Autodesk acquires Golaem
The features reel for Golaem 9, the latest version of the software. Autodesk has just acquired the Maya crowd simulation tool, along with its develoment team.
Autodesk has acquired Maya crowd simulation tool Golaem, along with its developer, also called Golaem. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed.
The original programmers and support team have joined Autodesk, but the old online store has been closed, meaning there is currently no way to buy the software.
Autodesk “will next work toward integrating Golaem’s key intellectual property into [its] current product offering”.
An intuitive crowd animation tool making use of standard Maya workflows
Launched in 2011, Golaem was designed to provide an intuitive approach to crowd animation, with users able to use Maya’s native tools to control crowd behaviour.
It now also includes toolsets for building custom AI logic, generating automatic variations of crowd characters, and interactively previewing and editing simulations.
Output is compatible with Arnold, Guerilla Render, Redshift, RenderMan and V-Ray; and users can output to other DCC tools for rendering, including 3ds Max, Houdini and UE5.
Recent movies and TV series on which Golaem was used include Aquaman and The Lost Kingdom, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem, and The Mandalorian.
Now due to be integrated into Autodesk’s existing products
In its blog post announcing the buyout, Golaem commented: “Being [an] independent company of seven people, we did not always have the means to develop all our ideas.
“Our team is eager to join Autodesk to deliver even more productive and user-friendly tools.”
The buyout is unusual in that Autodesk has immediately closed the old Golaem online store, meaning that there is currently no way to buy the software.
Instead, “Autodesk plans to integrate Golaem’s key IP directly inside [its] current product offerings”.
The obvious candidate is Maya, Golaem’s current host software, which would give Maya a readymade crowd simulation toolset, in the same way that Autodesk’s acquisition of Naiad in 2012 gave it the foundation for the Bifrost fluid simulation system.
However, it will be interesting to see whether the technology also makes its way into other Autodesk software, like 3ds Max, either for VFX work or for generating background crowds for architectural visualization.
Price and system requirements
Golaem is no longer for sale in Golaem’s online store. You can find system requirements and pricing for the final release in our story on Golaem 9.
Read Golaem’s announcement of the Autodesk buyout
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