Archive notice: This article was originally published on December 10, 2013. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
Golaem Crowd makes it easy to populate commercials, films, TV shows or games with life. Or with the undead. Most recently, Stargate Digital used the young French developers’ tool to set a few more undead upon protagonists who were already plagued enough.
With release 3, Golaem now expands the use of crowds to every kind of character: besides people, horses and birds, basically any conceivable figure can be multiplied. The new Golaem Crowd Character Maker is responsible for this and works well with every character type: Whether two, four or even more legs—every skeleton is supported. It has already been successfully tested with various industry standards such as Human IK, 3ds Max biped, Rocket Box, Daz3D, Pinocchio or Advanced Skeleton. The Character Maker can also automatically edit and cycle MoCap data.
The animation engine was also spruced up with the new release. Much now happens automatically, which is intended to save time and work and leave more time for the truly important creative things.
Golaem Crowd procedurally generates new movements by mirroring movements and putting them back together or automatically retargeting them to different characters/shapes.
So-called built-in behaviors automatically select movements depending on the speed and direction of the figures. Feet are adapted to the ground and characters can automatically take aim at a target.
In addition, physics simulation can now be switched on and off at any time—for the whole figure or only individual body parts—to combine physics simulation with animation.
Birds, Fish and Flock Behavior
Together with automated 3D placement, Golaem Crowd version 3 offers new behaviors for controlling flocks of birds or fish. Previews with up to 10,000 individuals are possible. The swarm can move within a particular area, seek targets or flee from danger.
The new interactive previs of a crowd simulation, including geometry diversity, directly in the Maya viewport also saves time.
Golaem Crowd offers various pricing models; here is the overview.
