Crowd Simulation - Battle Scenes

Yali Papacubec
25 авг.
2 мин. чтения

Hi there!

We had the pleasure of working on a fun and creative project from New York: within just one month, we produced a humorous music video in Unreal Engine featuring a large variety of characters. The project was for the official video of

John Maus – I Hate Antichrist

Thanks to careful design, animation, and composition, the clip received very positive feedback and has already amassed over 76,000 views on YouTube.

During this time, we had to create and animate 7 characters.

We decided to use DAZ Studio for character creation, which allowed us to achieve both speed and high-quality results for the final characters.

We created meshes for all the characters in DAZ Studio, adjusting each one’s body volume, proportions, and size. We also configured the clothing meshes and transferred everything to Unreal Engine using the DAZ to Unreal Bridge plugin.

When transferring the characters from DAZ to Unreal, the materials behave slightly differently in the engine — for example, textures "normals". Because of this, we had to adjust all the body and clothing materials directly in Unreal.

Once we achieved the desired results, we proceeded to create animations and set up physics for some of the characters, including clothing physics. You can check out more details in another post of mine:

https://www.papacubec.com/post/chaos-cloth-simulation

During the animation process, we used pre-made animations in some areas, modifying them with Unreal Control Rig and the ANIM MOD TOOL plugin. This plugin allows us to merge bones, mirror animations, and adjust hand gestures.

For the remaining animations, we used the QuickMagic AI platform, carefully cleaning up each animation from noise and jitter directly in Unreal Engine.

After that, we assembled all the scenes separately in the location provided by the client, using Unreal Sequencer. We then placed cameras, lighting, and visual effects to achieve the final look.

For the camera, we used Camera Shake to add a sense of dynamism, and we also placed particle and dust effects behind the objects to enhance the scene.

To create the crowd, we optimized all models and applied Nanite for both static objects and skeletal meshes, allowing us to place a large number of characters in the scene.