Animated Crowd

The past few days we've been working on our "snowboard game with cars" finish setting which is some kind of stadium filled with animated crowd. We didn't have a lot of time for all this so we used some shortcuts to create this.

One of the most important things to keep in mind when making a crowd is that it must look like there are a lot of individual people. In our game we have 12 different people to make up our crowd. But instead of creating 12 new 3D models we took the games original characters, just two, made some slight mesh changes (a bit fatter, smaller, etc.) and changed the textures.

For most of the textures only the colors were changed. We also switched/removed some hats. The results can be seen below, they look quite varied don't they?

Using these 3D characters in-game to make up the crowd wouldn't be a good idea and most likely cost a lot performance. Instead we chose to display the crowd as an animated texture with four frames. We've made one texture which holds all of the animations frames, these frames are mapped onto planes and are switched in-game by animating the texture coordinates.

And finally we've placed the crowd planes in the stadium resulting in this:

Cheers, Matt