Virtual Population Growth Driving Innovation in Crowd Simulation By DOMINIC rowd simulation has finally become easier thanks to worlds, is up to the challenge. MILANO is one of the technological breakthroughs. “Evolution favors simplicity and so do most challenging Whether filling scenes with opposing we,” said Michaël Rouillé, Golaem’s vice tasks in computer armies or throngs of people shuffling to president of engineering. “Our goal with animation—so work during rush hour, animation and Golaem Crowd* is to provide the VFX challenging that VFX teams need tools for creating realistic and animation industries with high- crowds in virtual virtual crowds that can interact with their performance, easy-to-use tools worlds are rare. surroundings in a believable manner. For for populating 3D worlds with Long accustomed example, they must follow undulations visually compelling and believable to these crowd- in the landscape, avoid obstacles, and virtual humans.” free worlds, audiences today don’t behave like a real cast of thousands, all Golaem Crowd is a multi-threaded C notice the absence. At the same without the artist needing to manually plug-in for Autodesk Maya* that taps into time, computer animation and visual choreograph a horde of individual the power of the Intel® Core™ processor effects (VFX) have become incredibly characters. Dwindling budgets and family to enable a streamlined workflow sophisticated, enabling stunning realism compressed timelines are adding further for simulating crowd scenes. With in those worlds. Creating scenes with pressures to this complex task. Golaem Crowd, content creators can legions of virtual extras whose every Golaem, a software company easily produce a virtual cast of thousands, move could make or break the illusion focused on bringing life to digital controlling overall crowd behavior in 1 Intel® Software Adrenaline SNCF—France’s national railway— • Procedural rendering plug-ins for was Golaem’s first customer. SNCF V-Ray*, mental ray* renderer, used Golaem’s crowd technology to RenderMan* rendering technology, simulate and optimize the boarding and and RenderMan-compliant renderers. disembarkation process of passenger trains in Paris and its suburbs. “Today In the VFX and animation market, Golaem SNCF uses our technology to simulate encounters as many workflows and various situations—for example, rush creative processes as there are users. To hour, impolite passengers, and passengers accommodate these variations, Golaem with impaired mobility,” Rouillé said. identified common steps that could be implemented in any production workflow. “We found that most studios build INTEL® HARDWARE scenes incrementally, step by step, ENABLES INNOVATION starting with asset creation, followed by placement, animation, then simulation, A few years ago, computing a thousand- and finally rendering,” Rouillé said. character shot created with Golaem Crowd would have been a completely non-interactive process, taking overnight, a day, or longer. “Thanks to technological advances, a similar crowd simulation can be computed in real-time on a desktop PC,” Rouillé said. “The availability of multi- core Intel® processors brings a significant performance boost to our customers.” Another boost comes from the proliferation of 64-bit OSs. “Thanks to Microsoft Windows* 7 64-bit and Linux* 64-bit, we can take advantage of the 16 GB of RAM commonly available on our users’ workstations,” Rouillé said. “If we can fit all the data for a 50K character crowd simulation in RAM, we do not have to rely on out-of-core algorithms to compute the crowd simulation in multiple which the appearance and motions of passes. This gives us another huge Golaem Crowd respects this iterative individual characters are visually believable. performance boost, because we do not process, and each tool in Golaem Through its close collaboration with need to access the hard drive as often as Crowd is paired with one of those steps. Intel, and by using a variety of Intel® when we’re using a 32-bit OS.” “We designed Golaem Crowd to help software development tools to optimize artists avoid repetitive or cumbersome code, Golaem has been able to achieve tasks, giving them more time to focus ABOVE, LEFT Fortress awesome near-perfect scaling, boosting KEEPING THE ARTIST on what gives real value to the shot. The Assault, a Golaem playback frame rates for pre-visualization IN MIND goal is to make every dollar spent visible Crowd* demonstration and delivering faster render times both on on the screen.” by Axel Domenger workstations and in the cloud. Ample processing horsepower accelerates for SIGGRAPH 2012. rendering and pre-viz, but to speed the creative process, Golaem was selective INNOVATION THROUGH FROM RESEARCH TO REALITY in the virtual human