Rise - Worlds 2018 - Sengokuhara field

Hi,
After two years, I've finally decided to share my work done on the Worlds 2018's trailer, RISE, done by Fortiche Production in Paris. I was responsible for the sengokuhara field crowd simulations, crowd simulations done with Golaem Crowd.

There were two types of simulations: one was for the beginning/staring moment before the fight (aka the calm before the storm), and the other was during the fight (aka the storm is definitely here).
I created a simple model and rig of one sengokuhara and separated the mesh in half in order for the asset to be cut by the characters during the fight - the asset was then procedurally animated with a number of variations (calm, windy, stormy, etc). To add more credibility in the overall field behavior, the sengokuharas were all physicalized in Local Servo Mode, allowing me to add a nice physics touch on a cycle and giving the effect that the plant's head was heavier than the rest - especially useful when one plant bent over or was pushed by the wind or by the characters when they were moving around.
During the fight sequence, some plants were cut by the sword of the main character, drawing sharp shapes in the field; this effect was done by cutting the agents (with a detach behavior) while adding an impulsion (with a force behavior), making the upper half go away while the lower half was still planted, reacting to the characters fighting; the rest of the field was shaken by shockwaves done with a controlled force behavior.

Finally, to respect Fortiche's artistic direction, I was able to create a camera mapping of a matte painting under the simulation and get the specific color at the very placement of each plant agent, and then apply this specific color to the whole entity inside Guerilla Render - for each frame, multiple renders were done (classic texture, matte painting color, darker matte painting color for faking an AO, normal map, etc) and compositing department played with these maps to have the foreground with the classic texture but the background with the matte painting color.

Kudos to Fortiche's team for the amazing work done on this project, but also to Golaem and Guerilla's teams!