Friday, September 30th, 2016 Posted by Jim Thacker

Basefount Technology ships Miarmy 5.0

Miarmy 5.0’s new automation engine in action. See more demo videos on YouTube.


Basefount Technology has released Miarmy 5.0, the latest update to its crowd animation system for Maya, adding a new automation engine to simplify the creation of complex crowd behaviours.

Miarmy: an overview
Miarmy provides a sophisticated AI driven crowd-simulation system, complete with PhysX-based dynamics. Crowd agents can also be controlled using standard Maya particles, fields and fluid simulation tools.

The software supports production renderers including Arnold, RenderMan and V-Ray.

Miarmy is now in use at VFX facilities worldwide, and has been used on movies including Independence Day: Resurgence and The Monkey King 2, Season 6 of Game of Thrones and MPC’s recent commercials.

Automation makes it quicker to create complex crowd behaviours
There aren’t many actual new features in Miarmy 5.0, the update instead focusing on simplifying workflow for the existing functionality.

The software’s new direct logic engine helps automate crowd set-up, making it possible to create crowd behaviours with fewer nodes or lines of scripting; or in some cases, completely automatically.

Behaviours affected include terrain adaptation, collision avoidance, road following, and the randomisation of the actions and speed of crowd agents.

There are also a number of smaller changes and bugfixes, which you can read via the link below.

Pricing and availability
Miarmy 5.0 is available for Maya 2014+ on Windows XP+, Linux and Mac OS X 10.6+.

It is now available on a rental-only basis, with a node-locked licence costing $2,550 for the first year, then $1,450/year thereafter. See the full range of rental options.


Read a full list of new features in Miarmy 5.0 on Basefount’s blog