Wild Capture's Cohort Crowds

Wild Capture's Cohort Crowd Kit Streamlines VFX Production Pipelines

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Wild Capture's Cohort Crowds is the new crowd creator tool for digital humans created with volumetric video. After years of development, Cohort is now being used to create crowd assets for VFX, gaming and web streaming pipelines. All part of Wild Capture’s rapidly expanding Digital Human Platform. Cohort Crowds is a crowd toolkit designed to optimize each asset, create customized variants of those assets and randomize the scatter of each character into the simulation to produce lifelike crowds with individual and group behaviors. This allows creators to save hundreds, if not thousands of hours deploying volumetric performances into crowd environments.

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Cohort assets are deployable across VFX,  gaming other new media workflows. This tool is designed to give the user complete controllability of individual crowd assets for digital crowd environments. It is also designed to give the user access to crowd tool functions that change the overall performance of the crowd to fit the action required. All of this is based on varied volumetric video crowd character performances that have been optimized for delivery.

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The Cohort Crowd Kit has various libraries of smart assets to choose from. Those assets are deployed into 3D environments and then duplicated to fill larger spaces, based on how many assets are needed or purchased. Standing, sitting, high energy, low energy.  Cheering, booing and other crowd behaviors are prerecorded and from there, performances are optimized with Wild Capture's Unify process, and then customized with fashion variants before they are randomly scattered into the user's simulation to create a variance of lifelike crowd movement and behaviors to achieve outstanding result when scaled.  

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Customizable Cloth and Product Placement

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Cohort Crowds can manipulate all kinds of unique performance identifiers for each character to create seamless background character integration. With the ability to scatter variants of each character with color changing wardrobe and hair options, artists will save hundreds of hours spent programming each performer individually. With Wild Capture's Cohort Fashion, characters can receive additional customization props such as drink cups, banners, sunglasses, jewelry and hats can also be added in these scenes. This also means that users can also add product placement with logos on shirts, hats & accessories.

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Cohort Crowd and USD

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With their early adoption of the USD coding language, Wild Capture has delivered an end to end solution that reduces the computational power needed to provide lifelike crowds. This process creates variants of the character without the need to "bake" each asset. This allows the data engine to reference a single volumetric character multiple times without overloading the system with unnecessary processing, blueprinting, writing the structure and transcoding the asset into the system properly.

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With Wild Capture’s many engaging products from it's "Digital Human Platform" like Wild Capture's "Digital Fashion Toolkit", While creating a pipeline for the tool and wrapping it into Wild Capture’s unique line of volumetric and digital human technologies, Cohort Crowds utilizes AI to enhance the capabilities of smart assets to create responsive crowd creation for VFX, gaming and XR workflows.

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Comparing to the industry standard: VFX tiling processes

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Generally speaking, one of the primary needs in the digital crowd space is in new media FX. For many years, this would be referred to as cinema "plating" or "tiling" in a VFX workflow. This process usually involves hiring extras and taking up many hours in a day or utilizing the need to hire a 2nd Unit or a VFX Unit for this process. One of the main advantages of volumetric crowds over traditional background or tiled crowd VFX is that if the camera is moving, traditional 2D plating can only extend the illusion so far.

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As the speed of pre-production can sometimes leave VFX artists and entities to be left with less than enough time to wrangle a unit to secure the crowd plates for camera positions that may not be precisely finalized until principle photography. This problem has driven many leaders in this space toward volumetric crowd kits to solve their production logistics problems.

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Believable crowd performances for concerts, sporting events and other custom built creations

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In the world of new media, creative and technological expertise proliferates the idea that virtual production and digital humans are going to be in high demand in the coming years and the technology to that recreates human performances will saturate 3D spaces as data pipelines increase.

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The new landscape gives creators unique ways to utilize smaller spaces to recreate endless virtual sets. And the use of digital humans as foreground, mid-ground and background is quickly becoming the solution for new media activations.

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Cohort Demonstrations Provide Promising Solutions to VFX Problems

New demos are releasing on the week of November 12th.

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