Atoms Crowd https://atoms.toolchefs.com Thu, 01 Feb 2024 17:27:12 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.2 The application of AtomsUnreal at Versatile Media https://atoms.toolchefs.com/atomsunreal-at-versatile-media/ Thu, 01 Feb 2024 17:23:10 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7913

The Application of Atoms Crowd within the Virtual Production System at Versatile Media

01/02/2024



Interviewee

Lian Ding

Deputy General Manager of the Asset Center and VFX Supervisor at Versatile Media

With 15 years of experience in the CG film and television industry, Ding is responsible for formulating the technical workflow for digital assets and overseeing asset production. These technical solutions not only enhance production efficiency and image quality but also optimize our workflow. In the current test project for a historical drama, he serves as the digital asset manager.





1. Can you please tell us why you chose Atoms among all other available solutions?
We initially learned about Atoms through networking with SFX professionals in the field of crowd simulation. Since Atoms released its first UE version, we have been keeping a close eye on its development. Atoms Crowd excels in rapidly creating massive crowds in animation, including individual physical features, behavioral traits and more. Among the many known crowd simulation plugins, Atoms stands out for its comprehensive functionality and diverse usage, especially in terms of interactivity, offering features and details not found in other software. Atoms is currently the most comprehensive crowd simulation system integrated into UE or other real-time engines. Additionally, for our virtual shoots which require offline caching and real-time controllable crowds, Atoms satisfies these needs, making it our preferred choice.


2. How did you use AtomsUnreal in your project?
Our current test project is about an ancient Chinese war. We aim to shoot a large-scale siege warfare scene set in the era of cold weapons on our LED stage. Digital assets such as the battlefield and soldiers need to be created in UE and allow for real-time control, which enables seamless integration with real actors and the physical set.

As for soldier characters, real actors are dressed in costumes representing different military units from specific historical periods. Reference videos are recorded, and the actors undergo 360° scans and motion capture. The obtained images and data serve as references for subsequent sizing, lighting, texture and motion adjustments. They can also be used as auxiliary references for other necessary CG elements and common physical effects found in ancient warfare.



The interaction within complex crowd animation data poses a significant challenge. Therefore, starting from the early stages of the project, we conducted tests on multiple crowd simulation systems. Ultimately, we chose to use Atoms to create interactive crowd shots. For scenes with weak or no interaction, we adopted other solutions and blended the data for those crowd shots.


3. Could you please tell us if the results of your tests were satisfactory?
In this warfare test project, we assigned one asset artist to create an Atoms crowd, while another artist utilized alternative solutions to complete all crowd effect in the project. Atoms Crowd doesn’t excel in achieving relatively simple crowd animation effects, but its controllability is commendable when dealing with complex interactive requirements.

Film and television production differs from game development, as directors and key creatives make on-the-spot adjustments on set. Virtual assets need to possess both a dynamic aesthetic and the flexibility to accommodate changes from the director. In terms of interactive needs, such as different states for attackers and defenders, various attacking methods, and interactive siege props within the scene, this is where Atoms shines. Once the functional requirements are met, optimization is crucial to ensure a smooth and clear presentation on the large LED screen at a sufficient frame rate. In meeting these two criteria, we are very satisfied with Atoms’s performance on the project.

Random actions based on predetermined directions. Both specified destinations and random positions are demonstrated.


On the set of the LED virtual soundstage at Versatile Media, the real actor performance is seamlessly integrated with digital versions of hundreds and thousands of soldiers, instantly transporting the audience to a grand ancient Chinese battlefield.




4. Is there any particular feature and workflow you like about our software after having used it in production?
Atoms’ framework allows for complete control over various aspects of the simulation process, with notable support for PhysX and ragdoll physics, making it easy to simulate different forms of crowds. This is especially true with features like Target Formation Actor, Atoms Layout Tool, and XPU Cache Exporter. Furthermore, in terms of enhancing and embellishing the environmental atmosphere, Atoms Crowd demonstrates remarkable efficiency, as seen in its application for set dressing in the stage scene.

Our sincere appreciation to Toolchefs for providing us with such a convenient tool!


