Overview

Cinema, video games, architectural visualization, traffic analysis, building, and engineering all rely on crowd simulation. The field's growing importance in cutting-edge industries is reflected in its widespread use in AI training, driving simulations, and digital twin development.

A free upgrade to iClone 8.4 now includes an integrated crowd simulation engine, a direct response to the skyrocketing demand for this feature. Small to medium-sized studios can now affordably harness its power thanks to this remarkable leap forward in accessibility. This update, which has been in the works for two years, finally brings streamlined features and perfect asset integration. Launching in 2024, Reallusion's Crowd Sim technology will take simulations to the next level with improvements to environment interaction and motion planning, solidifying the company's position as an industry leader.

The Motion Director (MD) Editor is now available in this update, giving you limitless control over how you use the MD toolkits. This gives you complete control over how the characters move around the scene and when they act out specific sequences.

With the new Scatter tools, users can scatter crowd characters across a 3D scene in a variety of ways, such as by placing them in a specific area, on top of objects, or in predefined formations.

A navmesh reminiscent of video games allows players to direct their characters' movement around the environment, while straightforward point-and-click controls allow you to plot out linear paths.

The proximity of crowd members is regulated by their inherent behaviors of flocking and avoidance.

Members of the audience can alter the look of their characters by combining them into Actor Groups and giving each one their own unique material settings. After that, particular motions can be paired with the groups.

The toolset supports DDS image compression to decrease load times, and characters can be toggled to Lite mode to lock specific animation functions for improved performance.

Watch the Sneak Peak of the new Iclone 8.4

 

iClone's Motion Director toolset also receives a substantial upgrade; it allows users to semi-automatically animate characters using controls similar to those in a video game.

The ability to combine user-defined upper-body movements with leg movements generated by Motion Director is one of the most notable updates.

Additionally, avoidance settings can now be customized for characters driven by Motion Director.

Furthermore, a new run-time solution to decrease foot slippage is introduced in the update, though it is currently only available for the embedded Motion Director packs (iMDs).

 

You can read more about Iclone 8.4 here