Norman Moses Joseph

Crowd Promotion Pipeline

The Crowds department can animate a large number of characters and agents using procedural animation. A secondary layer of animation can be applied to a series of base cycles to complement the performance using scripting and coding techniques. However, it is often necessary for the artists to customize the animation performance for a subset of the characters. To address the large scale and scope of crowds in Walt Disney Animation Studio’s productions, the Crowds department has developed automated systems that allow animators to use familiar tools to refine the performance of crowd characters on demand. For characters that require custom performances not achievable by the procedural animation system, the Crowd Promotion system maps procedural animation authored in Houdini onto the heavier, fully-rigged character representation, which can then be manipulated by the in-house animation, hair, and cloth simulation tools in Maya. Once the performance is re- fined, for efficiency, the characters can be demoted back to the lightweight procedural representation, while still preserving the hand-crafted animation.

Virtual Window Shader

The feature film “Big Hero 6” is set in a fictional city with numerous scenes encompassing hundreds of buildings. The objects visible inside the windows, especially during nighttime, play a vital role in portraying the realism of the scene. Unfortunately, it can be expensive to individually model each room in every building. Thus, the production team needed a way to render building interiors with reasonable parallax effects, without adding geometry in an already large scene. This paper describes a novel building interior visualization system using a Virtual Window Shader (Shader) written for a ray-traced global illumination (GI) multi-bounce renderer [Eisenacher et al. 2013]. The Shader efficiently creates an illusion of geometry and light sources inside building windows using only pre-baked textures.

Crowd Artist Shot Work

Here are a few examples of my work as a Crowd Artist.