technologies it built COLLABORATION into Golaem Crowd. Founded in 2009, Golaem is the “We chose key technologies that According to Rouillé, customer need— brainchild of Stéphane Donikian, a would allow artists to focus on creativity based on audience expectations—in the researcher at INRIA, the French National and forget about mechanics,” Rouillé VFX and animation market is another Institute for Research in Computer said. These technologies include: driving factor in Golaem’s software Science. Golaem currently employs a • Animation engine for automatic development process. “In a highly full-time staff of 13, eight of whom motion retargeting and motion competitive market, a studio needs to are focused on R&D. The fruits of their blending. innovate to bring the artists’ ideas to research include technologies for real- • Navigation engine for automatic path- screen in less time, with smaller budgets. time animation and navigation, and finding and collision avoidance. Our job is to bring innovation to the dynamic simulation of both the behavior • Behavior engine for control over virtual table and focus our R&D where it’s of the crowd as a whole and of each extras; starts and stops animation most needed. We know that our goals individual in the crowd. using environment-aware triggers. are ambitious and that the best way to Intel® Software Adrenaline 2 achieve them is through collaboration formations) that are navigational Golaem lacked the tools and with the right partners.” direction-enabled. expertise to quickly identify where to Whether they’re producing animation • The physics can simulate rag doll apply its parallelization efforts. “I have and effects for episodic television, behavior, so characters fall realistically solid experience in code parallelization feature films, or commercials, “Few have after an impact or an explosion. dating back to SGI architectures,” the time or budget to develop tools in- Rouillé said. “We did our homework by house,” said Rouillé. “Also, most studios reading on the subject, but nonetheless don’t have time to learn how to use we did not have the resources for a complex software or integrate it with trial-and-error approach.” their existing pipeline.” Working with Intel allowed Golaem to To hasten development and keep fully exploit the potential offered by Intel training costs down, Golaem chose to multi-core processors. integrate directly with Autodesk Maya, “We achieved a huge performance which Rouillé thinks of as “the artist’s boost for Golaem Crowd 2.0—a 15x Swiss Army knife.” Rouillé also felt improvement over Golaem Crowd 1.0 that Maya’s flexible architecture was when run on Intel® Core™ i7 processors. ideal for creating scripts and writing When run on the 3rd generation Intel® plug-ins to help increase efficiency and Core™ processor family, performance will customize features. improve even more.” Golaem used two Intel software development tools: Intel® Threaded RAISING THE BAR AgAIN ACHIEVING BREAKTHROUGH Building Blocks (Intel® TBB) versions 2.2 PERFORMANCE through 4, and Intel® Parallel Studio XE, Golaem Crowd 2.0, due for release which includes Intel® VTune™ Amplifier in summer 2012, will introduce new Golaem customers were also asking for XE and Intel® Inspector XE. “Intel TBB features and enhancements designed to increased simulation performance, which gave us cross-platform atomic operations, make creating complex crowd shots, such is when Rouillé turned to Intel. “Golaem thread-safe containers, threads, and as battle scenes and urban population Crowd 1.0 simulations were CPU-bound,” thread-locking mechanisms as well simulation, easier than ever. he explained. “The next logical step was as multi-thread allocators in a solid • The Behavior editor makes it easier to to scale on multi-core processors, so I package,” Rouillé said. build characters’ behaviors. looked for a partner to help us achieve a Intel VTune Amplifier XE helped identify • Group navigation allows characters holy grail—parallelism; great scaling with and resolve performance bottlenecks. “The to be assembled by group (or in a minimum of effort on our part.” tool gives reliable performance reports 3 Intel® Software Adrenaline through hardware-based sampling that According to Rouillé, Autodesk chief we could compare with blueprints at executive officer Carl Bass foresees that in each improvement and thus measure the two or three years all Autodesk products impact of any modifications. Furthermore, will be only used online. However, Marc system-wide, event-based sampling gave Petit, Autodesk’s senior vice president, us precious information on cache misses told the CG Channel that Autodesk in our code. It was an eye-opener for us.” Media & Entertainment’s transition to Rouillé added, “Intel Inspector XE saved