Golaem Crowd announced the release of a VRayGolaem for 3DS Max, a free plugin co-developed with Chaos Group enabling to render in 3DS Max with V-Ray the crowds created with Golaem’s crowd simulation software. The plugin allows VFX studios to create their crowds in Maya and easily export them to be rendered in Max. The advantage of this method is that the workflow stays 100% V-Ray native and procedural, which enables studios to benefit from all V-Ray features and keeps exported files very light (99% smaller than exporting the full geometry via Alembic or FBX).
VRayGolaem’s rendering workflow hinges on a combination of Golaem’s proprietary simulation cache technology and V-Ray scene files. Unlike other solutions, character geometry is not exported, but recomputed from simulation cache before being sent to V-Ray. This process makes exporting incredibly fast and reduces the size of all exported files by 99%. All shaders and assets distribution can be tweaked at any time, removing the need for re-caching that can make the creation process slow and inconvenient.
Native V-Ray features
Designed to replicate a native V-Ray workflow, the plugin supports all V-Ray 3.x features such as 3D motion blur, render elements, subdivision and more. All scenes translate as simple V-Ray proxy objects, keeping rendering speeds fast and efficient.
Max Viewport Display
To further simplify layout and lighting steps, VRayGolaem can display the crowd characters’ bounding box in the Max viewport without slowing it down. Additionally, thanks to a proxy node, artists can control every aspect of how their crowds are rendered without having to go back into Maya.
The VRayGolaem for 3DS Max plugin is available now, for free. Download and installation instructions can be found in Golaem’s support section. More on Golaem’s website and GitHub.
Too bad they just do a full up port to max. But I guess this is better than nothing. What are people using for crowd sims in Max these days? Can,t be populate.
For a upcoming show called Of Kings and Prophets. We built custom crowd rules in box3 and used the new and awesome vray instancer to render.
Had a army crowd of 178 million polygons render in ten minutes per frame. Thank you Chaos Group for that.
I’d be interested in seeing the results of your setup. How much R&D time was involved to get it production ready?
Well, you know how these things happen – crowds needed to be rendered in 3ds Max urgently for some project, no immediate solution was available and there was no time for a proper Golaem 3ds Max integration, but we could relatively easily get the crowds set up in Maya to render in Max. Still better than nothing… I do hope that a proper 3ds Max integration will be done at some point.
Best regards,
Vlado
Is there any way of seeing that process? I would dearly love to be able to do crowds in max.
Ok..good thing.
1 – Now Golaem creators need to think at the second step: a full max support.
2 – AXYZ guys promised a complete vfx crowd system for max (over one year ago?).
3 – Populate 2016 is better then 2015? don’t remenber but surely isn’t a mature vfx crowd sys.
Waiting…thank you Chaos Group for that.
Autodesk needs to come clear on the future of Max so companies can invest their time and money on plugins.