Our friends from Framestore Montreal are recruiting Crowd TDs. Golaem Crowd experience is a plus! Either build on your previous experience or start getting some now with our free & unlimited Personal Learning Edition (PLE)! Apply here
Golaem Crowd 3.3 introduces blend shapes on crowd characters. This new functionality opens the way to a myriad of possibilities, including facial animation, muscles systems, corrective blend shapes...
Golaem Crowd skeletal animation features have been extensively used by major vfx studios to animate all sorts of characters in their feature films, including spectators, soldiers and horses made by Milk VFX and Cinesite for Brett Ratner’s Hercules.
With crowds getting closer and closer to the camera, the ability to go beyond skeletal animation is a huge enabler to meet realism needs. Golaem Crowd builds on Maya blend shapes animation tools to let artists create their characters with the tools they know best.
Blend shapes are then read by Golaem Crowd at the same time as skeletal animation, which enables easy synchronization as well as benefiting from most of the functionalities already offered by the Golaem Crowd animation engine: motion blending, start frame and speed randomization…
Golaem in-house artist, Axel Domenger, has taken advantage of the blend shapes support to animate mouths of angry hairy blobs in this demo video
He created a rigged character and added both corrective and expression blend shapes. The character was then animated to create a 100 frames long loop, later randomized by Golaem Crowd to get animation diversity.
Domenger then exploited Golaem Crowd’s ability to interact with Maya particles to drive the crowd simulation using a nParticle system constrained by a sphere envelope and a few colliders.
Finally, the crowd was exported to a geometry cache to be used for Yeti fur replication before being rendered in Arnold thanks to Yeti and Golaem Crowd procedurals.
This demo as well as the latest Golaem Crowd features and demo reels will be shown this week at Siggraph Vancouver, booth #921.
See Golaem's Siggraph schedule
Golaem Crowd 3 has been extensively used by major studios for upcoming feature films (hint) and these cooperations resulted in many cool features and user experience improvements. We also come with a bunch of unannounced features showcased in an impressive demo made using a Maya / Golaem Crowd / Yeti / Arnold pipeline.
If you want to learn crowd simulation in-depth, we will also be given a lecture on the topic together with academic pundits Ming Lin and Julien Pettré, as well as Unity Software Developer Mikko Mononnen.
Under The HoodNew Generation of Microscopic Crowd-Simulation Algorithms
Sunday, 10th 10:45am - 12:15pm |
Workflow OverviewArtist-Friendly Crowd-Simulation with Golaem Crowd
Tuesday, 12th 12:00 - 12:20pm |
Hands-On Demos
Meet with our Team
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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
- 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.

- visit Golaem Crowd page
- get your free & unlimited Personal Learning Edition (PLE)
- see Release Notes
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
- see Release Notes
- visit Golaem Crowd page
- get your free & unlimited Personal Learning Edition (PLE)
- join the Golaem Crowd User Group