Crowds

Built for VFX, animation, and game cinematics, Houdini’s crowd system is a complete solution for instancing, simulation, and behavior. This can all be found inside a procedural, artist-friendly workflow.

Geometry Level
Crowds

Crowds can now be set up at the geometry [SOP] level using a suite of new tools. The Crowds MotionPath tools allows you quickly make changes to the motion path or the animation of a small number of agents without the need to re-simulate the entire crowd.

Dynamic Look at

Crowds can now dynamically switch who they are looking at while in motion. Based on certain rules, each agent turn their eyes and then their head to look at another agent nearby. This results in a much more natural look to both medium and background crowds.

Crowd Procedural

The Crowd Procedural provides render-time optimization that improves memory usage and performance.

KineFX Agents

The crowd tools integrate with the new KineFX character tools which make it easier to prep and refine your agents.

Hero Agents

At the same time, these tools provide a workflow for directing hero agents to achieve specific results that stand out from the crowd.

CROWDS IN PRODUCTION

Bacon X | Commercial Projects

Bacon X is a VFX studio based in Copenhagen that specializes in commercial work, but has also worked on HBO shows and Scandinavian films. They recently created a commercial for Etsy, using Houdini to simulate crowds, cloth, and smoke effects. They also crafted a Martian landscape and sandstorm for the client BKW. Despite challenges, they successfully utilized new tools, resulting in projects they're proud of and clients love.

Terrain Adaptation

Agents can lock to terrain, automatically adjusting their stride to match uneven ground. As they move across slopes, steps, and rugged surfaces, the solver drives each skeleton to place feet where they should land—delivering natural, stable walks over any terrain.

Partial/Full Ragdoll

State transitions allow agents to hand off control to a rigid-body simulation to create impacts, knockdowns, or death events. When an agent goes down, its body and limbs react naturally to collisions and gravity, delivering visceral, believable falls and dynamic secondary motion.

Banking

Mix left and right turn variations as characters arc through motion, to produce natural shifts in balance and posture instead of simply rotating the agent. The result is smoother, more believable turning with minimal effort.

Crowd Nodes

Here some of the nodes to look out for when working with Crowds in Houdini. These nodes let you add agents then set up their behaviour. These nodes can work at the Geometry level or the Dynamics level.