Dangerous Liaisons is a period piece that takes place in 18th century Paris. This required full cg establishing shots of locations. We had a full procedural 3D set up of 18th Century Paris in Houdini that as an artist I was tasked with creating Previsualization sequences that would inform the client a creative visual representation of camera moves and composition that would later be signed off. Following this I was tasked with formulating a crowd simulation set up, utilizing Houdini’s Crowd FX solution.
I built crowd simulation network using models and animations that I collaborated directly with Animators to provide me specific actions I needed my 18th century Parisian citizens to be engaging in within my simulation; considering what 18th century peasants and aristocrats would be doing. The crowd was controlled through a series of python based VEX code that I was able to wrangle points along curves to manipulate actions and movement.
The results added significant life to these large scene establishing full CGI shots.
