How to fine-tune props & shaders?

The appearance of the crowd is customized thanks to the Crowd Asset Manager. All settings are then saved to a .cam file, which makes it easy to create various setups and load them depending on the shot.

 

Golaem Crowd makes it possible to easily customize which props (clothes, jewels…) are available or not for the crowd, and even the repartition of these props. It can be useful to fine-tune the look of the crowd, or to match the production environment (people in winter jacket on a summer beach may not be what is expected).

 

The props selection is done in the rendering type tab of the Assets Manager.

 

In the following example, the weights of the overcoat props have been set to 0 (except the empty one, of course), so that nobody in the crowd will wear a jacket or a bomber. However, the t-shirt weights have been all set to 50, and the shirts ones to 0. The crowd characters will all wear a t-shirt, and it will be randomly chosen from all the available t-shirt types (with the same probability to get one or another).

 

 

You can look at the Creating Rendering Types section, or the Rendering Types Tab Reference for more information

 

On top of props variations, it is also possible to setup a shader variation in order to get different textures or colors in the crowd. This is done thanks to the shaders panel in the Assets tab.

 

 

Shaders attributes are defined in this panel and control the way the props are going to be rendered. The meaning of these values is easily understood by looking at the Hypershade.

 

 

These values are fed into special shaders named Switch Shader or HSL Shader.

 

The Switch Shader takes several shaders as input and select one of them based on the value of its selector attribute. The selector attribute can be fed like here by GetUserData node, retrieving data associated to the character in the Asset Manager Shaders Attributes, or by any value coming from Maya.

 

 

The HSLShader modifies an existing shader color based on the value given in the Asset Manager.

 

Note that due to specific renderer constraints and implementation, the HSLShader is not available for all renderers

 

 

It is then possible to change the props texture or color range by adjusting shader attributes min & max values, or by plugging them to ppAttributes.

 

More details are in the Managing Shaders reference