Versatile Media
Founded in 1993, Versatile Media is a full-service film and television media company that specializes in content creation and technological advancement. The company is known for its cutting-edge virtual production system. Versatile Media boasts an independent technical team and a robust research and development division, which focuses on creating innovative tools and technical solutions for virtual production. This dedication has given birth to the cutting-edge virtual production system, which encompasses the entire workflow from real-time Previz to LED shooting. LED Volumes with the highest optical standards in the world, high-speed optical mocap soundstages, and an interactive intelligent cinematography control system are among its standout facilities. These resources collectively form an integrated, real-time, efficient, and precisely controllable film and television production system, which ensures the finest manifestation of creativity.


]]> Updates to Our Indie Licensing https://atoms.toolchefs.com/updates-to-indie-licensing/ Wed, 10 Jan 2024 11:05:43 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7902

Updates to Our Indie Licensing

10/01/2024


Dear Atoms Community,

Today I am writing to share that after careful consideration we have made the difficult decision to discontinue our indie licenses.

We understand the decision to end-of-life our indie licenses will impact your creative process and workflows.

Starting from today, our indie licenses will no longer be available for purchase on our website.
However, please be assured that we remain committed to supporting our existing indie customers. Until the end of February, our assistance will continue as it has been. Nevertheless, there will be some adjustments after February until the license expiration date:
- We won’t be able to accept files or directly debug your projects.
- Response times might not match the swiftness you've experienced previously.

For our studio clients, nothing is changing. We look forward to providing you with state of the art crowd tools and workflows.

We understand that this news may evoke a range of emotions, and we want to assure you that your concerns and unique situations matter to us.
If you're an indie user seeking to discuss your specific circumstances, please reach out to us at support@toolchefs.com.
Discussions regarding this matter won’t be possible on Discord or our Google group and any messages on those forums will be removed.

On behalf of the Toolchefs team, I want to extend our heartfelt gratitude for the unwavering trust and support you've shown us. Your dedication to Atoms has been the driving force behind our progress, and we are sincerely thankful for being a part of your creative journey.

We are immensely grateful to each one of you who contributed time and effort to shape Atoms into the remarkable crowd software it has become.

Thank you once again,
Daniele Federico
CEO, Toolchefs LTD

]]> Reel FX populates “Super Giant Robot Brothers” in Unreal Engine with Atoms Crowd https://atoms.toolchefs.com/reel-fx-populates-sgrb-in-unreal-with-atoms/ Thu, 13 Oct 2022 20:25:30 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7850

Reel FX populates "Super Giant Robot Brothers" in Unreal Engine with Atoms Crowd

13/10/2022

AtomsUnreal is the only crowd solution capable of instancing skeletal meshes on the GPU and achieving great animation quality within Unreal Engine. All in realtime! Reel FX is one of the early adopters of Atoms Crowd.
Today we have a chat with Vincent Boulot (Former Reel FX Crowd supervisor) to talk about how Reel FX used Atoms Crowd to create their crowd sequences for "Super Giant Robot Brothers!" (SGRB).




How did you use Atoms on Super Giant Robot Brothers?
At the beginning, Crowd was not planned for the show, but with the amount of cars and people in the street we finally decided that Crowd was necessary.
SGRB was done with Unreal engine but as we joined in a hurry with really short timing, we needed to find a solution to avoid creating a full pipeline and train the team. So we decided to split our Crowd production in 2 parts.
We built our Crowd assets in Maya and in UE in parallel, we did our simulations into Maya and then imported our caches in Unreal Engine. Thankfully Atoms is correctly integrated in UE and the transition with Maya was really easy to do.



Is there any particular feature and workflow you like about our software after having used it in production?
The main strength of Atoms is its simplicity. It’s really easy to create assets, do a simulation and play with caches and overrides.
Everything is built to help you in that way. SGRB was a real challenge with the time we had and one of the issues was that we didn’t have any animation cycles provided by animation. So we used many mocap cycles found on the internet and as every Crowd artist knows, retargeting could be really tricky sometimes.
The retargeting system on Atoms was really helpful here. Really simple to use and set and it was working perfectly fine. Another example of this simplicity was when we built the Unreal Engine part and overrides caches and variations. Our Crowd system into Maya was really basic, different agents type with different clips but no variations. We decided to override the variations directly into Unreal as all the final assets were there.
Unfortunately with the short timing we had, the Crowd team couldn’t do it. So I needed to teach someone how to do that. The person I needed to train never touched any Crowd software and didn’t know anything about Atoms or Crowd in general, but he was ready to create a variation by himself and override the cache we provided to him in less than a half day!




