Massive Software
Massive is a crowd animation software package used in the visual effects industry for rapidly simulating and animating large groups of agents, each with their own unique behaviors and actions.
Visit website20,000 agents in real-time
In Massive v8 the goal was to aggressively optimise the software for a new pre-viz mode that would allow for real-time simulation and rendering of complex scenes.
I led the development of this feature with a wide range of optimisation techniques: multi-threading, OpenGL instancing, algorithmic optimisations, data structure changes, memory allocation improvements, function inlining, avoiding expensive operations such as divisions and square roots, as well as disabling computationally expensive features such as vision, IK and flow fields.
I achieved a 100 fold improvement in performance with minimal compromises in quality, which enabled 20,000 agents to be simulated and rendered in real-time on a single PC.
Showing this off at Siggraph 2015 in Los Angeles was a real career highlight.
Massive for Maya
I developed the majority of the major features in Massive for Maya, which was a plugin that allowed animators to use the Massive crowd animation software directly within their favorite 3D modelling and animation package - Maya.
The plugin had all the core features you would expect, such as being able to set up scenes, run simulations and render the results. In addition it also allowed for deep integration of crowd simulations into traditional keyframe animations, such as making Maya entities visible to the Massive agents, and post-simulation editing of the animation generated by Massive.
Tech Stack
Massive was developed exclusively in C and OpenGL. For performance optimisations I used gprof, perf and valgrind.
The Massive for Maya plugin was developed in C++ and MEL.