Populating massive scenes with realistic animated crowds has always been a demanding task in Unreal Engine, especially when performance becomes a bottleneck. Last month, we looked at a Blender add-on that solved this kind of challenge, and today we’ll explore a similar solution made for Unreal Engine.
Meet OverCrowd, a recently released crowd-simulation plugin made by Charlie Driscoll, built specifically for Unreal Engine 5. It’s designed to help filmmakers, animators, and developers populate scenes with thousands of modular, animated characters while keeping performance stable.
Meet OverCrowd, a recently released crowd-simulation plugin made by Charlie Driscoll, built specifically for Unreal Engine 5. It’s designed to help filmmakers, animators, and developers populate scenes with thousands of modular, animated characters while keeping performance stable.
By combining Niagara with Vertex Animation Textures (VATs), OverCrowd can generate large, dynamic scenes, from battlefields to city streets, with minimal setup. It focuses on scalability and efficiency, enabling cinematic crowd shots directly in Unreal without relying on external simulation tools.
Here’s a two-hour tutorial shared by the author on his YouTube channel, walking through how to use the main tools and workflows included in this plugin.
Main Features
- Wardrobe Editor
Organize modular wardrobes, body parts, and baked animations directly inside Unreal Engine. The system supports well-known assets such as Polyphoria’s armor sets and MetaHumans, making it easy to build varied and reusable character libraries.
- Vertex Animation Textures (VATs)
Convert modular skeletal meshes into lightweight VAT-based characters. This approach allows the engine to render thousands of animated models simultaneously while maintaining stable performance and visual fidelity.
- Static Population Boxes
Fill large environments such as stadiums, cities, or battlefields in seconds. The plugin can also generate paired animations for more dynamic interactions, like dueling or synchronized crowd behavior.
- Niagara Integration
Use Niagara systems to drive large-scale crowd behavior. Includes spline-following paths, grid-based positioning, and collision avoidance to keep characters moving naturally within complex scenes.
- Dynamic LOD Generation
Automatically creates optimized Levels of Detail, ensuring smooth cinematic transitions from wide shots to close-ups without manual setup.
- Additional Tools and Compatibility
Supports MetaHumans, including independent facial animation on Vertex Animated Instances (VANISMs). Includes animation blending via volumes, masking tools for geometry clipping, and full compatibility with Unreal’s particle and rendering systems.
The developer also shared some of the features planned for upcoming updates, such as dynamic character swapping between VATs and skeletal meshes, and more advanced Niagara-based crowd behaviors inspired by large-scale battle simulations.
If you want to learn more about what’s coming next or explore the full documentation, you can find everything on the plugin’s official page shared below.
Other Useful Alternatives
- MassCrowd (Epic Games): Part of Unreal Engine’s official Mass framework, MassCrowd is a native solution for simulating large groups of characters with AI-driven behaviors. It focuses on scalable, data-oriented simulations.
Unlike OverCrowd, which emphasizes artistic control and visual realism through VATs and Niagara, MassCrowd is primarily a gameplay and AI system aimed at developers building interactive simulations at scale.
- Procedural NPC Crowds Pro V3: A plugin for Unreal Engine designed to generate large numbers of animated NPCs with route-based movement, idle behaviors, and simple crowd logic. It’s particularly useful for city or marketplace scenes that need ambient life without complex simulation setups.
Compared to OverCrowd, this tool focuses more on procedural population and scripted behaviors rather than large-scale, performance-optimized crowd rendering.
- Atoms Crowd / