Motion Capture

What Is Populous?

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 — letting artists iterate rapidly while maintaining the control modern VFX demands.

Why use Populous?

Populous isn’t a particle simulator with animation just ‘bolted on’ — it’s 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.

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

PhysX Dynamics — Industry-proven PhysX delivers stable, high-performance collisions and naturalistic environment interaction.