Crowds are an obsession of mine with iClone. I’ve used many different methods over the years to populate scenes with crowds. Studio Max was an early choice but its populate system is a bit limited. As long you wanted a contemporary crowd doing nothing but walking or standing around it would do the trick. At a distance. Even its high poly characters didn’t look that good up close.

Sticking to a reasonable budget I settled on Anima Crowds and still use it as I can import custom iClone/Character Creator 4 avatars into it along with custom animations. It was and still is a good solution, but I never really had that good of a library of motions to import and use with it.

Along comes the motion-capture-based Run For Your Life pack and while it has great motions for individual and small scene shots… it really excels at creating chaotic crowds that go far beyond your usual mocap animations.

As with all Reallusion motion capture products this pack is top shelf created in collaboration with Monkey Chow Studios, an Orlando-based full-service Animation, and VFX studio. I scooted over to the monkeychowproductions.com site to check them out a bit more and was impressed with what I found. They have a sister company, Motion Capture Orlando that does planning, shooting, editing, and consulting.

According to their sister company's website, they use 28 optical cameras in an 18’ by 32w’ volume. It further adds they have amazing fidelity for tracking multiple actors with detailed hand gestures. Sounds like the two companies have plenty of experience with motion capture and it shows in the final product.

The motions are smooth and ready to use out of the can so to speak. Just drag and drop, position, and go. The packs have four main categories, 12 (motions) First Reaction, 31 Panic and Chaos, 13 Climb and Fall, 12 Ups and Downs which provide a wide range of motions for a panic shot or crowd. It is an inclusive range of motions that can be used with wide-angle shots and even survive the tightest of shots while providing smooth motion.

One of my earliest tests was seeing how a crowd of over 140 7K characters would run as Character Creator 4 can reduce and optimize most characters to that weight to use in a crowd in the close to middle distance shots. You optimize in CC4 then send them over to iClone for crowd creation.

I took 12 avatars with 12 motions from the Panic and Chaos folder, my favorite group of motions by the way, then duplicated them in groups until I had well over 100. I turned off the textures to speed up working with them and was very surprised to find out later that I could turn those textures back on and still have decent speed.

In a well-lit crowd scene, you would want to use much more than just 12 base characters but in darkened lighting, you can get away with it as shown in another example in this review.

A tip on previewing motions quickly for crowd creation as a lot of people get caught up in previewing the motions.

Dump several characters into the workspace with textures off, duplicate them as many times as your machine will handle, and assign random motions from the pack.  This lets you check out the motions in a crowded environment instead of trying to visualize which motions to use by a “one at a time” run-through of the pack with a single avatar. Turning off the textures keeps the repeating clothing from catching your eye and detracting from the test. This way you see the crowd in action very quickly. Below is an example of this in action.