Crowd character complexity on Big Hero 6

On Disney's Big Hero 6, we needed to create the city of San Fransokyo with unparalleled levels of visual complexity. The cityscape has more buildings and more geometry than any prior Disney film. Inhabiting this city are hundreds of unique characters, each performing a high caliber of animation individually and as a group. These challenges prompted a major upgrade to our existing crowd pipeline and the development of several new technologies in authoring crowd characters, generating crowd animation cycles, and instancing crowds for rendering.