Zombie Tracking ‘World War Z’ was a two-and-a-half year project for MPC’s team, who produced 450 shots for the film. The facility’s ALICE crowd software has now been developed and used on many projects over several years and this time, again, various improvements were called for.

Cinesite yet again showed their Massive skills in delivering huge shots of humans and zombies for World War Z. Veteran Crowd Technical Director Lyle Cooley explains some of the Massive shots in our exclusive interview.

2013年7月5日 · WIRED's exclusive behind the scenes look at the making of "World War Z" reveals how the visual effects artists at MPC used massive crowd simulations and hand animation to create the...

Lead by Marco Carboni, crowd shots started with the layout, shape and speed of the crowd being defined. For the pyramids, the team began with geometry, which was then populated based on inclination using ALICE. The larger pyramids typically included around 5,000 agents. In all of the complex crowd shots, MPC then added layers of hand animated ...

2013年7月1日 · ZWARTOUW: “Our crowd system needed to accommodate both distant crowd shots and those where zombies are much closer, so it was decided to create a tool which enabled the Massive TDs to export portions of the simulated crowd as animation rigs to import into Maya, in order that the animation could be tweaked, the geometry upgraded to a higher ...

2013年7月8日 · We also used the system to easily assign materials to crowd agents based on various agent properties. This came in handy for visualizing demographics (e.g., the distribution of humans vs. Zombies) when blocking out crowd shots. In a beautiful shot the hero jumps into a helicopter on a rooftop.

2013年8月26日 · For the honors, MPC was tapped to provide the VFX using their in-house crowd simulation software, ALICE. Led by MPC's VFX supervisor Jessica Norman, the house completed more than 450 shots for World War Z. The firm worked under both the film's original VFX supervisor John Nelson and his replacement, ILM's Scott Farrar.

2013年10月2日 · "The main factor for the crowd in World War Z was that they had to work as a cast of thousands in some shots, but also had to hold up as full-screen individuals in others," says CG supervisor Anthony Zwartouw. "Each character had to have three levels of detail.

The crowd characters were built from reference photography and scans gathered on set. MPC’s Modelling and Assets team creating 24 different body types with different textures, which resulted in 3,000 possible crowd variations. Crowd shots began with the layout, shape and speed of the crowd being defined.

2013年6月26日 · fxguide talks to Cinesite, MPC, 2h3D, 4DMax and Prime Focus about scaring up the zombie effects for World War Z, scanning sets and actors and the film's stereo conversion.