iCrowds

Highlights

Engineered a dynamic clothing system with automatic weight transfer and overlap avoidance for procedural outfits.

Created a curve-based tool to draw crowd paths with customizable density, movement types and randomness.

Implemented an intelligent pathfinding system so crowd agents navigate urban environments and avoid obstacles.

Developed a customizable, event-triggered ragdoll physics system using Blender's Python API.

Overview

iCrowds populates scenes with people — static background crowds for stadiums, parks, streets and queues, and animated crowds that walk along paths drawn by the artist. It ships on Superhive (formerly Blender Market) for Blender 4.5, rendering in both Cycles and EEVEE.

Breakdown

Distribution

Agents are scattered over any surface with controls for density, minimum spacing and seed, and can be painted in or out with a weight-paint mask. Obstacles are respected, so a crowd parts around them — like the helicopter in the gallery. Stadium stands, parks, streets and queues are all built the same way.

A curve defines where a crowd walks; density, movement type and randomness are set per path. Agents then plan their own way through the environment and avoid obstacles instead of following the curve blindly.

Procedural outfits

Clothing is assembled per agent. Weights are transferred from the body automatically so garments deform with the rig, and overlapping layers are pushed apart so they don’t intersect.

Ragdolls (iCrowds 2)

Any agent can switch from animation to a physics ragdoll when an event fires, for realistic falls and collisions. Ragdolls are customizable, and the whole system is driven through Blender’s Python API.

Videos