Rise of The Guardians

On this brand new IP from Dreamworks, I had the opportunity to develop a much wider range of crowd AI than previous shows.  Building upon my “digital marionette” workflows from previous shows, I built 10 unique agents from scratch to be both fully procedural and entirely customizable through Massive’s UI.

Since there was such a large amount of crowd performance in the film, I found it advantageous to spearhead the whole cycle animation budget including motion capture cycle previs and thus managed a team of 3 cycle animators as well as acting as department liaison for other departments.

I was also asked to provide in depth training to the department in how the Dreamworks crowd development and artist pipeline worked. This covered everything from brain development and fuzzy logic theory to how the crowd pipeline interacted with the rest of the studio.