Golaem Crowd

Golaem Crowd is a plug-in for Autodesk Maya that allows for the simulation of controllable characters crowds based on independent agents. It is developed by Golaem, a France-based software company (created in Rennes in 2009).

Contents

• History
• In production
• Compatible renderers
• References

It is a tool to generate characters in reachable areas of the scene (e.g. to place an army in a field avoiding trees and rocks) While animators can use Maya tools to make the crowd characters (represented as particle) move in the scene, the plugin provides navigation behaviors to make them go from A to B autonomously. It allows for automatic navigation mesh computation, Roadmap-based path planning and configurable steering behaviors (including reactive collision avoidance).

The included animation engine 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 two-legged or four-legged motion. It provides: Automatic and editable skeleton mapping, biped & quadruped dedicated animation engine, automatic motion retargeting, blending & ground adaptation. Animations can be triggered and blended by defining associated behaviors with start/stop trigger conditions.

The user interface is based on Maya workaday objects (particles, fields…). Golaem Crowd is based on the standard animation workflow in CGI, and allows to incrementally build a scene. Steps are validated one by one: assets, flows, population; behaviors; animation.