Golaem Crowd 2.2 Now Supports Solid Angle’s Arnold

Golaem Crowd 2.2 now has Golaem Crowd Render, incorporating all Golaem Crowd rendering proxies in a single installation package for easier deployment on render farms. Procedural rendering plugins and proxies are still free to use on an unlimited number of rendering nodes.

This new version also includes new procedural shaders for automatic diversity generation in crowds. They are available for Arnold, Mental Ray, Renderman and V-Ray. All procedural rendering plugins have also been improved to support multitexture, opening the way to sophisticated texture variations in crowds.

Golaem Crowd was used together with Arnold by Mikros Image Montréal for the movie ‘Astérix and Obélix: God Save Britannia’ to create stadium spectators, village inhabitants, walking armies and flying Romans.  

Golaem Crowd can be integrated into a Maya pipeline. By relying mainly on conventional Maya tools like fields and per particle expressions, it allows users to mix it with existing tools or customize it with MEL/Python API & Scripting

Golaem Crowd's animation engine enables the use or re-use of motions with different characters or in different situations. It reduces the amount of motion capture or keyframe animation to produce. It can perform motion retargeting, automatic transitions between motions, motion mixing on different parts of the body and automatic ground adaptation.

A graphical behavior editor is included to create the characters’ behaviour, using Operators  and Built-in triggers. By assigning a target to your characters, they will automatically find their way while avoiding obstacles and other characters. You can use automatic navigation mesh computation, ready-to-use navigation behaviours or customizable navigation attributes. Golaem Crowd can use the Bullet physics engine integrated in Maya to create explosions or cause characters to fall with a customizable Ragdoll behaviour.

When generating very large crowds, you can use various approaches, such as parametric placement by distance or noise, Obstacle awareness, various placement shapes, placement on a Maya mesh or placement on anchors. To preview the result of a scene or create previs, Golaem Crowd provides previsualization capabilities for thousands of character in Maya interactively including skinned mesh previews complete with diffuse textures and lighting and GPU display.   www.golaem.com