Massive Software and Vicon House of Moves contributed to the work of Method Studios on the new Miller Lite spot, BREAK FROM THE CROWD, helmed by 300 director Zack Snyder.

In the commercial, a 60-foot tall giant made up of hundreds of people clustered together stomps through a cityscape before people begin jumping off, disbanding to go their own way as independent-minded Miller Lite drinkers. While portions of the spot were shot practically, only eight live actors were filmed on set, while the giant is made up of anywhere from 1,200-1,500 individual people (real, digital and dummies) depending on the shot.

For such complex visual effects productions, CG artists in the know have shortened production turnaround times using the combined power of Academy Award-winning tools from Massive Software and Vicon. For this project, realtime performance motion capture was completed at Vicon House of Moves in Los Angeles; Massive, the artificial intelligence-driven animation system was selected to drive the many hundreds of individual characters.

The spot required ingenuity and preplanning on behalf of the Method team. After extensive preparation and pre-visualization, Method devised a four-step approach to building the giant with a mix of live action and CG in the most believable way possible. This approached involved:

1. Completing realtime motion capture representing the CG giant's movement;
2. Applying that motion data onto the giant's CG character rig built using Maya nCloth to create additional rippling movement on the agent to emulate approximate movement of the humans applied onto it;
3. Pumping coordinates off of the giant character rig and into Massive to map and drive individual Massive agents;
4. Motion capturing performances to apply to massive agents designed to represent the 1,200-1,500 individuals that form the towering giant.

This approach covered a bulk of the animation required, and was supplemented with layered keyframed animation in conjunction with motion capture animation for fine-tuning select shots.

Method completed all of the motion capture for the spot at Vicon House of Moves (HOM). Capture of a female and male performer was completed on HOM's 80 X 45 foot main stage outfitted with 55 of the latest Vicon MX-F40 cameras. "One of the most difficult challenges with CG humans is conveying a sense of weight, and you get that right out of the gate with motion capture, " explained Gil Baron, Method CG supervisor. "We've done a lot of projects with House of Moves and the studio produces really clean, high quality realtime motion data. Using House of Moves realtime pre-visualization during the motion capture sessions was critical for creative to sign off on shots as they were captured. Another huge advantage is its Diva View system that allows me to review same-day shoot sequences online, remotely in realtime, and scrub through selects to pick our final shots."

Method, an early adopter of Massive, called on freelance Massive artist Phil Hartmann and in-house lead 3D artist James LeBloch to create a MoCap Massive-Maya pipeline to streamline the complex process.

LeBloch developed an internal pipeline to map the motion capture data onto a roughly modeled and skinned object in Maya. The object was a rigged character that had the same volume as the giant, so the Method team could interactively move the MoCap data around in Maya to preview and finesse animations of the giant in different sequences. Then a second layer of animation was created using Maya nCloth to add a sense of scale and smoothness to the giant's motion. Method software developer Hai Nguyen then wrote software to allow the team to output this second layer of animation to Massive and use it as a data set to drive the individual characters that make up the giant.