On top of improved animation system, Golaem Crowd 4.0 enables to create more sophisticated shots and to populate scenes even faster by providing artists full control over the simulation.
Golaem Crowd is being used by more than hundred VFX studios worldwide. The newest releases include Dracula Untold (Framestore), Hercules (Milk VFX, Cinesite), 22 Jump Street (Pixel Magic)… Golaem Crowd helped them ramp up on crowds and deliver great projects quickly.
“Thanks to Golaem Crowd’s ease of use, artists from different disciplines such as layouts, environments and animation could be trained up very quickly and be running shots within a week or two,” says Framestore CG supervisor Ben Lambert.
Golaem Crowd 4 provides more advanced features with the same ease of use and facilitates the interaction of the crowd simulation with other elements in the shot: open access to simulation data, curve driven simulation, simulation cache scrubbing and editing… Artists can now take dailies requests into account immediately, without going back to the simulation, and get their shots validated in no time.
With Golaem Crowd artists benefit from instant previsualization of crowds geometry in the Maya viewport. Previsualization now even includes advanced animation like blend shapes and cloth simulation. The result is close enough to the final render for studios to validate the crowd simulation with playblasts before rendering.
The simulation can now be debugged by activating Visual Feedback to check which behaviors or motions are running and display debug information in the viewport.
Golaem Crowd 4.0 allows artists to cache the simulation for Interactive Replay and Timeline Scrubbing, facilitating work and validation steps. When small retakes are needed, they will enjoy the new simulation cache editing functionalities: cached characters can now be selected and directly moved, removed from simulation or imported for manual keyframe editing.
The new Channels System gives access to a character internal state, to get information such as its type, the current Motion Clip, bones positions, orientation, colour… These can be used to trigger behaviours or feed custom written scripts.
A nCloth based Cloth Simulation behaviour has been added, enabling artists to benefit from advanced cloth simulation for close-up shots.
Last but not least, the Synchronized Motion Behaviour enables artists to precisely control the occurrence of an animation by placing locators in the scene. It facilitates precise interactions like climbing ladders, triggering jumps, or synchronized close combat.
Golaem Crowd 4.0 introduces new ways to get a more realistic and varied crowd at nearly no additional animation cost.
The new SetBone Behavior allows modifying the orientation of any bone with a fixed value, a noise function or any other expression. It is an efficient way to add noise when input motions are too static or even to design procedural motions without any motion capture input.
Golaem Crowd 4.0 also integrates Animation Layers, which enable to extract a pose (e.g. clasped hand) or secondary animation (e.g. breathing) from an existing motion, and add it on top of other motions. It is possible to add any number of additional motions and randomize them individually to create infinity of new animations.
Golaem Crowd has been updated to support the latest releases of major renderers (V-Ray, Arnold, Renderman Studio, Mental Ray, 3Delight) and still offer compatibility with previous versions.
The Golaem Crowd Arnold procedural plugin for Arnold can also be used in SoftImage and Katana. On top of the existing FBX export, Golaem Crowd for Maya 2015 can now export Alembic Geometry Cache including shaders name information and user attributes.
Golaem Crowd is compatible with any Maya version from 2012 to 2015 (Windows or Linux, 64 bit).