The “Finished“ poor man’s Crowd sim

So I did it. I finished the crowd sim… kinda

If you’ve read my other posts you may remember that I tried to make a crowd sim using multiple walk cycles, and if we’re being honest it wasn’t great. The primary issues were the dodge key and the fact the cycles didn’t stretch the full screen. So I tried to fix those issues.

So step one was to fix the key. It wasn’t the easiest to key, as the plate’s lighting wasn’t the best and there was a lot of noise so I had to try a few times to get it working. but eventually got it working.

With that I worked on the crowd sim it’s self - alright I know it’s not a sim as I’m just putting a load of walk sims on top of each other, but this is what I called it when I suggested it so I’m gonna stick with it. This part was kinda difficult to be honest. It wasn’t getting the walk cycles organised, it was stretching it to fit the screen. I knew I could extend the walk by duplicating the walk cycle, but as this was a person, the start and finish didn’t always line up. So I had to find a way to stich the clips together.

I had a few ideas.

First idea, some kind of dissolve.

This idea was to line up the two clips and try and hide the seam with a discrete dissolve, but found the the person’s walk didn’t line up that much with the start. So the dissolve didn’t work, so moved on to the next idea.

Second idea, learn how to morph.

So I got this idea after watching someone talk about how they did bullet time for the original Matrix - they apparently morphed the test footage to prove the bullet time effect. Anyway, I went around teaching my self how to morph the footage and get the extension work. I worked on it for a while, and got some decent results but with all things, time started to run out. Hand in was approaching and around that point, a new idea formed. One I did not have time to figure out.

Third idea, copy cat.

Now I have no idea how to use copy cat (hence not being able to apply it to the shot), so this is a very… uneducated theory of copy cat. This idea came about after a peer told me about there experiment with the tool. I thought if they were using it for clean up and roto, I could use it for hiding the seams of the extensions. So that is something I will probably be exploring later.

Then I added the random colours to the each cycle and added the cg I was given, slapped it all together and it was done. Done and hopefully not worked on any more.