Thursday, July 12, 2018 - 17:37

Attending Siggraph? Discover how Golaem can populate your scenes very fast, whether with crowd simulations, or using Golaem Layout Tool. Get excited about Golaem new features:  nodal Layout Tool, Unreal Engine integration and much more!

Check out the agenda, and join us!

Siggraph


Meet with the Golaem Team on our booth and get a live demo of the latest features in Golaem.

Tuesday 14th - Thursday 16th
Siggraph Exhibition floor, booth #725

Golaem User Group


Get together with Golaem users and people interested in crowds while enjoying a few drinks.

Monday 13th 6 - 9pm
Ask your favorite Golaem guy for an invitation

VanCG Meetup


Get an overview of Golaem through its usage in the industry and live demo.

Thursday, 9th  6pm
The Network Hub - 3rd floor - 422 Richards St
Register here

 

Monday, June 25, 2018 - 14:32

Here is the ultimate video series for creating stadium shots with Golaem! It shows the most up-to-date & convenient way of creating stadiums with Golaem, including the latest novelties like our new reference workflow.

The following subjects are covered by the videos:

  • Stadium Tutorial 1 - Converting Characters
  • Stadium Tutorial 2 - Converting Animations
  • Stadium Tutorial 3 - Simple Mexican Wave Simulation
  • Stadium Tutorial 4 - Placing characters in stadium
  • Stadium Tutorial 5 - Layouting Characters
  • Stadium Tutorial 6 - Adding some flags
You can find these videos and additional tutorials (text-form) on our stadium tutorials section: http://stadium.mayacrowd.com


Click on the playlist button in the top-left corner of the video to display the playlist and be able to skip to a particular video

Wednesday, May 16, 2018 - 16:02

Our friends from Digital Production (https://www.digitalproduction.com/) recently published an issue including a comprehensive overview of available Crowd Simulation software, and obviously Golaem was in the selection!

Actually, the Golaem part even include 2 articles, as on top of a test by Digital Production the issue includes an interview with Nixolas (http://www.nixolas.com), the well known magician who created the hilarious Pokemon, Star Wars, Lego... videos using Golaem.

Our favorite parts of the interview:

"I remember having to quote on a job that required a stadium shot, and after installing Golaem and using their extremely helpful resource of tutorials and knowledge-base, I was able to put together a test that I could ship to the client in under a couple of hours. The rest of the work really involved custom models, rendering, and scene setups depending on the shot at hand. I was able to jump from a couple of weeks of work and in-house  development to around a day or two, depending on the assets needed. Since Golaem comes with an amazing character pack – 9 times out of 10 you have everything you need to get started on a basic industry standard job."
"One amazing feature that was introduced recently was Golaem’s Simulation Cache Library. With this feature, you’re able to create simulated crowd assets that are organized for you in this little window. Say you have to populate a city street and you have access to animations of people walking, leaning against the walls, smoking a cigarette, having conversations with each other, selling something on the street. [...] With Golaem’s Simulation Cache Library, I could create asset scenes where each scene would hold one behavior needed, like people walking down the sidewalk in a straight line, passing each other, another would be a few variations of people conversing with each other, etc. You can bake these out and add them to your Simulation Cache Library. Now I can go to the 5 or 10 shots needed to populate the streets, and literally drag and drop each of these behaviors. It will create a crowd proxy and you’re ready to go. Coupled with the Cache Layout Tool that I mentioned earlier, you can create a completely complicated crowd scene in minutes once your library is set up."
Read Nixolas' interview (in english) Read Golaem test by Digital Production (in german)

 

Tuesday, September 5, 2017 - 15:54

At Golaem, we love helping students to deliver great projects. Here is our selection from the 2016/2017 projects.

By the way, did you know that Golaem is free for universities & students?

You can grab a free & unlimited Personal Learning Edition (PLE) package here.

This year again, several students got noticed thanks to their Golaem project and were able to get a crowd related job in renowned studio. Why not you or your students?!

Hybrids

by Yohan Thireau from MOPA

When marine wildlife has to adapt to the pollution surrounding it, the rules of survival change... Yohan did a great jobs animating hundreds of  cap-topped crabs climbing on a fish with Golaem.

LEGOlaem

by Paul Gaulier and Julie Mansuy from ISART

After a few days of training, Julie and Paul came up with this LEGO fan film project. We were quite surprised by the level of quality they achieved in a short time.

Zombie Project

by Alexander Turk and ​Jason Toussies from ISART

After a few days of Golaem training at ISART, Alexandre and Jason simulated Mixamo zombies with Golaem rendered in Unreal. We recently had several requests about using Unreal to render Golaem crowds, they just did it!

