Massive Football Players

Massive

When i was working at ollin studio i got a chance to know massive software for a project they were developing to discovery channel.

This year on january A company contract me as freelance massive TD for a project they were making for corona beer.

The task was to create a 2000 crowd of two diferente teams of agressive football players, fighting for only one ball. These players will fight in a strongest battle where only one player will still alive and win the ball possession.

After asking about the battle psychology , i started working on the loco guy ( a kind of hooligan ready tu run agent ) designing some new procedural actions like lifting one arm up like a calling to fight shout, and creating some rules to make the most stronger player keep alive using collision detection and a strongest variable depending on the body size of the players.

early test avoiding black holes
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In the scouting proccess the production team decides to make the shooting on this location in EL ajusco Mexico.

The shooting day i take a lot of photo references of the real players to create de massive guys.

some real players references

Also i take a lot of photoreferences of the terrain at the same focal distance to recreate then using the image synth plugin to create a big 10K image to recreate a 3D terrain with a non pattern texture.

terrain photo refrences

Then when the approved clothes for the real players, i take photo references to the paint artist that creates above 10 different clothes , including shirt, pants, shorts, belts ,t shirt, and different hair, head, arms and legs textures.

multiple shirts maps


multiple head maps

Then Using the base OGLSL shaders included inside masive we make some baked maps to create a little more detailed skin and cloth shaders using displacement and different baked maps paint artist create on MODO

roughness map


baked normal displacement map

In addition 3d artist work on the loco guy model geometry to create new geometry's as punky hairs, cloth accessories, heads, arms and legs.


This is a preview render of a small crowd running.

Cloth test
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After i create some fuzzy rules to assign these individual clothes in different combinations for each player. This way we create near 10 to power of 10 different combinations of unique look players each one with different size on each body part like arms, legs, and head, creating amazing visual variety .

These are some previews test showing the AI engine of the players.

In this test without a ball the agents try to keep near and run only when a team partner is near of them. In any other case the agents stops and walks slowly looking for another partner to still running ahead. Because they don't have a goal, the crowd start running in cirlces to keep them togueter. Also At the end of the simulation only the more stronger players keep alive.

Partnership fuzzy logic test
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In this other test, all the agents know the ball position but only the agents closest to the ball receive a "ball in range signal", and starts running to the ball, also these agent emit a new stronger "ball in range signal" that other agents can hear and go ahead the ball too.

looking for the ball fuzzy logic test
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One of the most important issues on this project, comes whit the rendering fact, because for budget and facility reasons we are unable to render on a renderfarm because the installed renderfarm runs on windows, and the archive expander plugin of massive only works on linux at that time.

I walk around on the OGLSL shaders and create a compositing mix technique to solve the loook issues, helping me in the fact that massive agents will be on a medium far plane from the camera. This way i start making some preview shots creating some atmosphere with maya fluids and making some precomps in shake like these.

View in High res here at VFXtalk

I finish my work when the full agent brain was done, and the final scene setting and compositing runs on charge of Flame artist Kamen Markov and Massive Artist Phil Heartmann

These are some of the final shots

View in high res here at VFXtalk

View in high res here at VFXtalk