Thursday, March 15th, 2012 Posted by Jim Thacker

Golaem ships Golaem Crowd 1.4


Instancing in action: 120,000 characters, rendered using the new features in version 1.4, form the Golaem logo.

Golaem has released a free update to its Golaem Crowd crowd-simulation system for Maya, adding support for mental ray rendering, and new instancing features.

The former should increase the potential user base of the software, which was recently adopted by Zoic Studios for its broadcast work. Previous releases only supported RenderMan-compliant renderers and V-Ray.

The instancing tools look good, too, as the tech demo at the top of the story – created by French VFX house Mikros Image – demonstrates.

Golaem Crowd 1.4 is available now for Maya 2011+, for Windows and Linux. A perpetual licence costs $4,799.

PRESS RELEASE (Excerpts)
Golaem announces the latest update to Golaem Crowd, the crowd simulation software for Autodesk Maya. Golaem Crowd 1.4 includes support for Mental Ray procedural rendering, geometry instancing, as well many others improvements.

Mental Ray Support
Golaem Crowd 1.4 now brings its fast crowd rendering techniques to studios using Mental Ray renderer, thanks to native .mi files export and a dedicated procedural rendering plugin. Both Mental Ray standalone and Mental Ray for Maya are supported.

Geometry Instancing
Golaem Crowd 1.4 brings the ability to declare characters as geometry instances in order to allow
rendering thousands of entities with amazing performances.

French award-winning VFX studio Mikros Image used this new Geometry Instancing technique to fill a stadium in the last Nissan Juke commercial. When asked about Golaem Crowd, Christophe Huchet, VFX Producer says “The shots were very short, with a blurry background (because of motion blur, or just to put more emphasis on the Nissan Juke), so we had to make the stadium population process very simple and straightforward”. Guillaume Para, VFX artist adds “Depending on shots, we had to generate between 5,000 and 12,000 characters. I was amazed by how fast it is to render using procedural rendering, and how easy it is to set up a shot once assets are ready. I am thrilled to try next Golaem Crowd releases”.

Read the release notes for Golaem Crowd 1.4

Visit the Golaem Crowd website