Descripción
Render millions of animated characters, not just thousands.
Ultimate Crowd Renderer is a GPU-driven crowd system for Unreal Engine 5, powered by Vertex Animation Textures (VAT) and running in real time. It supports up to 16 million characters and multiple character types in the same crowd, all without a separate Unreal actor for every character.
This is not a Niagara or instanced static mesh (HISM) crowd system. It’s a custom low-level rendering pipeline built directly into Unreal’s renderer, with its own mesh rendering path, compute-shader GPU culling, and indirect draw calls, made specifically for massive animated crowds.
Built for stadium audiences, armies, battlefields, city streets, festivals and any scene that needs huge crowds.
Turn any character into a crowd with one click, including modular characters and MetaHumans. Materials are handled automatically. Baking captures the original materials of your characters across all parts, including hair, configures them for the crowd and generates distant character images, with no manual material setup required.
Ready in minutes: bake your character, drag a Horde Crowd into the level, pick the character and scale the area. No Blueprint or material work needed to get started.
Performance example: in our test, a packaged Shipping build at 4K resolution ran 5 million characters at approximately 58 FPS, with Lumen and shadows enabled. Actual performance depends on hardware and scene settings.
KEY FEATURES
ONE-CLICK BAKE
• Built-in Vertex Animation (VAT) baker inside the Unreal Editor
• Single skeletal meshes, modular characters (clothes, armour, weapons on sockets) and MetaHumans with groom hair
• Supports Anim Sequences, Anim Composites and Anim Montages as crowd animations
• Everything in one Crowd Character asset: animations, materials, detail levels, distant character images and all baked data
SCALE AND PERFORMANCE
• Up to 16 million standing or animated characters
• Automatic detail levels: full mesh, low-poly mid mesh and baked distant character images, with soft transitions
• Vertex Budget keeps the frame rate steady at any crowd size
MIXED CROWDS
• Several character types in one crowd, each with its own weight, animation and group
• Each type plays a chosen animation or a random one of its animations
• Animation play rate per character, group or whole crowd from Blueprint
PLACEMENT
• Shapes: box, circle (rings or grid, with an empty middle), custom outline and spline
• Spacing, Fill, Jitter, Scale Range, Height Offset and Seed for natural variation
• Facing: Forward, Toward Target, Toward or Away From Center, Custom Angle or Random
• Follow Surface (stands, stairs, terrain) or Flat, with obstacle avoidance and max step height
• Spline crowds with lanes and lane spacing
EDITOR TOOLS
• Horde Crowd mode: paint, draw new areas, select, move, rotate and erase characters
ANIMATION CONTROL
• Locomotion animations: set Idle, Walk and Run, and moving characters switch between them automatically by speed
• Play any animation on single characters, on a group or on the whole crowd
• Smooth crossfades and adjustable play rate
GROUPS
• Assign groups per character type in a crowd, or to characters added at runtime
• Play animations on a group, get the characters in a group, or find characters of a group within a radius or at random
• Use the returned IDs to move, remove, reposition or animate exactly those characters
MOVEMENT (BETA)
• MoveTo / MoveAllTo with pathfinding around walls and buildings
• Avoidance between characters, across character types and around moving obstacles (cars, the player)
• Walking spline crowds: walk speed, one or both directions by lane, speed variation and turn around at end
PRODUCTION READY
• Works in packaged Shipping builds
• Shadows, and motion vectors so crowds stay sharp with TSR / TAA and motion blur
• Full Blueprint API on every crowd: add, remove, move, animate and query characters
• Change crowd quality at runtime (Vertex Budget, shadows), for example from an in-game settings menu
SUPPORT
Need help or have a question? Email [email protected]
IMPORTANT NOTES
This plugin depends on Unreal Engine built-in HairStrands, Niagara and ProceduralMeshComponent plugins (enabled automatically) for groom hair baking and distant character image generation.