Installing the Character Pack

The Character Pack is a set of ready-to-use characters and motions enabling faster crowd shots creation.
It is available free of charge. You can learn more about it on the Golaem website Assets Section.

Where to install the Character Pack?

The Golaem Character Pack comes with an auto-extractible installation package. The only required information is the installation directory. The default installation directory is located in c:\Golaem\... (or ~/golaem/... for Linux) directory. Command windows may pop during the installation. They will close automatically when the installation ends. To ensure complete and valid installation, you should not close them manually.

As some files may need to be edited, you should install the Golaem Character Pack in a directory where you own the writing rights.

To be able to render on the render farm, all these files should be reachable by the render farm nodes using the provided installation path. It is then advised to install the Golaem Character Pack on a shared network drive. More here.

Package Description

Golaem Directory

characters/

Contains files relatives to the Golaem characters, to be referenced in your scenes

  • .gcha: Character File to be referenced by the EntityType. 
  • .fbx and .gcg: source geometry file used for rendering. Note that it does not contains the shaders of the character but only its geometry. It is referenced in by the .gcha file
  • .gmm: motion mapping file  to be used to replay provided motions on a given character.
motions/

Contains the motion files (.gmo files) that can be used to animate characters through Motion or Locomotion Behaviors. 
shaders/

Contains the source Maya scene including shaders for each renderer. There is one file by renderer (e.g. CMO-man_golaemAR.ma is the file that should be imported in your scene when rendering with Arnold).
sourceimages/

Contains textures files  used by the Golaem Character Pack.
templates/

Contains Maya files to be used as Behavior Templates in the Behavior Editor

Scenes Directory

Directory containing different Maya scenes illustrating the most frequent use cases. They are ready-to-play. When opening one of these files, a dialog should pop-up, enabling to choose a renderer for which to load the shaders. If the simulation is played without loading shaders, characters will be shaded with an orange color.

Script Directory

This directory contains MEL script used in the sample scenes for displaying the dialog box enabling to prepare the scene for rendering with your favorite renderer.

Moving an installed package

This installation package will extract asset files and automatically set the internal file references (texture path…) to match the installation directory. If one moves the Character Pack files after installation, the following file references should be adjusted according to the new path  (or the package re-installed to the new destination):

  • In .ma files:
    • Reference to texture files (.tga files)
    • Reference to character file (.gcha files) in EntityType
    • Reference to motion files (.gmo files) and motion mapping files (.gmm files) in Motion and Locomotion Behaviors
  • In .gcha files:
    • Reference to character reference for rendering (.fbx or .gcg files)

Note that this can be done automatically by using the dirmap command when loading Maya files