How many artists were working on your crowd shots? Do you think Atoms scales well following your production needs?
There were 2 artists on the show and myself as Crowd supervisor.
This show was really challenging as we were out of our standard pipeline, with a lot of shots to do in a really short time.
We couldn't have achieved this without the Atoms power and the possibility to easily switch different software.



Is there anything else you would like to add?
Atoms software is great, but your support is even better.
You are always ready to help when we are in trouble with a tool or an asset with very fast turnaround.
It’s really appreciated especially when having little time to deliver as happened to us.

]]> AtomsUnreal 3.0.0 is out https://atoms.toolchefs.com/atoms-unreal-3-is-out/ Tue, 25 Jan 2022 11:02:37 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7803

AtomsUnreal 3.0.0 is out

25/01/2022

AtomsUnreal3

We are thrilled to announce the release of AtomsUnreal 3.0 (Beta) for Unreal Engine, including XPU animation, Unreal Engine 5 support, Runtime Variations and much more!
Atoms XPU animation uses a combination of GPU & CPU computation to maximize performances.
No more baking of textures for Vertex Animation!
Just plug & play your state machine!






]]> Atoms Unreal Enters Release Candidate Stage https://atoms.toolchefs.com/atoms-unreal-enters-rc-stage/ Tue, 19 Jan 2021 16:36:59 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7600

Atoms Unreal Enters Release Candidate Stage

21/01/2021

AtomsUnreal-iOS

The open beta for AtomsUnreal has ended and the plugin is now moving to a Release Candidate stage!

The beta has been running successfully for several months and we were able to add many new features thanks to our users.

During the Beta many great features have been added:

  • iOS & macOS support
  • USD cache exporter
  • Massmotion caches support
  • Unreal navigation mesh support
  • Realtime animation retargeting
  • Materials driven by metadatas
  • Huge performance improvement
  • Simulation optimizations
  • Much more



AtomsUnreal remains the only solution capable of instancing skeletal meshes on the GPU and achieving great animation quality within Unreal Engine.

With the end of the open beta a few important changes take place:

  • a new PLE license replaces our former free licenses
  • indies and studios are now able to easily purchase Atoms licenses from our website
  • studios should contact us for purchasing AtomsUnreal licenses for game/app development


    • Please check out our updated pricing for more details.

    Please find some useful links below:
    Release notes for AtomsUnreal 1.9.0.
    Updated Pricing.
    New Buy page.
    Documentation.
    Tutorials.
    You can ask questions on Atoms google group.
    FAQ page.

    See you around!





    ]]>         Reel FX populates “Scoob!” with Atoms Crowd https://atoms.toolchefs.com/reel-fx-populates-scoob-with-atoms-crowd/ Thu, 07 Jan 2021 07:54:37 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7575

    Reel FX populates "Scoob!" with Atoms Crowd

    07/01/2021

    Image courtesy of Warner Bros
    Image courtesy of Warner Bros

    Reel FX is one of the early adopters of Atoms Crowd.
    Today we have a chat with Philip Melancon (Former Reel FX Crowd supervisor) and Guy Dubost (Reel FX Lead TD) to talk about how Reel FX uses Atoms Crowd to create their crowd sequences for "Scoob!".


    Image courtesy of Warner Bros
    Image courtesy of Warner Bros

    Hello Philip and Guy, can you please introduce yourself?
    Philip: Hi Daniele and Alan! We’re really excited to talk about some of what we’ve been working on since we adopted Atoms as our main crowd solution.
    My name is Philip Mélançon and I am the crowd animation supervisor for ReelFX’s feature film division. I’ve been working in the VFX/animation industry for about 13 years and have worn a bunch of different hats depending on production needs. While I’ve spent some time as a pipeline TD, FX/CFX artist, and animation TD, most of my time has been spent working as an animator and crowd TD. My first introduction to the world of crowd simulation came about when the studio I worked for vastly underestimated the scope of work needed to add hundreds of crows flying around in a few sequences. Not wanting to hand animate all of those birds, I ended up writing a primitive crowd solution based on Softimage’s ICE architecture. I’ve since had the chance to work on a wide variety of projects and styles, including armies of undead soldiers for Thor:Ragnarok, happy families exploring the amusement park in Dumbo, fearless knights in Arthur:Legend of the Sword, colorful fish in Mary Poppins Returns, etc.
    For the past 2 years, I’ve been working at ReelFX and originally started as a lead animator for background characters. With productions being more and more demanding, I eventually ended up taking on crowds as well and now supervise both the animation of background characters and larger crowd simulations.

