Thursday, August 21, 2014 - 14:46

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

Wednesday, August 13, 2014 - 11:07

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

Friday, August 1, 2014 - 18:15
We will be happy to hear about your next crowd challenges and show you all novelties in Golaem Crowd. Meet us on the Golaem booth on French Pavillion #921 or attend our course on crowd simulation algorithms.

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 MayaGolaem 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 Hood

New Generation of Microscopic Crowd-Simulation Algorithms


Learn from academic & industry experts about the theoretical, technical, and practical aspects of crowd-simulation algorithms.

Sunday, 10th  10:45am - 12:15pm
Exhibit Hall A

More on Siggraph Website

Workflow Overview

Artist-Friendly Crowd-Simulation with Golaem Crowd


Nicolas Chaverou, Golaem Crowd Product Manager, will give a brief overview of the Golaem Crowd simulation and rendering workflow. 

Tuesday, 12th 12:00 - 12:20pm 
Wednesday, 13th 2:20 - 2:40pm
booth #921

Hands-On Demos

Meet with our Team
 


Meet the Golaem Crowd Product Manager and our CTO to get a live demo of the latest features in Golaem Crowd.

Everyday
booth #921

Book an appointment

 

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:
 

 

 

 

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:

 

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