Postoffice Amsterdam shows off their Crowd and Stadium Tool allowing them to specialize in crowds and character/ CGI animal work.
Visual Effects house Postoffice Amsterdam shows off how they can create large-scale stadiums and crowds for any timeline and budget. Typically what takes weeks, they can pull off in days thanks to further development and their newly polished Crowd and Stadium Tool. The new system builds upon a previous in-house tool.
Postoffice Crowd and Stadium Tool!
The in-house tool solves one of the trickiest parts of crowd shots in VFX, creating unique characters quickly. The system is a procedural crowd and stadium generator. “With this tool, we input a couple of values. Primary, secondary, optional tertiary colors as well as brands, sponsors, flags,” Boyo Frederix, the head of Visual Effect at the Postoffice says.
“These all get combined through an algorithm, and thousands of unique characters are generated.” The team no longer needs to hand texture for crowd shots in VFX. The crowd tool works hand in hand with their stadium generator. They both use a similar principle of easy to use sliders to create any stadium in a matter of hours/days as opposed to weeks when modeling by hand.
Procedurally Generating People.
The Crowd and Stadium Tool can build “looks” on the fly using procedurally generated clothing. Support for crowds featuring men, women, children, flags, props, stewards, press, etc. included.
The VFX team can build stadiums in realtime with an endless array of tweakable options. Great for advertising, series or feature film projects. With the Euro Cup and Olympic games coming up, this tool will allow brands and ad agencies to create stunning crowd shots for their campaigns. All Olympic / Euro cup countries are pre-programmed and ready to go.
It almost sounds like the in-house system is polished enough as a third party product, but that’s not the case.
“At the moment, the tool is not available for licensing.”
About Postoffice Amsterdam.
We help agencies, brands, and other post-houses with their crowd shots. Postoffice Amsterdam is a post-production company that produces VFX and other post-production services for the international advertising industry. With specialties in crowds and character/ CGI animal work.
Perhaps soon, though?
