Arcane - Crowds (Ep. 1)

Arcane is out so here's a compilation of most of the crowd shots I did ep. 1!

I joined Fortiche Production in 2016 to work on Arcane's pilot with only guideline to make Zaun and Piltover feel like living, breathing cities - exciting stuff to say the least!

I was responsible for the simulations showed in this page, but also the asset conversion and rigging of the crowd characters from ep 1, lookdev QC and animations retargetting as well; I also helped setuping the crowd pipeline with pipe dept and developed small scripts and tools to ease the work on a daily basis.

Thanks to the collaboration with the model, texture and rig departments, we managed to have our crowd assets as good as main or secondary chars without any quality loss either in polycount, texture fidelity or rig deformations, allowing us to populate crowds in foreground or right next to keyframe-animated hero / secondary chars. Although we relied on some mocap data for basic animations (mostly conversations), most of the animations used by crowd were done by anim dept thanks to a bridge allowing us to quickly retarget any anim from any char to any crowd rig, ending up with a big library from basic motions to specific animations for specific shots (like the bar shots).

Kudos to everyone involved in this project, and to the crowd team that arrived when I left after the pilot's completion who did an amazing job for the rest of the show! Huge thanks to Golaem and Guerilla render for their help and support!

https://arcane.com/en-us/