Golaem 9 Released With Overhauled Animation Engine

The latest major release of Golaem elevates the quality level of crowd characters to animated hero characters with the same user-friendly interface and efficiency. It comes with a rewritten animation engine, lifting some input constraints and introducing new workflows for creating crowd animations directly, without simulation.

With the native motion format inputs FBX/USD/BVH file format support, artists can use 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 now also supports 9 Degrees of Freedom, enabling the creation of more advanced characters and motions with animations influencing rotation, translation, and scale.

Claiming to be the first commercial crowd software to implement this feature, Golaem introduces support for modular rigs without relying on a secondary skeleton mapping, giving artists the freedom to work with the same structure as hero characters.

This release also adds an experimental ML Deformer, which can reproduce advanced deformations on top of crowds. This Deformer comes with a training tool to encode any deformation done on a Maya rig, even with custom plug-ins. The trained network can then be linked to Golaem characters.

Now, you can create shots entirely without simulation with the Layout tool, and refine existing simulations in a non-destructive way. 

Any character can be brought into your shot, multiplied with the Duplicate or SnapTo layers, and animated later with the new PlayMotion layer. Create new characters and bring them to life, or select a few characters in an existing crowd and assign them a new animation.

The Crowd Levels paradigm allows artists to build shots incrementally, simplifying the crowd workflow and increasing the visual impact. With this feature, you can first focus on the crowd simulation itself and add extra passes like cloth simulation or secondary animation made with physics simulation afterward. 

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 resimulating a character without affecting the others.

Other Golaem updates include The Track Locator, providing a new way to drive characters between two curves that can be dynamically animated, a foot locking feature, expanded LOD workflow, and more.

Read the full list of Golaem 9 features in the release notes here. Also, don't forget to join our 80 Level Talent platform and our Telegram channel, follow us on Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Reddit, where we share breakdowns, the latest news, awesome artworks, and more.