Crowd Rendering

The Crowd Rendering Package is part of the Popul8 Express Unity SDK and is designed to efficiently display and interact with large crowds of 3D characters in Unity. All crowds are created in Popul8 Express, giving you consistent, high-quality digital humans that can be rendered in real time with minimal performance overhead.

This package enables you to populate scenes with hundreds or thousands of characters, while maintaining smooth animations and low memory usage.

Key Features

Runtime Loading - Load crowd data exported from Popul8 Express dynamically at runtime. Characters can be added, removed, or updated without restarting the scene.
GPU-Instanced Rendering - Efficiently render thousands of characters with minimal CPU and memory usage. Features include:
- Low memory footprint
- Support for character animations
- Optimized for high-performance rendering
- Level of Detail (LOD) support
- Frustum culling for off-screen characters
Interaction Support - Provides functionality to interact with the crowd. You can target, highlight, or trigger events on individual characters or groups.
Sample Scene - Includes a ready-to-use sample scene demonstrating crowd loading, animation, and performance optimizations. The scene is fully customizable:
- Modify shaders to suit your visual style
- Adapt behaviors to meet your gameplay needs

Typical Workflow

Create your crowd in Popul8 Express - Generate a crowd using the Popul8 Express application
Export Crowds from Popul8 Express - Export the crowd using the Bridge to Unity option, with "Instance Rendering" enabled.
Import into Unity - The bridge will handle package installation, data loading and setup.
Interact with the Crowd – Explore the scene to inspect all objects managing crowd data. These objects handle both the underlying data and the rendering of each character, giving you full control over crowd behavior and visualization.
Modify and Extend - Modify shaders or scripts as needed to match your artistic direction or gameplay systems.