CrowdMaster is a free crowd sim tool for Blender

Developer John Roper has released CrowdMaster, an interesting free add-on for Blender that provides a “complete workflow for crowd simulation”.

Create simple flocking and crowd animations in Blender
The software provides a node-based workflow for setting up crowd agents, which can be anything from simple primitives to rigged characters, then assigning basic properties governing their behaviour.

To judge from the demo reel, it’s currently more of a tool for surface scattering or flocking animations: although you can create crowd animations, don’t expect the sort of features you’d get in Massive or Golaem Crowd.

However, it’s evolving quickly: the latest update, rolled out less than a week after the initial release, added support for path following.

The goals list also includes more advanced features like AI-driven character states, ragdoll physics and cloth simulation, and Roper has put out a call for interested Python developers to help with the work.

Availability
CrowdMaster is available for Blender under an open-source GPL licence. You’ll need to be running Blender 2.78 – at time of posting, still at the release candidate stage – to use it.

Read the online documentation for CrowdMaster

Download CrowdMaster from John Roper’s GitHub repo
(Also includes downloadable example scenes)

Hat tip to BlenderNation for spotting this story.