Golaem at SIGGRAPH'09 , New Orleans

Golaem Scientific Advisor (Stéphane Donikian) and one of our software engineer (Cloderic Mars) will attend SIGGRAPH 2009 in New Orleans. Do not hesitate to email us to plan a meeting or to know more about Golaem range of products.

Golaem Crowd 2.3, new effects, enhanced usability

Submitted by admin on Tue, 03/12/2013 - 18:31

Golaem Crowd 2.3 introduces the Geometry Behavior, enabling a myriad of new effects, as well as the Character Maker,  a revamped tool for converting & editing characters skeleton & motions. Bug fixes & usability improvements have also been made based on users feedback.

 

Geometry Behavior

The Geometry Behavior let you assign a baked animation to a crowd entity. While being very simple, it enables a lot of new effects on the crowd characters: facial animation, multipeds, baked clothes (flags, capes...), rigid shapes (cars, ships...), parasite motions, level of details...
 

 

Character Maker

The new Character Maker enables to convert custom rigs & motion capture/keyframe motions for Golaem Crowd. It has been revamped in order to enable checking the result directly in the Maya viewport, thus enabling to chek or edit motion capture or keyframe motions very easily (offset cancellation, loop creation...).

 

Usability Improvements

Based on users feedback, many aspects of the rendering process have been improved: 

  • 3Delight Proxy: Render your 3Delight scenes directly in Maya
  • Check Settings: Check your scene before rendering
  • Batch Render: Render scenes on the farm, with a streamlined process
  • Kill list: Remove characters from your shots

For more information about Golaem Crowd:

 

Golaem Crowd 2.2, supporting Solid Angle’s Arnold

Submitted by admin on Fri, 01/25/2013 - 15:26

Golaem releases Golaem Crowd 2.2, facilitating distributed rendering and supporting Solid Angle’s Arnold. 

Arnold support

Procedural rendering is now available for Solid Angle’s Arnold, hence enabling lightning fast rendering and simulation independant geometry and shaders diversity. 
 
Golaem Crowd was used together with Arnold by Mikros Image Montréal for the feature film “Astérix and Obélix: God Save Britannia” to create stadium spectators, village inhabitants, walking armies, flying romans, and even knocked-out ones!
 
 
 

Easier deployment for farm rendering

Golaem Crowd 2.2 introduces Golaem Crowd Render, encapsulating 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. 

 

Procedural Shaders & Multitexture

Golaem Crowd 2.2 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 enhanced to support multitexture, opening the way to sophisticated texture variations in crowds.
 
 


For more information about Golaem Crowd:

Golaem appoints VP Sales M&E and VP Marketing

Submitted by admin on Wed, 12/12/2012 - 12:05

To understand and meet its users needs more closely, Golaem recently appointed industry experienced VP Sales M&E and VP Marketing.  They both come from the field and have been personally involved in using or developping artists tools for years.

Nicolas Verley, VP Sales Media & Entertainment

Nicolas has been in the animation industry for almost 20 years. 

He started computer animation as a CG artist in 1993, then moved to Netherlands at Motek to become a motion capture specialist.

Back in France in 1995, he joined the Softimage company as a technical support engineer and pre sales. For more than 13 years he succeeded year after year in various positions: 3D animator, demo artist and technical support engineer, product specialist and Softimage trainer, technical account manager. He finally became the country manager for the whole Softimage product range.

In 2008, he became a CG consultant focusing on customer needs and projects expectation for various product and services such as Toonz, a 2D software platform for traditional animation, and Damas, a digital asset management software solution for animation studio.

As a VP Sales M&E at Golaem, he will be in of charge of all the sales and distribution channel management activities for media & entertainment market.

 

Alexandre Pillon, VP Marketing

After graduating in mathematics applied to computer sciences at INSA, Alexandre spent two years in Japan discovering how finance was ruling the world, then he secretly studied how to shape chaotic code in usable products at night.

He started working on behavioral crowd simulation from 2007 to 2009 as an R&D software engineer at the INRIA.

Alexandre co-founded Golaem in 2009. From 2009 to 2012, he was in charge of a crowd simulation project where he developed and tested what would eventually become the Golaem Crowd Behavior Editor.

