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.

Golaem Crowd has recently been used by award-winning Zoic Studios to meet the timing and quality challenge of crowds in episodic productions. According to Mike Romey, Pipeline Supervisor, “Golaem Crowd allowed us to speed up production and meet our clients visual and cost expectations. Artists quickly flock to Golaem Crowd because of its complementary interface to Maya and ease of use.”

Mental Ray Support

On top of Pixar Renderman, V-Ray and Renderman compatible renderers, Golaem Crowd 1.4 now brings its fast crowd rendering techniques to studios using Mental Ray, 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 Parra, 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.”

See the commercial here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UfO5otFLOZw

To push limits even further, Mikros Image R&D team created this demonstration video where 120K characters team up to create the Golaem logo.

Golaem Crowd 1.4 bug fixes and improvements are detailed in the release notes.

Golaem Crowd is compatible with Autodesk Maya 2011, 2012 and 2013 for Windows and Linux.

For more information about Golaem Crowd:

• Visit the Golaem Crowd Page
• Read user testimonials in their full extent
• Visit the Golaem Crowd blog
• Contact our sales department: sales@golaem.com

About Golaem

Golaem is a software company that focuses on populating 3D worlds with autonomous virtual humans. Golaem helps creators and engineers to bring life to their digital worlds by providing virtual humans integrated in their favorite platforms.

Based on state-of-the-art research, Golaem technologies include real-time animation, navigation, and human behaviors, from single characters to functional crowds.

Editor's Note: Be sure to also check out Renderosity's Autodesk Maya Community

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