The recently released Social Group Bundle for the new iClone 8.4 Crowd Sim tool is a combination of professionally created characters, accessories, props, and motions that work with the new Crowd Sim tool to create a high-quality crowd. These assets come with features not found in most Character Creator or iClone characters like multiple clothing materials for a more varied crowd and handheld devices for related motions.
The Social Group Bundle is comprised of two products, the Modern People Sampler, and the Social Actions motion pack. Both packs are full of great drag-and-drop 3D assets that can bring a scene to life by quickly adding background characters in various motions and tasks. Let’s take a look at what the packs contain.
MODERN PEOPLE SAMPLER
This huge bundle is a combination of Street People vol.1, Business vol. 4, Business vol.6, Young Fashion vol. 5, Senior People vol.4, Kids vol.1. This includes 31 ActorSCAN/ActorBUILD characters with 7 to 10K quads (ActorSCAN) and 15 to 20K tris (ActorBUILD).
The types of characters in this pack can make a contemporary crowd for many different occasions from old to young, business, formal, or casual. It can work for a bustling downtown crowd to a more suburban mall or even a street party.
This “people pack” provides 31 drop-in characters with five texture variations each that the new Crowd Sim tool can use to pump out a randomized crowd in minutes or less. Whether it’s a harried businessman or a street performer this pack has the character. It includes grandma and grandpa too with the Senior characters along with the grandchildren in the kid’s pack.
ONE CHARACTER, DIFFERENT LOOKS
One positive thing about crowds is the ability to liven up a scene and add a little more realism. One bad thing about crowds is the repetitive use of characters. This is nothing new as crowds require a lot of resources to operate so duplicating characters is one way of dealing with the problem. Over at ActorCore, they solved this with multi-texture options for diversity in crowd generation.
Each multi-textured character, such as the characters in the Modern People Sampler, has five color variations available to the Crowd Sim tool. This Is not something we have to keep up with as all we need to do is check a box for material variations when generating a crowd using these characters. Like camouflage, this helps break up the easily spotted pattern of repetitive characters with a crowd.
The varied age groups, body types, heights, and weights all combine to make a more believable crowd as the camera pans by or draws back to a wide shot. These characters look great from any distance and close to the camera.
Reallusion: Each character in this pack comes with color masks, allowing for easy apparel changes and character switching. This feature enhances flexibility and customization options, ensuring that you can achieve the desired look and feel for your crowd simulation projects.
Below you find a video about texture options for ActorCore characters which applies to these packs as well.
Another asset needed to create crowds are the appropriate motions both stationary and moving as crowds tend to be both. Reallusion has you covered here with the Social Actions motion pack for Actor Groups.
If you aren’t familiar with Actor Groups, I’ll be covering them in a later article but for now, you can get more information about what a time-saving tool they are, how to deploy them, and how to create your own Actor Groups from the following tutorial.
SOCIAL ACTIONS
Social interactions are another very important but difficult group of motions to keyframe and are more suited to motion capture for a lot of animators. These seemingly uninteresting, common, everyday motions make up the fabric of life around us. Without them, we would be robots, waiting to move only when needed but thankfully, humans aren’t that way. We are fluid, always in motion, and Actor Groups add this type of visual fabric with drag-and-drop ease and simplicity.
A quick breakdown of the pack shows it contains: 90 Motion Plus groups, 8 Preset groups, 3 Random groups plus 8 Bonus props and accessories. This is a large pack with a lot of assets to help you create a diverse crowd.
Walking crowds are great but many crowds consist of smaller stationary groups often made of random groupings of people participating in conversations, interacting with their phones, or just relaxing. While you can easily create crowd clusters, those types of crowds are not as common as you might think and are not part of the mix for a street or similar crowd unless it is a live event or something similar.
Below you see a brief description and images in each section that demonstrate some of the versatile spawning techniques along with the menu that pops up when you load Actor Groups into the workspace. This is shown in more detail on the Social Actions Content Store page.
RANDOMIZE ACTORS
Actor Group strengths really shine here. With drag and drop ease you can load in a bench with actors in conversation already seated. It can also randomize Actor Groups with different actors and materials.
RANDOMIZE MATERIALS
It’s not just actors that are randomized. You can select from Materials Only to get different clothing colors, or you can randomize the actors and the materials for even more options.
PROPS & ACCESSORIES
Props and accessories are needed for some motions like sitting or interacting with a device and Actor Groups help with providing those items when needed to complete an Actors Group.
ORIENTATION
Orientation provides a change in position for each Actor Group, so they are not identical and not look like clones of each other. This allows for the general orientation of each group to differ and to be controlled by the user.
MOTION OFFSET
This option gives us a different starting frame for each group so they will not be doing the same motion at the same time. While these Actor Groups would not normally be this close to each other it does provide some additional protection against having the same motions running at the same time if this does occur.
Below is an image from the product webpage demonstrating the different types of standing, sitting, and mixed Actor Groups that can be dragged and dropped into the workspace. Load a five-actor standing preset along with a few two and three-actor mixed sitting and standing groups and you have a quick start on a crowd that will fill just about any medium to close camera shot.
Add more Actor Groups using the popup menu to randomize each group and you can build a larger and larger crowd before you even think about implementing NavMesh or Volume crowds.
ROSTER EXPANSION & CUSTOMIZATION
USER-DEFINED ACTORS
Tailoring actors within Actor Groups is a breeze. By accessing the Actor Group settings, you can find a preset, swap out the actor pool with your customized lineup, and ensure compatibility with corresponding gender and age tags. Once a new iActor Group is made, all subsequent spawns will feature distinct appearances.
ActorCore BRIDGE
At the heart of Actor Group lies the ability to randomly spawn actors featuring customized animations. Beyond your personally curated actor list, source from all available ActorCore characters to pair matching animations for males, females, children, and elderly. Expanding your ActorCore collection will also broaden the diversity within your cast of characters.
CUSTOMIZATION
Once satisfied with the spawned formation and the actors’ behaviors, you can effortlessly drag and replace any actor or adjust their material colors according to your preferences.
SUMMARY
In my opinion, the product demonstrates how much planning and effort have been put into these characters and motions and how important tools like Actor Groups are to creating a crowd in as little time as possible. This combo pack provides high-quality characters and studio-quality motions to create a crowd effortlessly and quickly.
Now let’s look at what we all want to know… does it really work this easy? Yes. It is that easy. Add in some path-driven walkway crowds and you have a complex and compelling crowd with a few clicks of your mouse.
Over the years I’ve dealt with a lot of crowd simulators/generators including manual crowd creation and I found the Actor Groups to dramatically decrease the time it takes to populate a scene with more than just a randomly generated NavMesh or Volume crowd. While those can be great crowds on their own, the Actor Groups add a specific flavor or type of crowd that can blend in or stand out… like a street utility crew hard at work or a gun crew manning a weapon. Improve your scenes without adding a lot to your already busy workday with the Social Group Bundle from Reallusion.
REALLUSION COURSES
MD McCallum – WarLord
Digital Artist MD “Mike” McCallum, aka WarLord, is a longtime iClone user. Having authored free tutorials for iClone in its early years and selected to write the iClone Beginners Guide from Packt Publishing in 2011, he was fortunate enough to meet and exchange tricks and tips with users from all over the world and loves to share this information with other users. He has authored hundreds of articles on iClone and digital art in general while reviewing some of the most popular software and hardware in the world. He has been published in many of the leading 3D online and print magazines while staying true to his biggest passion, 3D animation. For more information click here.
