Rennes, France - For the first time, Golaem will showcase Golaem Crowd, its brand new product for easily creating crowds within Autodesk Maya at FMX, Stuttgart.
Developed and tested under real production conditions with the award-winning VFX company Mikros Image http://www.mikrosimage.eu, Golaem Crowd allows to easily simulate complex and controllable characters in Autodesk Maya.
Golaem Crowd is strongly integrated with one of the most powerful 3d animation software, Autodesk Maya. It offers an intuitive interface based on Maya workaday objects (particles, fields…).
Golaem Crowd enables to save production time eliminating switching and tweaking between software applications, as well as being usable by an artist trained within one day.
Issued from years of academic researches on virtual humans, Golaem Crowd enables to streamline digital content creation, allowing to:
- Reuse existing motion choreographies on any ground and any character;
- Replace cumbersome fluid fields with pathfinding and collision avoidance algorithms;
- Easily add variety to crowds taking full advantage of individual character behaviors.
Last but not least, Golaem Crowd respects the standard animation workflow and allows to incrementally build a scene. Artists proceed step by step, getting director's validation at each stage:
Per production:
1. Asset definition
a. Asset Import: scene, characters, accessories, motions
b. Population Description: Associate a character class with geometry, motions and behaviors (e.g. Gauls and Romans)
Per shot:
2. Placement: a powerful tool to quickly generate characters in reachable areas of the scene (e.g. it is possible to place an army in a field avoiding trees and rocks)
3. Navigation: characters are represented by particles in Maya, it is then possible to use Maya tools to move them, but we also propose navigation algorithms (including automatic obstacles and characters avoidance).
4. Animation: the animation engine included within Golaem Crowd enables to replay previously created motion, even on characters of different morphologies. Golaem Crowd can adapt motions to the ground and automatically compute transitions between motions, for biped or quadrupeds.
5. Behaviors: Animations can be triggered and blended by defining associated behaviors with start/stop trigger conditions.
6. Export & Rendering
a. Golaem Crowd proposes a plugin for REYES render engines (Pixar, Renderman, 3dlight, AIR, Guerilla Render…)
b. Other formats are available: Autodesk FBX, Renderman RIB, and Google Protobuf
Please visit http://www.golaem.com/crowd for more information