All images courtesy of Warner Bros Pictures. Screenshots courtesy of the Moving Picture Company. No unauthorised copying or distribution!

Troy was my first vfx feature - The Moving Picture Company hired me based on my previous work on crowd simulation (some of which you can see on the site) to become one of the core R&D developers of ALICE. ALICE is the acronym for Artificial LIfe Crowd Engine and a Maya based multi agent animation system that enables Crowd TD's to create crowd layouts and simulations using Maya's build-in and a whole lot of custom tools.

Crowd control networks can easily be generated by simply plugging dependency nodes together. I developed various parts of the ALICE: nodes to control crowd dynamics (math, (fuzzy) logic, state machines, flow control, etc.), the integration of crowds with particle systems (for arrow impacts, dust kicks, blood splashes, etc.), data visualizer and a new interface which enables TD's to build, manage and debug crowd control graphs easily.

After an extensive R&D phase we finally went into shot production. As a Crowd TD I completed the majority of battle shots. Most of the fighting between the two armies is done using artificial life techniques (or just a good layout and extensive use of randomness and noise).

For the close combat scenes I devised a system which enables the use of pre-choreographed multi-character animation clips within a crowd simulation. It was used to insert many high quality 1-on-1 fights performed my stunt actors into the melee - which helped a lot in making the action more believable.

More information on the production of Troy can be found here.

Most of the crowd effects in Alexander were done by the french company Buf. However a number of more close-up crowd shots depicting the battle in the Indian jungle were executed by MPC's team - simulating horses for the first time using ALICE. Apart from a view simple tasks I was not directly involved in the production - however I created various example shots demonstrating the crowd system we developed. They were used to convince the director we were able to produce the battle scenarios he was asking for.

All about the effects in Alexander here.

Batman Begins was the chance for me to add another dimension to crowd simulation - the third one. ALICE had so far only been used to produce simulation running in 2d, but for the swarms of bats this was clearly not sufficient. After creating a suitable simulation bat rig in conjunction with the Rigging TD I extended the crowd system to support full 3d movement of agents. In addition I build a Maya dependecy graph rule network which would emulate the flight behaviour of bats.

Custom tools to control the flight motion (eg. guide curves, flow fields and obstacle detectors) helped the Shot TD's to direct the bats, artificial live techniques (like the well known flocking behaviour) added additional variation.

Numerous companies worked on Batman Begins, more about the production here.

More crowds! For Ridley Scott's crusader epic MPC's crowd team perfected the "large crowd" simulation workflow. The most important addition to the toolset being a system to reuse simulations as building blocks for other simulations, making the generation of very complex and coordinated crowd motion fast and easily controllable. Besides working in R&D on the enhancement and restructuring of the inhouse crowd system I was again a Simulation TD, creating the crowds seen in the Siege sequences and the vultures of the Battle of Hattin aftermath shots.

The vultures were controlled by a procedural bird flight emulation system which automaticly adjusted the flapping and banking behaviour based on it's speed, distance to ground and air pressure differences (a simple 3d perlin noise map). It was again realised as an ALICE network. I used guide curves to direct individual hero birds.

I added multiple digital stunt double falling and jumping out of collapsing siege towers, crashing into the ground or onto other soldiers - they were realise using PAPI. This is a proprietary physics tool in Maya which allows the seamless blending of motion capture data and ragdoll dynamics.

After more than 2.5 years of development ALICE has reached a very mature state - it is possible to add "inteligence" to virtual every Maya object - from individual characters driven by procedurally controlled motion capture data to vertices in a cloth mesh analyzing their surrounding.

It was a nice surprise that the team's work on Kingdom of Heaven was honored with a VES award for Best Supporting Visual Effects in a motion picture - see the "making of" here.

I worked as the Lead R&D TD on this project and developed various Maya particle setup and management systems for air bubbles. Lot's and lot's of bubbles. Bubbles in the ships wake, bubbles in splashes, bubbles bursting out of exploding compartment windows, a demolished funnel, exhaust pipes, open doors, debris, drowning people... all interacting with the motion of the fluid.

Unfortunately the full trailer was never shown in complete - however many parts of this massive shot were used in the promotional trailers.

Read the VFXPro article on Poseidon here.