Tutorial: Simulating Crowds with Golaem & Maya
The Gnomon Workshop has released Simulating Crowds with Golaem & Maya, a guide to crowd workflows for VFX and games cinematics, recorded by DNEG Crowd TD Wilfried Lhomme.
The workshop, which is suitable for artists who are completely new to crowd simulation, provides over five hours of video training in Maya, Golaem and Unreal Engine.
A complete crash course in crowd simulation for movies and AAA game cinematics
In the workshop, Lhomme sets out a full workflow for simulating crowds in Maya and Golaem, the crowd animation add-on included in Autodesk’s Media and Entertainment Collection.
He begins in Maya where he explains the fundamental of Golaem workflow, including creating crowd agents, assigning animation, and setting up motion paths, triggers and transitions.
Lhomme also explains strategies for optimizing crowd setups to make it easier to iterate in production.
Work then continues in Unreal Engine 5, covering cache export, scale and timing validation, and best practices for integrating crowds into a cinematic scene.
Lhomme also sets out how to use Sequencer, camera blocking, lighting, and post-processing.
The workshop uses assets from BigMediumSmall’s commercial Lost City Collection, but viewers can substitute their own models and still follow the techniques demonstrated.
About the artist
Wilfried Lhomme is Senior Crowd TD at leading international VFX company DNEG.
He began his career as a 3D generalist before moving into crowd simulation, working for studios including Mikros Animation, ON Animation, Digital Domain and Framestore.
Pricing and availability
Simulating Crowds with Golaem & Maya is available via a subscription to The Gnomon Workshop, which provides access to over 300 tutorials.
Subscriptions cost $57/month or $499/year. Free trials are available.
Read more about Simulating Crowds with Golaem & Maya on The Gnomon Workshop’s website
Have your say on this story by following CG Channel on Facebook, Instagram and X (formerly Twitter). As well as being able to comment on stories, followers of our social media accounts can see videos we don’t post on the site itself, including making-ofs for the latest VFX movies, animations, games cinematics and motion graphics projects.
Full disclosure: CG Channel is owned by Gnomon.