You can find which versions of a rendering are supported by the different versions of Golaem in the Release Notes
Note that if you are using the oldest version of a renderer for which two versions are supported (e.g. V-Ray 2.4 and V-Ray 3), you probably need to do one extra-step manually after installation.
If your renderer is not supported, drop us a line, you never know...
To be able to get good performances Golaem Crowd characters are not real Maya geometry. They are rendered thanks to procedural plugins for your renderers, called by proxys/standins. These plugins are loading a Golaem Crowd simulation cache and handling the geometry to your renderer.
To check if everything in your scene is correctly setup for the procedural rendering to work, you should check your render settings.
In order to render its Simulation Caches, Golaem takes advantage of procedural rendering. : for each supported rendering engine, Golaem develops a plugin which is able to generate the geometry on demand based on a set of parameters.
When you start Maya, it loads the Golaem module (either because it was copied in the modules directory at installation, or because it is referenced by the MAYA_MODULE_PATH environment variable). This modules itself will set other environment variables for each renderering engine to be able to find Golaem procedural plugins. Those per-rendering engine environment variables are defined in the following page.
To be able to render on the farm, your IT department needs to deploy Golaem so that it is available from all render nodes and do some configuration on your render farm manager so that it sets some environment variables needed for Golaem to be loaded. Please check Render Farm Deployment and Troubleshooting Render Farm Deployment.
If rendering outside of a farm and of Maya (eg. with the rendering engine command line or another platform), you need to set those environment variables yourself in your application-specific context. Also if using the rendering engine command line, do not forget to export the Crowd Render Proxies in your rendering scene description (.ass, .rib, .vrscene, .rs). When doing so, a new type of object will be added to the rendering scene description and, if the environment variables are correctly set, this new node will trigger the procedural plugins and the creation of the crowd entities.
It is probably because "Segment Scale Compensate" is activated on some bones. When Golaem Crowd scale it to fit your simulation, Crowd Field or Entity scale, the scale is applied twice.
You should import you geometry file (.fbx), make sure no extra-namespace has been added, uncheck the "Segment Scale Compensate" on all bones, and reexport it.
Have you check your character's joint hierarchy? This issue usually happens when the root of your character is under a group already scaled. All the nodes above the root bone (transforms, controllers) should have a identity scale (1., 1., 1.). Also please check if Scale Compensate option is not activated on some bones as described here. Once Scale compensate is disabled on every joints and the parent group is scaled back to 1,1,1 don't forget to export back your Character Geometry ! Please refer to this documentation page for more information about character prerequisites.
When exporting animations with wide orientation variations, you may experience flickering when replaying the Simulation Caches in Maya. This is due to the fact that, by default, Simulation Caches are compressed using quantization and some data get lost when being exported. One can disable Cache compression for this use case by changing the Bones Quantization attribute in the Simulation Cache Export Attributes of the Crowd Manager Node:
As Golaem Crowd is tightly integrated with renderers, most render passes/elements or AOVs will work natively with the Golaem Crowd Rendering Proxy. However for some of them configuration may be required.
For more details, check the Rendering Section in the Reference Guide
The Crowd Render Proxy node provides a Motion Blur panel to configure the motion blur aspects. To configure the Crowd Render Proxy node motion blur attributes based on the current renderer motion blur attributes, you can use the "Auto Compute Motion Blur Parameters".
Obviously, it only works the motion blur in the render settings of your renderer is enabled as well.
It can be a good idea to split the simulation by CrowdField, and to use the Camera Frustum optimization.
You can find the detailed procedure here.
You can use the Render Entity Percent attribute of a Crowd Render Proxy node to render the wanted percentage of characters exported in a Simulation Cache
You can use the Simulation Cache Layout to remove some characters from the final render