Golaem Battle

by Jordi Camps Illa from FX School

Before working on the Army of the Dead for Game of Thrones at El Ranchito, Jordi was trained at FX School Barcelona by the talented Oscar Marquez. Here is his student crowd project

Demo Reel

by Joe Ponsford from University of Portsmouth

Joe is the perfect combo, a mocap + crowd TD. As a wise man said "a nice crowd starts with good motions" and Joe demonstrates it in his epic battle project

The Beast Of Brecon

by Ben Brown & Madeleine Orchard from University of South Wales

A couple of adventurers go on the search for the mythical 'Beast of Brecon'! Madeleine & Ben created a dinosaur model/rig and animated a horde of it with Golaem.

Droids on Kashyyk

by Christian Sovis from SAE Institute

Christian used Golaem to create an army of wookies defending their island against droids.

 

Monday, June 26, 2017 - 11:18
Golaem announces Golaem 6,  giving Crowd TDs more accesses under the hood of the simulation engine. They can now customize the way characters perceive and react to their environment, giving them custom Artificial Intelligence capabilities. Other additions include an Emit/Kill behavior, a behavior for Traffic Simulation as well as some improvements on the acclaimed Golaem Layout Tool.
 
These new features are based on user feedbacks and requests, Golaem being used by renowned studios on more and more demanding projects: Pirates of Caribbean by Atomic Fiction, Halo Wars 2 by Blur, Hacksaw Ridge by Slate VFX, Captain Underpants by Mikros Image, Game of Thrones...  

 

Golaem 6 has been beta tested for several weeks by our biggest customers, with some production shots already released. The following video demonstrate the new features available in this version:

 

Perception: Customize the way characters are aware of each other's

Characters perception is now totally customizable and enables to choose which other characters or obstacles are taken into account. For example soldiers can now feel that the soldiers in front of them are moving forward and start walking to follow them. On the other hand, they will ignore the cavalry soldiers around.

 

Channel Operators: Give a brain to your characters

Building on the new perception abilities, character’s behaviors can be totally customized by using low level building blocks called Channel Operators. Around 100 channels (e.g position, speed, distance to target…) can be used to feed a graph of operators outputting a new character speed and orientation or controlling its animation.
It is now possible to create custom hide, seek, flank… behaviors and let characters find their own way into the scene. More realism can be added into scenes simply by enhancing the character’s logic, for example getting characters to do a shoulder motion when crossing another one. 
 
 
 

Customizable Transitions: Build animation state machines

Transitions between motions can now be precisely controlled. Users can now customize the starting point and duration of a transition. The user-friendly Transition Editor displays the compatibility between each motions at a given time to make setup easier, and includes an automatic assistant.
These new transition makes it possible to build state machines with in-between motion transitions like walk -> walk-to-run -> run for an even better animation quality.
 
 
 

Emit / Kill behaviors: Summon or dismiss characters at will

Characters (or arrows, cannonballs…) can now be emitted from a Golaem Placement Tool or relatively to another character. This is very handy for shooting arrows, creating fragmenting munitions or emitting people from buildings exits. A new Master/Slave mode enables to make them sticky (like arrows on a shield for example). It is also possible to remove characters from simulation when they are out of view or not needed anymore.
 
 
 
 

Traffic Behaviors: Add traffic to your virtual cities

There is no good city landscape shot without hundreds of cars driving around. The new Traffic Behavior enables to create populated roads in minutes. The road network can be drawn from Maya curves and Golaem will automatically create lanes and traffic lights.  The Traffic Behavior will automatically put cars on lanes and let them wander around or reach a given target.

 
 

Layout Tool Improvements: Layout or retake your scenes

The Golaem Layout Tool is highly praised by studios as a way to efficiently retake scenes, create new ones from existing simulations or simply layout scenes. It saves lot of time in shots production and greatly simplifies the production workflow.  
It now includes the possibility to move characters, delete them, offset their animation, change the animation speed, edit props & shaders, and so on. A Trajectory Edition mode has also been added in order to tweak trajectories manually, or benefit from automatic avoidance when layouting several characters from scratch. Last but not least, it is now possible to snap an object or a character to a Golaem Placement Tool, which makes scattering objects around a scene even more convenient.

 
 

Extensibility: Integrate Golaem in your pipeline or build tools around it

Thanks to its deep integration in Maya and an extensive set of MEL/Python commands, Golaem can be integrated in a feature film workflow with a minimal amount of pipeline development. It provides advanced display capabilities in the viewport (supporting up to 16 shadowing lights and customizable via GLSL). A C/C++ (and soon Python) development kit is provided for building tools around its simulation cache format. 
The possibilities offered by the Golaem Layout tool coupled with the site license pricing allow to make the Golaem simulations available to the whole studio, with shot production capabilities without a single line of pipeline to be written.
 
The complete release notes can be found here
 
Learn More:

 

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