Golaem Crowd 3.2, Bring Out The Painter In You
Wednesday, April 16, 2014 - 17:10
Golaem Crowd 3.2 introduces a Crowd Paint Tool enabling artists to place their characters and control their behaviors (Character Attributes, Triggers and Navigation) with a simple brush.

 

Intuitive and Powerful Paint Tool

  • Placement: place characters by painting them on the ground, while controlling their density with color. 
  • Character Attributes: paint character attributes to control their behaviors and their appearances.
  • Zone Triggers: paint color zones on your terrain to activate/deactivate behaviors on your characters.
  • Navigation: control characters path-finding by painting vector fields on the ground.

 

Convincing Crowd Shots in a Few Days

Golaem Crowd is currently used by more than 50 studios all over the world, from one-man shops to established studios like Framestore or Cinesite. Some of their productions have been included in the new Golaem Crowd Showreel, e.g. the “Lipton, Be More Tea” commercial, featuring crowds of Muppets, made by Framestore for the opening of the Academy Awards ceremony.
 
 
Golaem Crowd 3.2 benefits from these users’ feedback and integrate lots of usability improvements as well as new behavior operators (delay, loop, script). 
 
Golaem Crowd is more and more open. Simulation caches can be loaded directly in Maya for editing them or adding FX on top. Code samples are also provided for loading them directly inside studios proprietary tools, and the  MEL/Python API is growing.
 
This focus on ease of use and interoperability is what enables Golaem Crowd customers to nail down pipeline integration very quickly, have their artists send shots for review in a few days and make producers & clients relax.
 
Golaem Crowd is available either through
  • rental (1500 EUR for 3 months)
  • permanent license (4999 EUR including 1 year of support & upgrade)

Both are floating licenses, enable to render on an unlimited number of nodes for free, and come with a contemporary ready-to-use Character Pack. Maintenance & Support Subscription (875 EUR/year) enables permanent licensees to benefits from all upgrades including major versions.

For more information about Golaem Crowd:
 

 

 

 

Golaem Crowd 3.1, visual debug and Arnold mtoa 1.x
Tuesday, February 25, 2014 - 10:04
Golaem just released a new update for its crowd simulation plugin for Maya. Golaem Crowd 3.1 now enables to visually follow the execution of characters behaviors in the Behavior Editor.


Behavior Live Visual Debug

The Golaem Crowd Behavior Editor makes it simple to describe elaborate behaviors by drag'n'dropping a few built-in behaviors and connecting them to each others. It is now directly linked with the Maya viewport and can display which behaviors or motions the selected character is running. It makes it easier than ever to build behaviors and identify unexpected behaviors or wrong configuration.

Arnold Mtoa 1.x Compatibility

Golaem Crowd is now compatible with Arnold 4.3 + mtoa 1.x. Golaem Crowd has been used together with Arnold on several productions for commercials, movies and animation. The most recent work being the Nike commercial done by Framestore for the launch of Brazil World Cup 2014 kit. 

 

In his testimonial about this project, Robert Harrington, CG Lead at Framestore concludes “Our small, controlled team turned the 3D work around in a few weeks, and whilst that does take planning, it was also entirely feasible, renderable and predictable... and that says a lot about how capable Golaem is.”
 
For more information about Golaem Crowd:

 

Golaem Crowd 3, unleash your imagination
Wednesday, December 4, 2013 - 12:06
Golaem Crowd is used by an increasing number of studios (including industry leaders like Double Negative or Framestore) to easily give life to commercials, movies, TV shows and games. It recently helped Stargate Digital to create a massive horde of “walkers” for the acclaimed The Walking Dead TV Show. This new update enables artists to simulate any type of character: human, horses, birds, or imaginary creatures…
 

 

Control any Type of Characters

The new Golaem Crowd Character Maker handles any type of characters: bipeds, quadrupeds and n-peds. It supports any custom skeleton description  and has been successfully tested with various industry standards ( Human IK, 3DSMax biped, Rocket Box, Daz3D, Pinocchio, Advanced Skeleton…).
 
The Golaem Crowd Character Maker can also automatically edit your motion capture data and make them cycle perfectly while preserving animation.
 
 

Do More with Less Work

Powered by a revamped animation engine, Golaem Crowd 3.0 helps to save time and work at each step of the production. Because most cumbersome tasks are automated, artists can now focus on what they do best: being creative.
 
Golaem Crowd procedurally generate new motions by mirroring motions, mixing them together or automatically retargeting them to various character size/morphology, hence dramatically reducing the amount of motions to be produced. 
 
Built-in behaviors automatically choose motions depending on character speed or orientation, adapts feet to the ground (matching closely the ground geometry), or make a character look at a given target or aim at something with a gun. 
 
Last but not least, Golaem Crowd now allows to enable or disable physics simulation at any time, at the character level, or even at limbs level in order to mix physics simulation with animation.
 
 

Control Birds and Fishes with the Flock Behaviors

Together with automatic 3D placement, Golaem Crowd provides new behaviors for controlling flock of birds or school of fishes with unmatched performances: interactive with 10 000 birds and geometry preview. The flock can wander in a given zone, seek targets or flee dangers. 
 
 

Validate Your Work Before Even Pressing the Render Button

To speed up shots creation and validation, Golaem Crowd proposes a new interactive previzualisation  of the crowd simulation, including geometry diversity, directly in Maya viewport. 
 
 
 
For more information about Golaem Crowd:

Nantes 2099 Making Of: flying ships and live actors integration
Tuesday, August 20, 2013 - 15:46

Today we'll talk about our last Siggraph Demo. You may already have seen part of it in the Golaem Crowd 2.5 video: it features the creation of flying ships, animated thanks to Maya fields, and live actors integration within a virtual crowd.

 

Our visitors on the Siggraph Booth particularly appreciated the fact that it was very easy to get the live actors avoided by the virtual extras.

 

Axel Domenger, the freelance artist who created this demo, did a nice breakdown of the shot, showing how Golaem Crowd was used to reach this result.

Golaem Crowd 2.5 is coming
Thursday, July 18, 2013 - 09:57

Golaem announces Golaem Crowd 2.5 at Siggraph Anaheim, bringing Maya 2014 support, as well as tools to create crowds of trees, cars, ships...


Use Golaem Crowd for everything

Golaem Crowd 2.5 allows artists to place and animate more than skinned characters. Golaem Crowd can now instantiate any rigid shape object (trees, cars, ships...) with an interactive viewport preview and customizable visual and animation diversity.  Artists can now  populate the whole shot environment using the same powerful tools. 
 
 

Maya 2014 Support

Golaem Crowd now supports the new major version of Maya, for Windows and Linux 64bit. The free rendering plugins have also been updated to match last versions of the major renderers (Mental Ray, V-Ray, Arnold, Renderman and 3Delight)
 

Game Of Thrones, Warm Bodies, Asterix and lots of sport commercials

Golaem Crowd has been used by Pixomondo for Game Of Thrones, season 3 and by Look Effects, to create the Boneys from Warm Bodies. 
 
Last but not least, it has also been used by several shops together with the free, ready-to-use Golaem Crowd Character Pack to create stadium/audience commercials in no time.
 
For more information about Golaem Crowd:

 

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