Independence Day 2 – Resurgence

Once again, collaborating on another Roland Emmerich movie full of wanton destruction and thousands running in terror.  This time having the opportunity to work on the sequel to one of my all time favourite cinematic tentpoles, Independence Day.  I was tasked with putting hundreds of thousands of digital extras in harms way during the Singapore and London Sequences. I was also responsible for populating the grounds of the White House and wider DC metro area during the arrival of the mega-mothership.

Using a combination of Miarmy and Massive for rapid prototyping of shots as well as ragdoll dynamics, vignette workflows.  Many hero animation performances were also generated in Motionbuilder for render through the crowd pipeline.  Working closely with the FX department on the Singapore sequence, we developed a nifty way of exporting transforms from our TP simulations directly into Miarmy so we could be certain that the gravity was consistent across all the CG.  It also helped exponentially increase the turnaround time for crowds in that Singapore sequence.

In London, in addition to hundreds of thousands of crowd characters, I also built traffic agents to populate the bridges and roads surrounding the rivers.  All using basic navigation logic to know when to stop, avoid and when to get the hell out of dodge when the Petronas Towers make their final appearance.

Overall a very fun and fullfilling project with a wide variety of challenges thrown in for good measure. Or, as the good reverend would say….