Golaem 9: Hero Characters Quality At Your Reach

Golaem 9: Hero Characters Quality At Your Reach

Brie Clayton June 4, 2024

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Golaem proudly announces the release of Golaem 9, a groundbreaking version that elevates the quality level of crowd characters to animated hero characters with the same acclaimed user-friendly interface and efficiency.

Golaem crowd tools keep playing an important role in ambitious projects, like filling Paris streets with cars for John Wick (RodeoFX), or populating Time Square for TMNT Mutant Mayhem (Mikros Animation) where animated characters need to be at the hero quality level.

Golam 9 facilitates the creation of such characters by providing universal joint rig animation support and direct animation replay, as well as crowd levels which enable adding secondary simulations on top of chosen characters after the main simulation pass. To bring details even further, Golaem 9 also includes a beta ML Deformer able to bring advanced character deformation into the crowds.

Keeping Golaem's mantra of making artists' life easier in mind, a slew of workflow and UI improvements have been added into Golaem 9 based on customer feedback and their experiences in major crowd productions.

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A video overview of all the new features in Golaem 9

New Animation Engine Golaem 9 comes with a powered-up animation engine, lifting some input constraints and making Golaem able to animate any character in a straightforward way. These enhancements empower the crowd team as well as rigging and animation departments to enhance the quality of their crowd characters, ultimately saving significant time and effort.

Direct FBX/USD/BVH Animation Replay Golaem 9 supports native motion format inputs (FBX/USD/BVH), enabling artists to play animations directly on their crowd characters. Thanks to the new one-click mapping workflow, Golaem can automatically play these motions on any character and retarget them on the fly if needed.

Golaem 9 Direct Animation Replay

9-DOF Animation Support Golaem 9 now supports animations influencing rotation, translation and scale, providing flexibility for riggers and animators to work as they please and enabling the creation of more advanced characters and motions.

Golaem 9 DOF Animations

Modular Rigs Support Golaem 9 is the first commercial crowd software to support modular rigs without relying on a secondary skeleton mapping, hence giving artists the freedom to work with the same structure as hero characters.

Golaem 9 Modular Rigs

Crowd ML Deformer (beta) Golaem 9 ships with a ML Deformer node which can reproduce advanced deformations on top of crowds. The Crowd ML Deformer comes with a training tool to encode any deformation done on a Maya rig, even with custom plugins. The trained network can then be linked to Golaem Characters to be executed at render time.

Golaem 9 Crowd ML Deformer

Create Shots Without Simulation Creating Characters From Scratch Create a shot from scratch with the Golaem 9 CreateEntity Layer. No simulation required anymore, you can build an entire shot with the Layout tool. Any character can be brought into your shot and multiplied later with the Duplicate or SnapTo layers. They can then be animated with a PlayMotion node.

Golaem 9 CreateEntity Layer

PlayMotion Layer The new PlayMotion layer can animate or reanimate the characters in your shots. Create new characters and bring them to life, or select a few characters in an existing crowd and assign them a new animation.

Golaem 9 Play Motion

Crowd Levels Golaem 9 introduces the Crowd Levels paradigm, allowing artists to build shots incrementally by re-introducing cached and layouted simulations as a source in a new simulation level hence allowing new possibilities.

Adding Details to Simulations The new Crowd Level paradigm enables artists to first focus on the crowd simulation itself and add extra passes like cloth simulation or secondary animation made with physics simulation afterwards. By blurring the lines between simulation and layout, Crowd Levels makes it possible to take advantage of the best of both worlds to create a shot. Indeed, it simplifies the crowd workflow while giving the ability to push details where they are needed for maximum visual impact.

Golaem 9 Crowd Levels Add Details

Taking Notes or Changes Into Account Populating shots which are changing daily can sometimes be frustrating and cumbersome. The crowd simulation levels enable artists to keep their existing simulation and mix it with a new one in a non-destructive way, whether adding new character types, more people or new obstacles in their shots or completely resimulate a character without affecting the others.

Golaem 9 Crowd Level Changes

More Control on Your Crowds Track Locator Navigation The Track Locator provides a new way to drive characters between two curves which can be dynamically animated, hence giving control on the overall shape of the crowds on top of the path to be followed.

Golaem 9 Track Locator

Foot Locking Thanks to the new foot locking feature, Golaem 9 can automatically enhance foot contacts on the ground, offering a procedural solution for users who may lack the time or skills to fine-tune their input motions beforehand.

Golaem 9 Foot Lock

Workflow & UI Improvements New LOD Workflow The new LOD workflow facilitates the creation of LOD levels by giving the possibility to have different numbers of meshes and different meshes names in each LOD, hence allowing the creation of completely custom LODs. The Character Maker Geometry tool also facilitates their export to

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