LOS ANGELES — Golaem has released Golaem 7, the latest version of its crowd simulation and character layout software, which brings a new Character Layout Tool, including a DCC agnostic nodal editor and more capabilities, as well as a live link to Unreal Engine.
Golaem builds on its experience with many animation studios, delivering a new way to populate scenes faster, easier and funnier.
Born as a retake tool for Golaem simulations, Golaem Layout is now evolving as an independent tool for procedural character layout, enabling artists to easily populate shots by using Population Vignettes they can place in their scene and quickly edit them to fit with the shot direction. A Population Vignette is similar to a proxy for characters and their animations that can be edited thanks to directable layers such as automatic feet adaptation to the ground, look at, duplicate, controllable geometry and shading variations, animation retiming, IK autorig to retake animation. Artists can then adapt the scene very easily to frequent changes in directorial intentions or environment
changes. For example, taking into account a new ground geometry can be done in one click.
Population Vignettes edits are non destructive and performed using a new nodal editor, which makes it easy to copy edits to others characters, rearrange modifications, test different stacks of modifications and so on. The new Layout architecture also makes it possible to drive edit with locators, or to keyframe their values using the standard Maya tools.
Population Vignettes can be layer out manually or scattered in the scene thanks to the Golaem Population Tool. Thousands of them can be animated in real time without slowing down Maya or making the scene file longer to open.
Golaem 7 also introduces a new plugin for Unreal Engine allowing to load Population Vignettes and layout them. Unreal scenes can be refreshed instantly to take modifications done in Maya, and the Layout modifications can be edited directly in Unreal, and reloaded in Maya.
This new plugin takes advantage of Golaem C++/Python APIs which allows to quickly load Golaem simulation caches and layout in any platform. It also embeds the new Golaem Layout editor, which is independent from Maya, making it possible to use in any platform which supports Python. The Unreal plugin source code is now available to customers so that they can compile their own Unreal Engine version with it, and contribute their developments.