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Crowd Population Tool for Those About to Die

This tool was developed as a solution to efficiently populate scenes with crowds for the production Those About to Die in Unreal Engine. Combining Nanite technology, VertexToAnimPlugin, and dynamic property handling to create a lightweight setup capable of supporting large-scale crowd simulation without sacrificing performance.

  • Description of the imageUnreal Engine

Challenges to Overcome

Handling the complexity of large-scale crowd systems meant tackling several key challenges:

  • Optimizing Nanite static meshes to allow thousands of instances to render efficiently.
  • Modifying and expanding the VertexToAnimPlugin for GPU-driven animation, reducing bottlenecks.
  • Managing dynamic material parameters and per-instance properties for enhanced interactivity.

Features

    • Nanite Crowd Static Meshes: Leveraged Nanite to optimize rendering for thousands of crowd instances, ensuring real-time performance without compromising visual fidelity.
    • Modified VertexToAnimPlugin: Enhanced the plugin to seamlessly integrate with crowd animations and support Nanite.
    • Dynamic Crowd Instances with Clothing and Properties: Added support for dynamic clothing and per-instance properties like movement speed, animation blending, and custom materials.

How it's done

We first retargeted mocap animations onto custom-designed crowd meshes. These animations were then processed through a custom Manager plugin, which generated vertex animation textures (VATs), allowing for optimized rendering of numerous animated characters simultaneously. The use of VATs ensures high performance by replacing traditional skeletal animation with texture-driven animations, streamlining the rendering of detailed character movements. Additionally, this approach enabled real-time animation control, allowing animations to be cued in response to specific triggers.