He now leads the marketing effort, listening to customers and translating their needs to the developers dwelling in Golaem cave.
 

Alexandre and Nicolas will work closely together to bring even easier to use and powerful products to artists in the M&E market.

Golaem Crowd 2.1 Unleashes Crowds Rendering

Submitted by admin on Wed, 10/31/2012 - 10:41

Golaem releases a new version of its plugin for Autodesk Maya : Golaem Crowd 2.1, including new rendering proxys for Maya, optimized rendering performances as well as bug fixes.

Lightning Fast Rendering

The new Maya rendering proxys will enables artists to quickly test their crowd rendering, launch distributed renders from Maya and design their crowd shaders directly in the hypershade. 
 
  • Renderman Maya Proxy: load your crowds .rib file and render them
  • V-Ray Maya  Proxy: easily render crowds .vrscene
Golaem Crowd rendering performances have also been optimized. Particularly, the Mental Ray rendering plugin is up to 10x faster while being less memory consuming.
 

Mental Ray Plugin performances comparison on Intel Core i7 X990 (1 character = 5590 triangles)
 

Behavior Editor Improvements

Golaem Crowd 2.1 improves collaboration by enabling to easily share behaviors or reuse them in different projects.
 
  • Behavior Templates: export behaviors in a shared template directory and import them in any scene. 
  • Triggers Handles: get an easy access to the behavior triggers by using the triggers handle and easily share conditions between multiple triggers.

Behavior Editor improvements: Custom Behavior Library (bottom left) and trigger handles

 

For more information about Golaem Crowd:

 

Golaem Crowd Siggraph 2012 Demo: Fortress Assault

Submitted by admin on Tue, 09/18/2012 - 17:14

If you could not make it to Siggraph this year, maybe you missed our new Golaem Crowd demo: Fortress Assault.

This demo includes 5 500 soldiers attacking & defending a huge fortress, and demonstrates the features of Golaem Crowd 2.0, released on the first day of the exhibition.

All modeling, rendering and compositing have been done by our in-house artist: Axel Domenger.

Golaem Crowd 2.0 is out!

Submitted by admin on Tue, 08/07/2012 - 11:26

Golaem sets new standards for crowd simulation in terms of performances and usability by releasing the new version of its plugin for Autodesk Maya : Golaem Crowd 2.0 at Siggraph 2012 Los Angeles.

On top of increased productivity, Golaem Crowd has a quicker than ever learning curve. Maya artists will be able to create crowd shots themselves or to test the assets they produce before giving them to TDs, hence strengthening the team efficiency.

Discover all the new features and the recently added Maya procedural rendering plugins in the Golaem Crowd 2.0 preview video.

 

Creating behaviors as easy as a drag’n drop

No need to learn complex artificial intelligence concepts, Golaem Crowd 2.0 provides an easy way to build new characters behaviors.

  • Behavior Editor: create and assemble sophisticated behaviors with this new graphical editor.
  • New Triggers: control behaviors with frame number, volumetric triggers, or Python scripting...

 

New ready-to-use behaviors

Golaem Crowd also comes with new behaviors, helping to achieve more in less time.

  • Ragdoll Behavior: simulate falling or exploding characters in a snap
  • Formations Behavior: keep character’s formation shape while navigating
  • Enhanced LookAt & IK behaviors: get greater control on characters

 

Speeding up production

Whether to scale to thousands of character or simply to reduce artists’ waiting time, speed is critical to crowd simulation. Golaem Crowd 2.0 enables artists to get results and previzualisation quicker than ever.

  • Multithread & Optimization: Golaem Crowd 2.0 is up to 15x quicker thanks to its new multithreaded and optimized simulation engine.
  • GPU Character Previzualisation: preview simulation with skinned meshes proxies directly in the Maya viewport.
  • Faster Navmesh Computation Method: compute navmesh at the speed of light (from several minutes to a few seconds depending on the terrain)

 

For more information about Golaem® Crowd:

Golaem Crowd now offers procedural rendering directly in Maya Render Window

Submitted by admin on Wed, 07/04/2012 - 03:53

Already compatible in batch mode with the major renderers, Golaem Crowd now offers, with Golaem Crowd 1.5, its lightning fast crowd rendering directly inside the Maya render window, for Mental Ray, V-Ray and Renderman.