    Guy: Hi there !
    My name is Guy Dubost, I am Pipeline Lead in the CG Film branch at ReelFX.
    I have been supervising our TDs who did a tremendous job at implementing Atoms into our pipeline.


    Can you please tell us why you chose Atoms among all the other available software?
    Philip: One of our main objectives at ReelFX is to have our secondary characters and crowds be as indistinguishable from our main characters as possible quality-wise. In the past, we often relied on instanced animation caches and while that has a lot of advantages with regards to rendering speed, it also has the drawback of being stuck with the original animation. Our projects are constantly growing in scope and we needed a skeleton-based solution. Having worked with most commercial solutions out there, I was really interested in Atoms because of how easily customizable it can be.
    Another thing that was really important to us was the fact that it’s extremely easy to pick up. As anyone in this business knows, studios tend to hold on to the crowd artists that they have and so the ability to quickly train people to use the software was critical to us in formally establishing a new department.
    The final deciding factor for me personally was the extensive Python API and how easy it can be to write custom behaviors.


    Is there any particular feature and workflow you like about our software after having used it in production?
    Philip: As I just mentioned, for me the ability to write custom Python behaviors is a game changer. This opens up so many possibilities without requiring a software update. We had a lot of very specific scenarios to solve on the projects we worked on and even if there wasn’t an obvious solution out of the box, we could still quickly whip up a solution that exactly fit our needs.

    Image courtesy of Warner Bros
    Image courtesy of Warner Bros

    How many shots did you deliver for "Scoob!"? Which ones were the most challenging?
    Philip: Scoob had a total of 184 crowd shots. The biggest challenge was probably how diverse all of the different crowd scenarios were. We had shots of people taking it easy on Venice Beach, hundreds of murderous robots flying through the air or scuttling on the ground trying to capture Shaggy & Scooby, thousands of cave-people cheering on Captain Caveman in his fight against Blue Falcon and the gang, adorable little robots being terrorized by Dick Dastardly, tourists marveling before ancient Greece appearing before their eyes - and subsequently running for their lives and, finally, a giant rave on the streets of Venice Beach to bring things full circle.

    This meant managing hundreds of different assets, cycles, looks, etc., while simultaneously integrating a new software into our pipeline. Thankfully, we have a great team and Atoms has a lot of ways to make their lives easier by being able to fully or partially re-use existing simulations through cacheReaders, or simply duplicating proxies and swapping variation files.


    How many artists are working on your team? Do you think Atoms scales well following your production needs?
    Philip: Our team was composed of 3 crowd artists, 7 BG animators, 1 animation lead, 1 pipeline TD, as well as myself and our production staff.
    Our production timeline for the crowd shots on Scoob was approximately 15 weeks long. This means an output of about 4 shots per week per crowd artist. Due to how versatile and flexible Atoms is, we got to spend our time on the shots that deserved more attention and re-use on ones where we could get away with it. For example, almost every shot of Venice Beach that we see in the film reuses the same cache with minor modifications. These critical time gains let us, for example, develop a custom overlap system for our flying robots’ tail so that we could art direct them zipping around without the need for our animators to provide us with dozens of different cycles to cover every potential trajectory, but also without the added cost of doing actual physics simulations. For some of our assets, it even ended up being more cost effective to do even close up secondary characters through Atoms instead of hand animating them, so that let us add more time in animation to provide more cycles and add more custom animations in other shots where we’d benefit from one-offs.


    We know you did some python coding on top of Atoms. How easy was to extend it and shape it to fit your needs?
    Philip: We wrote a few custom behaviors for Atoms. We found it extremely easy to just “sketch out” ideas through python behaviors and adjust as needed. The fact that the API gives you access to almost everything the engine does under the hood means that you’re generally limited by your own imagination or abilities more than by the software. The examples provided on the website were also a very good starting point for us to explore new ideas.

    Guy: We also did some extra coding to automate a lot of rigging and lighting related tasks. For example, we faced a motion blur issue with Arnold related to the number of geometries called in a single instance. Since a lot of these shots were already completed in crowds, we simply wrote a script that would read the cache IDs, and split up the crowd into multiple proxies containing a fraction of the complete crowd. That way lighting artists could split up a proxy easily directly in their scenes without having to kick it back upstream. We also leveraged the existing Atoms dialogs when building our pipeline and simply forced standardized paths instead of leaving them open to user input. That way the existing docs from your website are still relevant, but we ensure a certain standard in our file management system.
    We hit a few walls along the way in some areas, but the Toolchefs team was always quick to provide us with a solution or propose an alternative to get us where we needed to go.

