Crowds Animation Directors
Why Casting and animating thousands of crowd characters meant chaining together a technically complex clunky workflow, so animators spent more time wrangling the pipeline than directing performance.
What Led design for two visual editors that replaced the old multi step pipeline with intuitive visual workflows
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.
