Populate Your World
Motion powered Crowd & Animation Simulations
Built for modern VFX and animation pipelines, Populous seamlessly integrates with industry-standard digital content creation tools including Autodesk Maya and SideFX Houdini, enabling artists and technical directors to craft compelling crowd simulations for film, television, and real-time applications.
What Is Populous?
Logic layout for behavioural control
STORMCROWD FACTORY Populous is a powerful desktop application designed for generating and simulating sophisticated crowd behaviours at scale.
Populous helps artists and technical directors achieve world class crowd simulations and digital background characters demanded by supervisors and clients.
By using production proven techniques for motion and behavioural simulations, Populous can deliver to the highest quality tens or even hundreds of thousands of autonomous characters in a scene.
Designed for production
Populous delivers production-ready crowd solutions through a render-agnostic architecture that outputs standardized data formats, integrating seamlessly into existing pipelines regardless of your rendering backend.
Built on OpenUSD for universal scenes and NVIDIA PhysX for high-performance simulation, Populous combines maximum interoperability with exceptional efficiency — allowing artists iterate rapidly while maintaining the control modern VFX demands.
Why use Populous?
Character layout
Populous is a full motion-driven behavioural animation system built for interoperability, delivering results without requiring a team of TDs or developers.
Automatic IK Adjustment
Inverse Kinematics are processed automatically, ensuring limbs behave naturally and adapt to uneven terrain. No more “floaty” motion.Foot Locking & Grounding
Adjustable foot contacts lock to uneven surfaces per animation, eliminating sliding and ensuring realistic weight transfer.Motion Editing
Fine-tune poses and animation directly in the viewport using integrated adjustment tools.Animation Graph & Timeline Control
Full scrubbing, looping, and playback controls give complete visibility over your generated sequence.Fast Preview & Slapcomps
Lightning-fast preview renders and automated slapcomps streamline internal approval in dailies.Production Integration
Pull the latest published camera, terrain, lookdev, and more directly from your ShotGrid/Flow instance.DCC Sync
Send your Characters, updates, environment and cameras directly from Maya into Populous, without manual exporting.
Create Full Solaris setups directly from your simulations for easy adjustments and integration into your render pipeline.PhysX Dynamics
Industry-proven PhysX delivers stable, high-performance collisions and naturalistic environment interaction.Native USD support
Populous ingests and exports USD natively. No custom or proprietary procedurals are required to manage Populous crowds. Once simulated, take the crowd into any USD supporting application for FX, lighting and rendering
What we offer
| Feature | Populous | Alternatives |
|---|---|---|
| Licensing | Single licensing subscription covering all functionality | Complex or expensive licensing |
| DCC Integration | Standalone app with version agnostic plugins & communication | Tied to specific DCC versions |
| Rendering | $0
Native USD output – Sim Once Render Anywhere |
Additional costly render licenses required
Proprietary procedural plugins required |
| Legacy Asset Migration |
White-glove asset conversion included |
Manual rebuilding required. |
| Integration Support | Direct consultancy for pipelines, shot planning and bidding. | Relies on internal studio resources |
| Custom Agent Creation | Bespoke mocap and agent builds upon request. | Requires dedicated internal rigging/anim teams |
System Requirements
 | Linux x86_64 binaries can be installed via .rpm package on supported platforms (RHEL, Rocky Linux, CentOS etc) For other Linux platforms, an AppImage is also available. |
 | Windows 10 and 11 platforms are supported, with an .msi installer – Windows 11 recommended |
| Min | Recommended | |
|---|---|---|
 | OpenGL 3.3 core profile or newer 4 GB VRAM NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti 4 GB | OpenGL 4.5/4.6 8 GB VRAM (12-16 GB preferred for larger crowds) RTX 3060, AMD Radeon RX 7600 |
I want to try it!
STORMCROWD Populous is currently in Early Access Technical Preview. Please use the following contact form to register