    Image courtesy of Warner Bros
    Image courtesy of Warner Bros

    Can you briefly outline your pipeline and how easy it was to integrate Atoms Crowd into it?
    Guy: Our biggest challenge was converting our complex animation rigs to something Atoms could work with. Since our goal is to strive for the highest possible quality, we tried to keep as many of the bells and whistles that our rigs have as we could. This meant writing a few custom tools to port our correctives system so that we had the option to get high quality deformation when we were close enough to camera to need it.
    Another complex hurdle was translating our existing variant system to Atoms variations. We decided to stick with existing assets and looks and so needed to make sure we could have a 1:1 match for every character had. The fact that Atoms variations are built around json files helped us a lot in that regard. We just needed to collect and output the information the correct way.
    Ultimately, those were the only critical bridges that we needed to build. For everything else, we more or less relied on the native Atoms toolset. We’ve since added more automation into our pipeline for other projects but those were the critical pieces that were built while working on “Scoob!”


    Is there anything else you would like to add?
    Philip: Toolchefs has been a great partner for us. Anytime we’ve faced a problem, the response and turnaround time has been incredible and I’m excited to see what Atoms 4.0 bring to the table. We’ve completed 2 projects with Atoms so far - WB’s Scoob! and Paramount’s Rumble - with a third currently in production - Netflix’s Back to the Outback - with a few more productions slated to begin next year.


    Image courtesy of Warner Bros
    Image courtesy of Warner Bros
    ]]>         Atoms Crowd (3.8.0) embraces USD as new I/O format https://atoms.toolchefs.com/atoms-crowd-embraces-usd/ Wed, 02 Dec 2020 09:10:45 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7363

    Atoms Crowd (3.8.0) embraces USD as new I/O format

    3/12/2020

    USD is now fully integrated within Atoms Crowd.

    The new integration includes:
    • exporters for animation, skeleton and meshes from the supported DCCs
    • loaders for skeletons, animations and meshes
    • a C++ USD cache exporter
    • USD cache reader module allowing users to bring back crowd caches and modify them

    This integration is the result of a close collaboration between Toolchefs and Luma Pictures.

    "With the ability to read and write USD, Atoms now lets us leverage the full power of USD composition within our crowd assets and then view the final sims in any application that supports USD." Chad Dombrova, Head of Software

    "We are very excited about this new integration and we want to thank the team at Luma pictures for the great help they have provided on this." Daniele Federico, Toolchefs CEO

    Here you can find some videos showing the state of this integration:

    • AtomsMaya : Skeleton Exporter
     • AtomsMaya : Animation Exporter
     • AtomsMaya : Export Variations in USD
     • AtomsMaya : Importing USD Assets
     • AtomsMaya : USD Cache Exporter
     • AtomsMaya : USD Cache Reader Module
     • AtomsHoudini : Skeleton Exporter
     • AtomsHoudini : Animation Exporter
     • AtomsHoudini : Export Variations in USD
     • AtomsHoudini : Importing USD Assets
     • AtomsHoudini : USD Cache Exporter
     • AtomsHoudini : USD Cache Reader Module
    Atoms Crowd 3.8.0 also includes several other amazing features such as:

    • a new workflow with Reallusion Character Creator
    • New modules for animating agents in 3D (Navigation 3D, Vortex Field, Magnet Field)
    • improvements to the retargeting system
    • And much more

    Full release notes can be found here.

    Enjoy!

    ]]>         Image Engine creates crowds for the Mandalorian and many other projects with Atoms Crowd https://atoms.toolchefs.com/ie-creates-crowds-with-atoms/ Fri, 06 Nov 2020 09:16:35 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7355

    Image Engine creates crowds for the Mandalorian and many other projects with Atoms Crowd

    09/11/2020

    Image Engine Logo

    Image Engine adopted Atoms Crowd as their crowd toolset a couple of years ago.
    Today we have a chat with Carsten Kolve (Facility Digital Supervisor) and talk about how Image Engine uses Atoms Crowd to create their crowd sequences.



