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 Over much of his career in animation, Bradley Gabe has been an active member of the CG community helping to develop technical approaches to CG production via consulting, and the publication of tutorials online as well as in trade magazines. He also teaches courses, seminars, and Master Classes at Siggraph and other venues.
Bradley's technical skills have been honed over the years working on high-end digital effects in commercial and feature film productions at Stan Winston Studio, ILM, and Quiet Man.
Bradley is currently the Senior Technical Animator at Janimation, Inc., an award winning animation and motion graphics production studio in Dallas, Texas, which focuses mostly on television commercials and game cinematics.
Animating Crowds In Real Time Using Softimage ICE: How we can make birds flock, fish school, and bugs swarm.
This course will review the basic concepts of crowd animation, starting with reference footage of flocking birds, swarming insects, shoaling
fish, and then reviewing early research done by Craig Reynolds in 1986, covering the concepts of boids, steering forces, cohesion, alignment,
repulsion.
We will then move into the Softimage Interactive Creative Environment and reproduce the different steering forces using the visualization tools available to "see", interactively, how each operation affects the
motion of a crowd. Once we have developed a basic understanding about how steering forces work, it becomes trivial to add more and more steering forces for obstacle avoidance, target tracking, influence objects, and other crowd behavior controls. We will have fun with our crowd animation and let the lecture attendees guide the direction of how we control our crowd. The resulting animation will be posted online for future viewing.
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