Ever wished you could populate an entire street, stadium, or office scene in minutes instead of hours? One tool can transform an empty environment into a lively crowd with just a few clicks.
Today we introduce Population – Human Crowd Simulation, an add-on by Bproduction, a team we’ve featured before. This Blender tool lets you fill scenes with realistic animated people in no time, offering 48 photo-scanned characters and a library of 55 motion-capture animations to bring streets, events, or interiors to life.
Today we introduce Population – Human Crowd Simulation, an add-on by Bproduction, a team we’ve featured before. This Blender tool lets you fill scenes with realistic animated people in no time, offering 48 photo-scanned characters and a library of 55 motion-capture animations to bring streets, events, or interiors to life.
Released in 2023, this add-on supports Blender versions 4.4 and 4.5 and comes packed with useful features. Let’s take a closer look at them.
Some of the featured modes and options
- Bidirectional Path – Make crowds move back and forth along a path.
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- Group Mode –Spawn people in defined groups for more natural formations.
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- On Vertices Mode – Distribute characters precisely on selected vertices.
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- Paint Mode – Paint directly on a surface to place and animate characters.
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- Stadium Mode – Fill stadium seats quickly with varied animated people.
- Pitch/Inflate Path – Add volume and variation to crowd paths for more dynamic layouts.
Some of the key features
- Motion Capture Integration – Apply any of the 55 mocap animations (walking, running, dancing, daily life, sports, etc.) to any of the 48 photo-scanned characters.
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- 3D Scanned Characters – High-quality, realistic people divided into casual, business, and sport categories.
- Smart Shaders for Variations – Randomize clothing and hair colors to create unique, memory-efficient crowds.
- HD & Low-poly Models – Use 8K textures and subsurface scattering for close shots or optimized low-poly versions for large scenes.
- Single or Crowd Mode – Place individual characters for full control or generate large crowds with a single click.
🎥 Here’s a quick video showcasing all the available character animations:
These are the main features, but for full details on installation and usage, we recommend checking the official documentation here.
Some Useful / Similar Alternatives
If you are looking for alternatives to this add-on, or just useful alternatives for the area, here’s a quick list for you:
- Procedural Crowds: This add-on provides a crowd system with over 50 photo-scanned human models and controls for distribution, animation, and variation. Its node-based, procedural setup allows more customized behaviors compared to Population, though it can require a bit more manual configuration.
- Agents (Blender) – A beta-stage add-on for Blender 4.3+ that delivers true agent-based crowd simulation. Each character moves independently with smart pathfinding, terrain awareness, and speed-driven animations. It currently ships with a low-poly base model and a small set of animations, but it excels at large, dynamic, obstacle-aware crowds. Compared to Population’s photo-scanned characters and motion-capture library, Agents focuses more on procedural crowd behavior and navigation.
- And finally, Human Generator Ultimate, a Blender add-on that brings photorealistic human creation directly into your workflow. It offers a wide variety of presets, real-time sliders, hairstyles, clothing, and expressions to customize characters in minutes. Unlike Population, which is focused on crowd generation and animation, Human Generator’s strength lies in building high-quality individual characters that you can further rig, pose or animate.
✨ You can get the Population - Human Crowd Simulation add-on on the SuperHive Market.
📘 Want to build your own Blender tools? Check out Blender Tool Development Fundamentals, a complete guide to creating custom operators, UI extensions, gizmos, and Qt widgets for advanced add-on development.
📘 Want to build your own Blender tools? Check out Blender Tool Development Fundamentals, a complete guide to creating custom operators, UI extensions, gizmos, and Qt widgets for advanced add-on development.
Check out our new book!
We invite you to explore "Blender Tool Development Fundamentals", a comphensive book on the concepts and fundamentals seen in this post.
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