RFX

Description

Golaem Crowd 2 is a user friendly plug in for Autodesk® Maya® that allows artists to animate crowd simulations within the familiar Maya environment. 

Features

Fully Integrated With Your Maya Pipeline
No need to adapt your existing Autodesk Maya workflow to Golaem Crowd: Golaem Crowd is built with ease of integration in mind. By relying mainly on Maya workaday objects, (particles, fields, etc) it ensures you can mix Golaem with your existing tools or customize it, saving production time & eliminating switching and tweaking between software applications.

• Totally integrated into Maya
• Usable with Maya tools (Maya fields, per particle expressions...)
• MEL/Python API & Scripting

Believable Crowds
Golaem Crowd can generate believable crowd diversity in your shots without extra work:

• Reuse existing motion choreographies on any ground and any character;
• Create asset variation (at geometry or shader level) using the asset manager.

Quick Learning Curve
Creating crowd shots is usually challenging and needs a lot of training time. Golaem Crowd is user friendly enough to be operated by Maya artists trained within a day. They can now create crowd shots themselves or test their assets before sending them to the crowd TD.

No Need to Deal With All the Crowd Complexity At Once
Respecting the standard animation workflow, Golaem Crowd allows you to incrementally build a scene. Step by step, you can validate assets, flows, population then behaviors, before the animation is processed and exported, ready to be rendered.

Animation Engine
Golaem Crowd's animation engine enables to use, or re-use, motions with different characters or in different situations. It reduces dramatically the amount of motion capture or keyframe animation to produce.

• Motion Retargeting
• Automatic transitions between motions
• Motion Mixing on different parts of the body
• Automatic ground adaptation.
• Locomotion system.

Behavior Creation
Create character's behavior using a graphical behavior editor. No surprises, what you draw is what you get!

• Graphical Behavior Editor
• Behavior Operators (Alternative, Random, Parrallel...)
• Built-in triggers (zone 2D/3D, frame number, motion duration...)

Automatic Navigation
Assign target to your characters, they will automatically find their way while avoiding obstacles and other characters.

• Automatic navigation mesh computation
• Ready-to-use navigation behaviors
• Customizable navigation attributes
• Various target modes (static, dynamic, random) 
• Groups formations

Physics Simulation
Golaem Crowd can use the Bullet physics engine integrated in Maya to create explosion or make your characters fall.

• Customizable Ragdoll behavior
• Physics masks, apply physics only to some parts of the body to create different effects

Placement Tools
Easily generate thousands of characters.

• Parametric placement (distance, noise...)
• Obstacle aware (avoid unreachable areas)
• Various placement shapes, custom shapes
• Placement on maya mesh
• Placement on anchors (e.g individual stadium seats)

Previsualization
Wether you want to preview the result of  a scene or you are doing previs, Golaem Crowd provides advanced previsualization capabilities. With Golaem Crowd, you can preview thousands of character in Maya interactively.

• Skinned mesh preview, complete with diffuse textures and lighting
• GPU Display
• Multithreaded simulation

Rendering
Render crowds quickly and easily add variety in your shots. Golaem Crowd provide free procedural rendering plugins optimizing the rendering process. 

• Assets Manager, define available props & shaders for your characters and easily create diversity in your crowd.
• Procedural Rendering, inside Maya or for standalone versions
• Simulation data are independant from cameras, lights or asset repartition, you can change all these and re-render without simulating again
•  Export & Render:
• Pixar® Renderman®'s RIB and 3Delight & RenderManCompliant plugins
• Autodesk® FBX®
• Open format simulation cache
• V-Ray Rendering Engine

Scene Setup

• Automatic navigation mesh computation
• Automatic and editable skeleton mapping
• Crowd asset manager (meshes, props, shaders...)
• Population types descriptions (behaviors, morphology and assets)
• Parametric and navigation mesh aware characters placement

Simulation

• Predictable path finding and configurable steering behaviors
• Biped & quadruped dedicated animation engine
• Automatic motion re-targeting, blending & ground adaptation
• Easy-to-configure behaviors
• Geometry instancing*
• CrowdField: a mesh (animated or not) can be added as a ground support in addition to the navMesh
• IK Behavior: New behavior to add a kinematic constraint on a body chain (arms, legs)
• LookAt Behavior: New behavior to make a character look at a specific position

Golaem Crowd 2.3 introduced the Geometry Behavior, enabling a myriad of new effects, as well as the Character Maker, a revamped tool for converting & editing characters skeleton & motions. Bug fixes & usability improvements have also been made based on users feedback.

 

Geometry Behavior

The Geometry Behavior let you assign a baked animation to a crowd entity. While being very simple, it enables a lot of new effects on the crowd characters: facial animation, multipeds, baked clothes (flags, capes...), rigid shapes (cars, ships...), parasite motions, level of details...

 

 

Character Maker

The new Character Maker enables to convert custom rigs & motion capture/keyframe motions for Golaem Crowd. It has been revamped in order to enable checking the result directly in the Maya viewport, thus enabling to chek or edit motion capture or keyframe motions very easily (offset cancellation, loop creation...).

 

Usability Improvements

Based on users feedback, many aspects of the rendering process have been improved: 

• 3Delight Proxy: Render your 3Delight scenes directly in Maya
• Check Settings: Check your scene before rendering
• Batch Render: Render scenes on the farm, with a streamlined process
• Kill list: Remove characters from your shots

  

Videos

Mathematic Golaem User Testimonial

Click here to view more Golaem Crowd videos