Guardians Of The Galaxy’s Space Battle!

It’s out in theatres and you should definitely go and see it because it is pretty awesome!!! 🙂

I worked on this project for about a year at MPC mainly on the final space battle leading our amazing London crowd simulation team.

There will be an MPC talk at SIGGRAPH this year covering some of our work, if you are around definitely come and say hi! s2014.siggraph.org/attendees/talks/sessions/got-crowds The talk abstract can be seen here: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2614127

We’ve built a lot of new tech on top of our in-house MPC crowd system ALICE to allow those thousands of spaceships in the final battle to whizz around through space and combat each other. One of them was a bridge between Softimage’s ICE framework and ALICE. The motivation behind this was to utilise the performance, flexibility and speed of development that framework provided for the behavioural point simulations whilst still having MPC’s sophisticated motion engine behind it for intricate clip blending.

The flight system built in ICE was modular allowing our artists to either highly art-direct their simulations or let more autonomous behaviours simulate battle without much intervention. The flight core would at all time ensure correct flight manoeuvres and enforce the specific per-ship characteristics.

Based on that simulation data and extra trajectory analysis our ALICE motion engine would then ensure blending of the proper ship motions either procedurally or as predefined by animators. Our sims also contained tons of extra data describing the battling (explosions, firing, damage percentages, etc) for down the line departments to pick up.

Big kudos to Ciaran Moloney and Alan Stanzione who participated in developing all this with me and off course the rest of the crowd team for delivering some amazing work using it!

Plus on that note I’d like to say: farewell Softimage, you’ve been a great companion, I hope there will be a worthy replacement for your ICE framework soon!

Cheers

Jo