    Hello Carsten, can you please introduce yourself for the people who don't know you?
    Hi Daniele and Alan, good to talk with you! I’ve been working in the VFX / animation industry for a little over 20 years now. Originally I started out as a software developer at MPC in London, primarily developing crowd tools for a system we called ALICE and working as a Crowd TD when there were virtually no viable alternative commercial solutions around. After a few years and a number of sword and sandal epics like ‘Troy’, ‘Kingdom of Heaven’ and ‘Alexander the Great’, I moved to Australia where I could take on diverse challenges and broaden my horizon as rigging tools developer, pipeline engineer, FX and CG supervisor. Crowds always seemed to land on my plate though, whether it’d be cattle herds for the movie ‘Australia’ while at Rising Sun Pictures, crowd supervision for the ‘Happy Feet 2’ penguins at George Miller’s Dr.D Studios or minifigs for ‘The Lego Movie’ at Animal Logic.

    For a bit over 6 years now I have been working for Image Engine in Vancouver as Digital Supervisor. This is a really diverse role where I get to be involved with all aspects of production, including which toolsets to use.

    I just did a quick count and of the about 30 shows I was lucky enough to directly work on at 5 different studios, about half had some kind of crowd component to them. So yeah, it’s a bit of a recurring theme.


    Can you please tell us why you chose to use Atoms and how you are using it in production?
    At its very core, Atoms is quite an open architecture. It allows us to interact with crowd related data at different stages in production and with a variety of 3rd-party as well as internal DCC tools. So it is more like a generic crowd infrastructure, rather than a crowd plugin limited to just one of the 3D tools we use. This flexibility maps well to the demands of high-end visual effects and animation production, where large parts of a typical pipeline have custom components to it.

    In addition, Toolchefs also provides us with an integration of Atoms with the open source project ‘Gaffer’, which we rely heavily on across the group for scene graph creation, automation, lookdev, lighting, rendering as well as compositing.


    Which Atoms integrations are you using?
    As I mentioned, flexibility is very important to us - every project has its own unique challenges to which we try to find the most efficient solution. In addition, being a mid size studio, we also need to be flexible in terms of the available talent as well as their preferred toolset.

    Crowd character setups are usually completed in AtomsMaya; AtomsMaya is also used for more layout based crowd work as well as the integration of crowds with the animation pipeline. For crowd effects that have a heavy dynamic or fx component, we use AtomsHoudini. It allows us to both integrate our crowd performances with Houdini native crowds as well as bring Atoms crowds into Houdini for effects integration.
    Lighting and lookdev are using the AtomsGaffer integration in Gaffer to add crowds to the scene graph which is ultimately rendered in Arnold. In fact, the output of all departments at Image Engine is verified via a render - so in the background, they all utilize AtomsGaffer. In addition, we also make use of the standalone Atoms Python API inside of pipeline tools.





    You have a lot of experience with all major crowd softwares as well as writing crowd solutions yourself. Could you please tell us if Atoms has any particular feature and workflow that you find useful compared to similar softwares available?
    The flexibility and openness of Atoms really does set it apart from its competitors. Being able to seamlessly pass large amounts of (crowd) character animation data through all stages of the production pipeline with direct support of all the major tools and easy customization was a major selling point.

    Crowds are often not something that can be isolated to one part of the production process and Atoms provides the glue between the asset departments, layout, animation, crowd, FX and lighting.


    Can you describe your approach and workflow for delivering a crowd shot with Atoms?
    As you know, there are a large variety of crowd scenarios that have their unique demands: A large background crowd in a stadium sequence might need to be tackled with a different approach than armies fighting in the midground or a bespoke foreground crowd interacting with hero characters.

    In the first scenario we might be utilizing a motion instancing-type setup, the second case might require the use of crowd control state machines and motion blending trees, and the last case a mass animation/mocap pipeline with larger focus on secondary animation like cloth and hair. There are many more scenarios - but I guess our common steps would involve creating the crowd character and preparing the motion data in AtomsMaya.

    Whichever way we choose to generate the motion or crowd layout, the rendering of the crowd happens always via AtomsGaffer. If we’d feel that a character would need some specific hero treatment, we would opt to promote the performance from a crowd character to a traditionally rigged hero character via the provided functionality. The workflow is not fundamentally different from what one might already know if one is familiar with crowds - I think this is good as it makes it easier to onboard new artists.


