Building up the Bikini Bottom population - The Crowd challenges for “SpongeBob The Movie: Sponge on the Run”
William Bobant, Guillaume Dufief, Nicolas Chaverou · The Digital Production Symposium · 2021
From the original TV show to the feature film adaptations, the universe of SpongeBob is very well-known for its unique characters, whether lead or secondary. To deliver dynamic and directable crowds for “SpongeBob the Movie: Sponge on the Run”, the teams at Mikros Animation had to think of a new approach from the ground up for the Crowd department to populate hundreds of shots as quickly and effectively as possible. Several challenges were faced: the crowd population was made of dozens of unique morphologies of cartoon characters instead of a generic and classical bipedal one; the locations to populate were huge and diverse; the resulting animation had to remain faithful to the 2D-stylized original show.