Entity Display
This page covers how Entities are displayed in Simulation in an Entity Type Node and in Cache Replay in a Simulation Cache Proxy Node:
Display Attributes

Display Mode |
Mode used for preview rendering (see below) |
Display Color | Diffuse color for the Entities belonging to this Entity Type. When particles will be emitted from a Population Tool Locator, the rgbPP PPAttribute of the particles will be set to this color (for more explanation about how to use PPAttributes, see PPAttributes Handling). By default, the color considered to shared the Entities will be the one stored in the rgbPP PPAttribute. It is also possible to use the color defined in this attribute by unchecking the "Use Rgb PP" checkbox in the Crowd Manager Display Attributes. |
Display Color Weight |
Weight of the Entity Color in the final shading.
|
Draw Selected Entities BBox |
Show the bounding box of the selected entities |
Use Far Clip |
It is possible to limit cache proxy display, to only show entities closer than a distance to a specified camera. This improves the display performance of the crowd when far crowd display is not required. |
Far Clip Camera |
Far clipping camera reference |
Far Clip Distance |
Far clipping distance from camera reference. |
Animation Bones / Physics Shape Display Attributes
The following attributes are available only in "Animation Bones" or "Physics Shape" mode:
Bone Radius | Radius factor used to compute the width and depth of the box used to display bones |
LODPixels Size | A LOD system is available and allows bones smaller to a size in pixels to not be rendered. LODPixels size value of 8 (default) sets the preview renderer to discard bones which on-screen size is lower than 8 pixels |
Render Previz Display Attributes

Geometry Tag |
Type of Character Geometry Files to use during Simulation or Cache Replay |
Two Sided | Doesn't perform triangle culling based on its winding. Every triangles are visible from both sides. |
Shading Mode |
Mode used to shade the Render Previz geometry:
|
Shading Namespace |
Name of the Maya Namespace to add to the to the shading assignment defined in the Geometry part of the Character file. This attribute only works if the Shading Mode is set to From Maya Scene. |
Refresh Geometry ![]() |
Flush the geometry cache and reload them (fbx and gcg files). |
Display Modes
Cylinders

Animation Bones and Physics Shape

- The Animation Bones mode displays a box for every bone composing the skeleton. The length of the box is the distance from the bone to its children median position. Its width and depth are a fixed ratio (0.25) multiplied by the Bone Radius attribute.
- The Physics Shape mode displays the physics volumes of the skeleton. Those properties can be edited in the Character Maker.
Render Previz

Notice that this display mode does support:
- Classic Linear skinning (other skinning methods will fallback to linear skinning)
- up to 682 bones per Character for a GPU allowing 8k texture. Recent hardware could manage bigger textures, thus more bones, see hardware capabilities stats here.
- up to 14 active blendshapes per mesh
- up to 4 skinned bones per vertex
- geometry cache animation using the Geometry Animation Behavior
- Rendering Type Mesh Assets repartition
- texture files and diffuse colors
- shading/texture variation (mainly for performance issues). This means that in Render Previz mode, all assets of the same type will have the same texture and you'll have to render the scene to get a visualization of the shading variation.
- UDIMs assignment (mainly for performance issues)
- most advanced shading features: alpha, bump maps, displacement maps...
- per-face shading assignment. If a Mesh has several Shader Groups assigned, only the first one will be assigned to the whole mesh in the previz and you'll have to render the scene to get a visualization of the per-face assignment.
Previz Lighting
Maya viewport Lighting Panel
Previz supports up to 16 lights which can be either spot, omni, ambient, point or directional Maya lights. Use the Lighting menu in the viewport panel to activate it.
Shadows are supported when using Viewport 2.0
Depth Of Field (DoF)
The display of entities, either in simulation or in cache replay, should be compatible with the depth of field cameras, without any additional configuration. The algorithm matches the one suggested by Maya team.
Viewport 2.0 and DirectX11
Golaem Crowd is compatible with Viewport 2.0 using OpenGL rendering. On some hardware, Maya only allows Viewport 2.0 using DX11 whether you chose OpenGL display. If the Viewport 2.0 display is DX11 entities will only be displayed with orange bounding box and an error message will appear in the console.
Golaem with DX11 display compatibility mode.