The Mill builds a Mountain for PlayStation and talks about it at the UK CGI Festival. Courtesy of The Mill.

Back to the crowds, though. Part of Regelous’ message is that crowd software is about more than just large armies going at it. It was thus interesting to hear The Mill’s Bares talk through a couple of commercials the post giant has done using Massive; namely PlayStation Mountain (people clambering over each other) and Nike The Other Game (stadium crowd replication), both the sort of highly entertaining and technically demanding projects that London specialises in.

Over at DreamWorks/PDI, meanwhile, effects supervisor Mark Wendell explained how they used SOFTIMAGE Behavior to build and animate the crowd scenes in Shark Tale. “We would have liked to have used Massive actually,” he said, “but it wasn’t really ready when we started development on the movie.”

Other tid-bits grabbed from the presentation: Shark Tale had to rotate fish fins 90 degrees to give the illusion of bipedal movement and all the innate expressiveness that goes with it to the audience; characters were rigged especially to have extreme deformations without breaking; the movie would have taken one person 474 years to complete; occupied more than 30TB of disc space and gobbled up more than six million CPU render hours. Oh, yes, and 27 babies were born to DreamWorks employees during production.

As this shows, it can be a bit frustrating getting the one-hour overview of a production at a conference, leaving you as likely to come out with an idea of the reproductive rates of animators as about anything specific and useful. So the best presentations tend to be themed and focussed on one topic, such as Scott Easley’s excellent masterclass on the making of EA’s Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault. Easley was lead animator on the game and is passionate about detail. It’s all about getting it right as far as he’s concerned, so a group was sent on a three-week field trip to the Pacific theater of war where they found amongst other things that sand behaves differently from how it does on Venice Beach and that Japanese soldiers moved in a fundamentally different and more efficient way from their American counterparts. So they engaged Japanese actors to get the MoCap right, researchers to explain the culture of the Empire at the time, military advisers to make the animators realise what being in the middle of a war is like, took pictures of the sand and generally immersed themselves in their work.

Animators should take ownership of their work, says Easley. But not to an excessive extent. Addressing the inevitable question from his audience on long working hours at EA, he replied, “The Medal of Honor team does not work those hours. At six we kick them out. If you have an efficient pipeline you don’t have to work those hours.”

So there you go…

Efficient pipelines are becoming more and more important as the 3D industry continues its drive toward real world complexity. Take Danielle Feinberg, lead lighting artist at Pixar. On Monsters, Inc. they had 59 lighting set-ups. On Finding Nemo there were 50. On The Incredibles there were a whopping 179 with 17 people doing master lighting set-ups alone. That sort of work needs a fat and very well-designed pipe to stop clogging up.