Procedural Crowds
Why Casting and directing thousands of crowd characters meant chaining together a clunky, 7-step technical workflow, so animators spent more time wrangling the pipeline than directing performance.
What Led design for two visual editors that replaced that pipeline: a Tags Manager that lets artists cast thousands of agents into tagged, weighted groups, from rough layouts down to fine-tuned detail, and a Transition Editor for choreographing how those agents move between states like Walk, Cheer, and Dance.
Impact A 7 step,clunky workflow to two visual tools.
Casting thousands of crowd characters meant hand-editing groups and asset references directly in the scene graph’s code — a slow, fragile way to direct performance at scale.
I designed a Tags Manager that let artists cast agents into tagged, weighted groups through direct manipulation, replacing scripted setup with a visual, drag-and-drop workflow.
Alongside it, a Transition Editor let artists choreograph how agents move between states like Walk, Cheer, and Dance, without touching a line of code.
We refined the Transition Editor’s trigger logic with probability and timing controls, so switches between states felt natural rather than mechanical.
