Implementation of Crowd system in Maya®

This paper introduces a practical implementation of virtual crowd scene for contents such as animations, movies, games, and so on. The motion of individual as well as the overall movement of extras is very important because the crowd is gathering of the characters. Animators want to control the overall movement of crowd while each character moves autonomously. Also, they desire to confirm their character models with motions before rendering. However, the characters require lots of memory and consume lots of time because of the model data size, the simulation time, model-import time, motion connection time, etc. Therefore, the crowd system should allow animators to guarantee good motion quality, control the characters easily, and generate crowd scene rapidly. This paper proposes the crowd system that satisfies the conditions.