In collaboration with Pomp & Clout and Saad Moosajee.
This was an ambitious project for me and Saad. All of the animation was created using motion capture and Unreal Engine, the shots were built in both C4D and Houdini, and they were rendered with Arnold.
We had to make several tools to facilitate rendering Houdini crowds in C4D as well as rendering large volumes in Arnold that finished within our lifetime.
Since Arnold lacks light instancing I made a tool that creates lights that can be copied to geometry in Houdini using the normal Houdini instancing attributes.
The crowd LOD system from “Last I Heard” was improved for both the angels and dancers.
Aside from the technical hurdles we also made this project during the pandemic and record breaking heat + fires in California.