Haggi Krey describes how AIR was used in the feature film Back To Gaya:
“Here are some examples of how we used AIR in combination with MayaMan to create some renderings in our movie.
The first two images are from a camera flight over the fantastic landscape of Gaya. The trees here are rendered in AIR because Maya couldn’t handle the huge amount of data.”
In the scene below the trees and the crowds are rendered with AIR.
The crowd is animated quite simply: First we animated a character over 1000 frames. Then we created a geometry cache storying the polygon and uv data for this character. In the scene we placed standin boxes where we wanted the people to be rendered. With MayaMan we used a RIB procedural to generate the final geometry from the cache at rendertime. The script was written in perl, and it assigned a random shader to the clothes of each character. We didn’t need any complicated animation of the crowds, so that this was enough for us.
