Links DigiWorks created the highlighted opening cinematic CG movie sequence for the PS2 game "Onimusha; Warlords" in which more than one thousand soldiers were shown in the battlefield.　The game itself has sold more than one million copies worldwide and the CG movie clip won the Best of Show at the SIGGRAPH2000 Computer Animation Festival.. Director Shimako Sato wanted to show the reality of the battle and the struggle between the soldiers. We looked to multi-actor motion capture as a challenge allowing us to achieve her target. We captured up to 6 actors as one session for Onimusha: Warlords. Actors in the motion capture session In general, we try to avoid capturing the motion sequences not designed into the storyboard in advance. However, this time, creating a sense of story in the struggle of soldiers who have their own characteristics, we created dozens of actions for combining battles based upon the ideas of actors, staff and the director on the stage. We reviewed the all captured actions using simple models, and selected the battle actions to be combined into the final battle sequence. Even in this simple model animation, we could sense the soldiers' fear and violence as so well-performed by the actors. After selecting the best captured motions, we reviewed the CG animation in a band with the final models. Reviewing the captured motion with simple models. Reviewing the captured motion with the final models. Combining the multiple battle actions into the final sequence, we had to pay close attention to avoid unexpected collisions between soldiers in adjacent sessions. In each session, we extracted the outer boundary from the soldiers' movements and created the action area from these combined boundaries. In this way, we could avoid collisions if we kept all of the action areas from overlapping. Top view of the soldiers' action area We laid out the action areas covering the battlefield by hand with no overlap to avoid the soldiers' collisions and to hide the repeats from the multiplying number of sessions. Overview the combination of the action areas The battlefield covered by the action areas The camera view run through the battlefield. According to the camera path, we set up the starting timing of each session to looks exiting but not expose its repeat. Rendering was a challenge because there were so many soldiers to be rendered even as we separated them into each layer according to the distance from the camera. We used Z buffer for rendering soldiers and to extract the depth information while rendering them, and it made it possible for us to render the entire sequence, block by block, without concern for each soldiers' position. We rendered the effects elements like rain and fog separately and composited them with the soldiers using AffterEffects. Final images were composed of as many as 40 layers. PDF Download : oni_maiking_E.pdf click to download Acrobat Reader for this PDF files.