Hello,

I am in early stage of Project to choose the right tool for Crowd Simulation.

Assets,Animation and Lighting is based on Maya.

Is it possible to use Houdini just for crowd simulation and re-use the Sim for Lighting and Rendering in maya.
Advise would be helpful.

Thank you.

As far as I know, the crowds are a mantra procedural. you can convert them to geometry but depending on your character poly count it is most likely going to be in the tens of millions of polys

I dont know of any renderer other than mantra that will efficiently render the crowd procedural.

I am using them now for a project that is being rendered in arnold from maya, but I am rendering them in mantra. motion blur lines up, but it has been a process to recreate all the environments in houdini.

You could write out the agents to Alembic, but that would produce a huge amount of geometry for any deforming shapes as mentioned in the previous post. Another idea would be to just export the agents' joint transforms if you're able to do render-time deformation in whatever renderer you're using.

Mantra's agent procedural does render-time deformation, along with some additional LOD-based optimizations (http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini16.0/nodes/shop/vm_geo_agent) [sidefx.com]

I have a similar interest (but with Blender instead of Maya). My plan is to render the crowds in Houdini and composite with the rest of the scene rendered in Blender. I'll probably use the compositor in Houdini.

Thank you sidenimjay and Cwhite,

Your replies were really helpful.

To avoid complication on Pipeline has decided to stick inside Maya.

Will be exploring between Miarmy and Golaem.

Thank you for your kind reply.

cheers