Golaem 6, Crowds Power in your Hands
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:

 

See you at FMX 2017!
Thursday, April 27, 2017 - 11:45

We come with a new demo reel and a preview of Golaem 6!

Golaem & Redshift Make Crowd Rendering Faster Than Ever
Thursday, December 8, 2016 - 17:03
Golaem now includes a rendering plugin for Redshift for Maya. Redshift users can now access all the benefits of procedural rendering with shading variety and rendering optimizations.
 
Golaem is well known for its artist friendly crowd simulation & layout tools used in production like Game Of Thrones, Independance Day Resurgence, the Halo Wars 2 cinematics as well as hundreds of projects.
 
Redshift is the world’s first fully GPU-accelerated, biased renderer, capable of rendering scenes many times faster than existing CPU-based renderers.
 
Golaem and Redshift teams joined forces to add Redshift procedural rendering capabilities in Golaem as well as native shaders for variety and user data workflow in Redshift.
 
Nicolas Chaverou, Golaem Product Manager, comments “Taking advantage of Redshift's amazing GPU rendering performance and Golaem latest multithreading & automatic instancing optimization, the Golaem procedural rendering plugin for Redshift can render 20 000 characters in less than 2 minutes. We are thrilled to offer unprecedented crowd rendering performances to Golaem and Redshift customers”.
 
Golaem procedural rendering is based on Golaem’s proprietary cache & geometry storing technology. It reduces the size of exported files by 99% compared to Alembic caches, keeping scene files light and interactive. 
 
Redshift is already used in production by several Golaem customers for rendering tens of thousands of characters. Duncan McWilliam, Outpost VFX CEO explains: “Outpost VFX was the first UK pioneer of Redshift. We helped Escape Technology to design the 8 x GPU Tyan chassis. We are glad to remain at the forefront of GPU rendering by helping Golaem and Redshift in bringing their technologies together around a live film blockbuster.”
 
Paul Francis, Outpost VFX CTO details: “In August this year we commenced work on a feature film project, involving a large amount of crowd shots in and around a fully populated football stadium. For any crowd work undertaken in the past, we have traditionally used basic geometry instancers and card systems. However initial R  & D tests highlighted the need for a much more robust solution due to the scale and complexity of the shots, that allowed for rapid work flow and the high level results we needed to achieve. We spent some time evaluating various solutions and eventually settled on Golaem. We found Golaem to be an excellent fit for our needs, as it integrates well with Maya and our various in-house pipeline tools. 
 
Here at Outpost we use Redshift as our main renderer, and at the time of our R & D, Golaem did not have Redshift integration by default. We approached the Golaem developers about Redshift integration and found them to be very open to assisting us, and after months of intensive development and constant communication, we had a fantastic plugin that we could really work with.
 
With full integration achieved, we commenced with render tests, while establishing a robust and effective crowd work flow, so when the time came to implement our R & D into a full production environment, we were able to hit the ground running. Golaem is a very artist friendly system that we have enjoyed using, and we already have other productions in the pipeline for which it will be ideal.”
 
Panos Zompolos, Co-founder & CTO at Redshift concludes: “We hope that the ability to plug into feature film ready software like Golaem will act to extend our services to better cater for this area of production. We really can’t wait to see the results of artists working with both Golaem and Redshift.“.
 
Both Golaem & Redshift can be freely downloaded for testing
About Golaem (http://mayacrowd.com)
Golaem develops artist-friendly tools to animate digital characters.
 
Integrated in Autodesk Maya, Golaem makes it fast and affordable to populate worlds with directable digital characters, from a few to thousands. Artists from all over the globe use Golaem to bring life to commercials, episodic productions, feature films and games.
 
 
About Redshift (https://www.redshift3d.com)
Redshift is an award-winning, biased GPU renderer, renowned for its unique combination of speed and power.Redshift was founded by three video game developers with extensive background in hardware-accelerated real-time rendering. The trio combined their decades of experience to push the limits of GPU hardware, with the goal of developing a production-quality, GPU-accelerated renderer with support for biased global illumination techniques that were previously only in the CPU domain. 

Learn Golaem / Build your pipe with the new Personal Learning Edition
Wednesday, November 30, 2016 - 10:31
 
We just replaced the time-limited evaluation license with a Personal Learning Edition license (PLE), free and time-unlimited, with shading watermark.
 
 
Golaem now has more than 200 customers around the world and thousands of active users. We think that this is the easiest population solution to learn and integrate in a studio pipeline. The Golaem community is growing, and our featured artists page now boasts dozens of Golaem artists all around the world.
 
However, when we listened to these thousands of users, either artists in studios, at home, pipeline TDs,... we understood that they were somewhat frustrated not being able to use Golaem where/when they want and being bound to a commercial license or a time-limited evaluation.
 
So we decided to create a version of Golaem which would include all the features, for an unlimited period of time, without limiting the number of characters to let you experience the full power of Golaem. This is the Golaem PLE. Its only limitations are that when rendering, some characters will be shaded with the Golaem orange shader, or when exporting geometry, some polygons will be missing. This is the less annoying we could do to prevent commercial usage of the PLE.
 
With the new Golaem PLE, you can:
  • Train yourself or your team in the studio (by the way, we also now offer dedicated trainings)
  • Train yourself or play at home
  • Try Golaem to see how it can help you save time on your project
  • Develop and maintain pipeline in-between projects
  • Train your students (Universities should ask for a free academics license instead to ensure their students can render projects without watermarks, like these)
The Golaem PLE can be downloaded on http://download.mayacrowd.com
 
Plenty of training resources are available on http://help.mayacrowd.com
 
Do not hesitate to share your progress, questions or feedback on our various user groups ( Mailing List, Linked In, Facebook)
 
And above all, enjoy!

6 best student projects done with Golaem last year
Tuesday, August 30, 2016 - 18:20

At Golaem, we love helping students deliver great projects. 2015/2016 was a prosperous academic year and we were so lucky to have lots of incredible projects. Here is our selection!

By the way, did you know that Golaem was free for academics & students? No joke!

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

Several students got noticed thanks to their Golaem project and were able to get a Golaem Artist job in renowned studio. Why not you or your students?!

Red Dawn

by Jean Burtschell from ArtFx

Jean did a great work populating shots with slaves carrying out various tasks. Although he was using a very early version, he grasped at once the purpose of the Golaem Layout Tool for this kind of shots

Charlie Et Ses Grandes Dents

by Chao Hao Yang from Supinfocom Rubika

Chao Hao populated the whole disco club with rabbits and even created a wheat field physically reacting to the main character navigation with Golaem

Parkour

by Jordan Sautron from ICAN

Jordan clervely used a set of parkour motion to create this incredible video with Golaem, after just 2 days of training at ICAN!

Invasion Day

by Dimitri Trouvé from ISART

Dimitri set up a panicking crowd in a destroyed Paris for this incredible end-of-year short movie

Demo Reel

by Romain Le Guillerm from ISART

Romain demonstrated the full extent of his talent over three shots: zombies falling down a cliff (with physics simulation), a wheat field, and a street filled with people

Demo Reel

by Agata Cichosz from Lodz University of Technology

Agata created several shots including armies in formation or running at each others, complete with fx integration.

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