Variation: Crowds

I was watching scenes from Gods Of Egypt and noticed some of the steps they took to integrate the large CGI crowd into the scene. This got me interested in studying ways to shed the appearance of the digitally copied and pasted CGI crowd. From this study, I found 3 integration techniques I’ll be breaking down: atmospherics, lighting, and composition.

This is with exception to the most important crowd integration concepts like color variation, physical variation and realistic animation.

Atmospherics

The first way to add variation to a crowd is with atmospherics. This will vary contrast levels of the characters at different depths.

“Game of Thrones”

Gods of Egypt

The Two Towers

Lighting Break Up

The Lord of the Rings series has many massive crowd shots, and one way the break up the crowds is by not lighting them evenly, spotlighting some and leaving others in shadow.

This shot from The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies breaks up crowds with lighting, but it still has the “cg curse“ from uniform layout of the characters, making them feel copied and pasted:

Linear vs. Organic Lines

One way to break the feeling of copied and pasted crowd is to add organic lines.

An example of a straight crowd lines from The Return of the King, the end is feeling like repeated elements along a perfect perspective line:

What can make the shot less of a linear copy and paste style is a weaving, organic line. The composition is similar to a coastline with sections that are hidden and revealed for varied depth.