    How many projects have you used Atoms on? Could you please name a few?
    We have used Atoms on a variety of completed projects as well as on a couple that are currently in production and we can’t talk about just yet. Some of the crowd effects we created involved tourists fleeing the mayhem that is unleashed in ‘Spiderman - Far From Home’, villagers as well as soldiers on horseback in ‘Disney's Mulan’, close up robots in the pivotal episode of the VFX Emmy nominated ‘Lost In Space Season 2’, microscopic nanites running through bloodstreams in ‘Bloodshot’ as well as blaster fighting spacefarers in ‘The Mandalorian’.





    Can you briefly outline your pipeline and how easy it was to integrate Atoms Crowd into it?
    I already touched a bit on our general pipeline, but would like to point out some areas that are often tricky with other off the shelf systems. The look development and rendering pipeline often requires one to deviate from a standard hero workflow and come up with specific setups just for crowds. We didn’t really have to deal with this problem at all - GafferAtoms allowed us to work with look and shader assignments the same way we work with hero characters. In fact, we can choose to reuse the lookdev of a hero character straight on a respective crowd character. This offers us a lot of flexibility at render time and makes the integration of crowds with hero characters much more straightforward. We do have custom ways to handle other character related data like fur or hair at render time - with Atoms these effects, usually reserved for hero characters, can be applied straight away on crowds with no extra work.

    I would also like to point out that Atoms is not the only toolset we have inhouse to generate crowds. Depending on the task we might choose to generate a crowd performance using the Houdini crowd tools or even just capture a lot of bespoke performances using our motion capture setup. But what makes Atoms great is that we can easily map that performance to Atoms crowd data and utilize it throughout the rest of our pipeline - for example as reference for animation in Maya or inside of a library of crowd performances used in an Atoms crowd layout workflow. With it now being commonplace for multiple vendors to work on a show and exchange data, we feel comfortable to ingest or deliver large scale skeletal animation data if the need arises using the provided Python API.


    Is there anything else you would like to add?
    Atoms is a relatively new and growing player in the ‘crowd game’, but Toolchefs make learning how to use it easy with a large amount of useful training videos and extensive documentation. A lot of the crowd tools are written in Python, so referencing them for your own scripts is straightforward.

    Dealing with a software vendor with a background in feature film R&D software development, that understands the unique challenges and requirements we face in production, listens to suggestions and often implements them extremely fast while being open for dedicated support - all these are huge benefits for us and we are looking forward to collaborating with you on our upcoming crowd projects!




    ]]>         Atoms Unreal Open Beta Update https://atoms.toolchefs.com/atoms-unreal-open-beta-update/ Thu, 25 Jun 2020 09:41:42 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7293

    Atoms Unreal Open Beta Update

    25/06/2020

    multiplayer

    We are extending Atoms Unreal open beta until further notice.
    The beta has been running very successfully and we have received plenty of useful feedback.
    Before releasing the first official version, we want to make sure AtomsUnreal is a comprehensive package.
    In recent weeks we mainly focused on performance improvements and other requests by our testers.
    We hoped you enjoyed our software so far!





    In order to install and use Atoms Unreal you will have to: Docs can be found here.
    Tutorials can be found here.
    You can ask questions on Atoms google group.
    FAQ page is here.

    During the open beta, the plugin can used for building apps and contents without limitations as long as you don't infringe our terms of agreements.
    We will let our users know when the open beta will be finished through the newsletter and on the google group.

    Enjoy!





    ]]>         Epic Games Awards Toolchefs MegaGrant https://atoms.toolchefs.com/epic_games_awards_toolchefs_megagrant/ Tue, 28 Apr 2020 20:53:41 +0000 https://atoms.toolchefs.com/?p=7268

    Epic Games Awards Toolchefs MegaGrant

    29/04/2020

    Toolchefs_Megagrant

    We are happy to announce that Epic Games has awarded Toolchefs a MegaGrant for the development of Atoms Crowd integration into Unreal Engine: AtomsUnreal. We would like to thank everyone at Epic Games for believing in us and recognizing the potential of our crowd system!

    Toolchefs is specialized in software development for the 3D industry, both open source and commercial.

    Atoms Crowd is a standalone framework designed to handle great amount of animation data in real time. Atoms Crowd is currently integrated in Autodesk Maya, SideFx Houdini, Gaffer, Isotropix Clarisse and Foundry Katana. The Unreal Engine integration is still in Beta and you can join it by registering on the website.

    We are very keen to make a great product for Unreal Engine so its entire community can benefit from it.

    Please visit Epic MegaGrants to learn more about the program.






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