (yay clients and their short deadlines!).

Anyway, I was wondering if anyone had any helpful suggestions as to how I might streamline this process. I'm sure if I knew how to use actionscript, there would be something I could do here, but I don't, so have to do it manually.

My idea was: animate one or two folks on walk cycles in a movieclip, then duplicate and repeat to make a crowd. I fear this may end up making them robotic cos they'll probably all move at the same time, but maybe that won't be so bad. Thankfully the crowd will just be silouhettes with no major details.

The end result is I have to single one guy out of the crowd, cos he's special y'know - and he takes off like Superman into the sky. It's the crowd that's bugging me.

My google searching has yeilded limited (and somewhat scary at times) results. So yeah any help you can offer would be awesomesauce.

[vicjperry]

Is it possible to provide a quick sketch of what this crowd scene will look like? A visual might help in finding you a solution.:D:D:D

[bleupencil]

Good point Vic!
Too addled atm to think of such a simple thing.

Kk, here's a thumbnail scribble of the layout, hopefully it reads well enough.
http://bleupencil.animationforum.net/junk/imo_introplan.gif
Basically I want to keep them on two layers, the foreground and background 1... will probably end up having to use more tho :\

The arrows indicate the direction of travel for the crowd or groups.

http://bleupencil.animationforum.net/junk/imo_blahwalk.gif
Here's a rough walkcycle (gif format may screw up timing). Planned to make one or two more figures of different shape and just alter the framerate slightly to make them seem different.

I'm not making it anymore complex cos there's no time to fiddle with that, and the walks aren't the focus of the sequence. I just didn't want them to be too robotic.

[flashcartoons]

you could probably get away with using just 2 different walks, for characters

dont forget blurs, im sure you can do it :)

[ElusiveMoose]

dont forget blurs

That's a great point (though, maybe you've already thought of it). Using a depth of field blur might help differentiate people in the crowd and help focus the scene.

Just a thought... Good luck!

[bleupencil]

Thanks for the tips guys.

I don't know if I'll be using the blur, because I'm not sure how it will translate into the client's module (this is one piece of a whole interactive thing). I'll give it a shot though. Was going to emphasise the depth of focus through colour though.

I still haven't worked out a good way of getting this done, but am working on it.

[flashcartoons]

let us see previews, so we can give any help we can :mickey1

[vicjperry]

Well, what I could suggest is this:

Maybe you could add some static people in the background, i.e., a man reading a newspaper, a woman window shopping, or an outdoor cafe where there are people sitting at some tables. That way, you will still have a crowd but won't have to animate too many walk cycles.

Also, you could have a few people in the forground close enough to the "camera", that will actually block out the bottom half of some people in the background and time their passing so that you don't have to animate the legs of the person(s) in the background.

Just suggestions. I know how it is to have a lot of work to do in so little time.:banghead I'm sure you'll be using multiple layers but it shouldn't be too bad. Good luck. Hope we get to see the final draft.:D:D;)

[bleupencil]

Thanks guys. Between uni and this, it's been freakn' hell and busy these past few days. Unfortunately the final product didn't turn out as neat as I'd hoped. It's pretty shocking in fact, but I've had no complaints from the clients so far (go figure). Wish I could've put more people in, but just didn't have time. This is my crappy end product.

http://bleupencil.animationforum.net/junk/crowd.html

The layout changed a good deal. Had to go the cheap way by making a symbol of a group of people and just motiontween it. I'm not happy with this at all, but sometimes you just have to deal.

Thanks for your suggestions even though I didn't get to implement them.

[flashcartoons]

the people kinda look like they are on a level escalator, like they have at air ports (maybe add bounce?)

http://img356.imageshack.us/img356/1766/levelfu5.jpg

when the character transforms is great and when he flys off even better

[bleupencil]

the people kinda look like they are on a level escalator, like they have at air ports (maybe add bounce?)

Lol. I know. Like I said, its a horrifically cheapass way out, didn't have the time to get into the technical details. It's already been handed back.

I plan to make many improvements should the decide they want changes, but the project had to come to a close, they didn't give me much time so they got what they got in the time given.