Introduction

About

Atoms Crowd is a crowd simulation framework. 
Atoms Crowd is skeleton based, modular and extendable via c++ or python.

Atoms Crowd does not rely on any 3D package.

We have integrated Atoms Crowd into Unreal Engine, Maya, Houdini, Katana, Gaffer and Clarisse.
Atoms Crowd supports already VRay, Renderman, Arnold and Redshift.

For the sake of brevity, we might refer to Atoms Crowd simply as Atoms in this documentation.

Why Atoms Crowd?

Atoms Crowd is:

• Easy to use. Anyone can use Atoms Crowd when it comes to simulating, even people with very limited crowd knowledge. This is because Atoms Crowd is completely user driven, artists can in fact decide what to do with any of their agents at any time, from deviating their directions to modifying their positions or poses. No AI will take decisions for you. Artist familiar with crowd concepts might be needed for building your crowd show/shot environment (i.e. agent definitions, animation clips).
• Customizable and extendable. You can extend Atoms Crowd with C++ and python. The python bindings match completely the C++ side. You can access any kind of information during the simulation, write your own exporters, create your behaviours etc. Having this flexibility makes easy both to integrate Atoms Crowd in your current workflow and extend it if you find that the software is lacking a particular feature you really need for delivering a show.
• Skeleton based simulation. We fully simulate the agent skeletons (no particles) to achieve the best animation quality.
• Multi-software support. Thanks to its structure, Atoms Crowd can work on multiple softwares and support other technologies, such as render engines. Currently Atoms Crowd supports Unreal Engine, Houdini and Maya, but it's easy to make it work with your proprietary technology. For instance, you might already have a rendering workflow you want to keep and that would not be a problem, as you can extract all the relevant information you need from Atoms Crowd at render time and use it with your custom tools.