 
Being able to render directly in Maya enables artists to check the results of their crowd scene more easily and quickly. They can now experiment with their shaders configuration or the automatic assets repartition provided by Golaem Crowd and see results in a snap. 
Studios not using the standalone version of their renderer, can now, at last, benefit from an efficient rendering method for crowds.
 


Why is procedural rendering the best method to render crowds?

Procedural Rendering consists in NOT exporting the characters baked geometry (thus wasting significant time, storage space). Instead, only reference geometries, assets repartition and animation poses are exported to a particle cache. The characters geometry is reconstructed at rendering time using Golaem Crowd procedural rendering plugins, available for the major renderers.
 
Sébastien Eballard, Lead Animator at Mathematic Studio, used Golaem Crowd to populate the Warsaw stadium with thousands of cheering people in the last Euro 2012 Orange commercial. 
 

 
He adds “another advantage of procedural rendering is that the particle cache being independent from the scene and its environment, it is really efficient to experiment with the lighting or cameras.”
 
Read the user testimonial in its full extent here.
 

What’s next?

Golaem Crowd 1.5 is the latest version of the 1.x family. Golaem will launch Golaem Crowd 2.0 at Siggraph 2012 Exhibition in Los Angeles, 7-9 August. This new version includes tons of new features as well as up to 15x simulation performances increase.
 
For more information about Golaem® Crowd:

 

Golaem ships Golaem Crowd 1.4, including Mental Ray procedural rendering

Submitted by admin on Thu, 03/15/2012 - 12:45

Golaem announces the latest update to Golaem Crowd, the crowd simulation software for Autodesk Maya. Golaem Crowd 1.4 includes support for Mental Ray procedural rendering, geometry instancing, as well many others improvements.


Golaem Crowd has recently been used by award-winning Zoic Studios to meet the timing and quality challenge of crowds in episodic productions. According to Mike Romey, Pipeline Supervisor, “Golaem Crowd allowed us to speed up production and meet our clients visual and cost expectations. Artists quickly flock to Golaem Crowd because of its complementary interface to Maya and ease of use.”


Mental Ray Support

On top of Pixar Renderman, V-Ray and Renderman compatible renderers, Golaem Crowd 1.4 now brings its fast crowd rendering techniques to studios using Mental Ray, thanks to native .mi files export and a dedicated procedural rendering plugin.


Both Mental Ray standalone and Mental Ray for Maya are supported.


Geometry Instancing

Golaem Crowd 1.4 brings the ability to declare characters as geometry instances in order to allow rendering thousands of entities with amazing performances.

French award-winning VFX studio Mikros Image used this new Geometry Instancing technique to fill a stadium in the last Nissan Juke commercial. When asked about Golaem Crowd, Christophe Huchet, VFX Producer says “The shots were very short, with a blurry background (because of motion blur, or just to put more emphasis on the Nissan Juke), so we had to make the stadium population process very simple and straightforward”. Guillaume Parra, VFX artist adds “Depending on shots, we had to generate between 5 000 and 12 000 characters. I was amazed by how fast it is to render using procedural rendering, and how easy it is to set up a shot once assets are ready. I am thrilled to try next Golaem Crowd releases”.

To push limits even further, Mikros Image R&D team created this demonstration video where 120K characters team up to create the Golaem logo

Golaem Crowd 1.4 bug fixes and improvements are detailed in the release notes.

Golaem Crowd is compatible with Autodesk Maya 2011, 2012 and 2013 for Windows and Linux.

For more information about Golaem Crowd:

Zoic Studios gears up for Crowd Simulation with Golaem Crowd

Submitted by admin on Thu, 02/16/2012 - 18:19

 

Zoic Studios is an award-winning digital studio involved in producing high-end visual effects and animation for feature films, episodic television, commercials, video games and interactive media. Spanning from visual effects, to live action production and specialty shooting, Zoic Studios’ imprint can be seen on V, CSI: Crime Scene Investigations, Fringe, or True Blood.  Zoic Studios has offices in Los Angeles and Vancouver.

Read Zoic Studios Pipeline Supervisor's interview to learn how Zoic Studios speed up their productions and meet our clients visual and cost expectations with Golaem Crowd!

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