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.

At its core, Populous delivers production-ready crowd solutions through a render-agnostic architecture that outputs standardized data formats, ensuring effortless integration back into existing studio pipelines regardless of your rendering backend.

Whether you’re working with Arnold, RenderMan, V-Ray, or any other renderer, Populous provides the flexibility modern productions demand.

Leveraging cutting-edge technologies including OpenUSD for universal scene description and NVIDIA PhysX for high-performance physical simulation, Populous combines maximum interoperability with exceptional computational efficiency.

This foundation enables artists to iterate rapidly while maintaining the level of realism and control that contemporary visual effects require—all within a unified, intuitive environment that prioritizes both creative freedom and technical robustness.

STORMCROWD Populous isn’t just a particle simulator where animation is later attached, it is a full motion-driven behavioural system designed from the start to be interoperable and fit as seamlessly as possible into your pipeline without requiring a team of developers or TDs to produce results.

Some of the advantages of Populous are:

• Automatic IK Adjustment: Say goodbye to “floaty” motion. Our system automatically processes Inverse Kinematics to ensure limbs behave
  naturally in animation and adapt to uneven terrain
• Foot Locking & Grounding: Adjustable foot contacts per animation, locking them to the uneven floor to prevent sliding and ensure realistic
  weight transfer.
• Motion Editing: Need to tweak a pose? Use the integrated adjustment tools to fine-tune the result directly in the viewport.
• Timeline Control: scrubbing, looping, and playback controls give you full visibility over the generated sequence.
• Lightning fast preview renders and automated “slapcomps” for internal approval in “Dailies”
• Pull the latest published camera, terrain, lookdev etc all from Shotgrid/Flow
• Advanced stable dynamics using industry proven PhysX subsystem for collisions, naturalistic environment interaction and more.

STORMCROWD Populous is currently in a beta stage. If you want to know more and take part in the beta trial, please use the following contact form

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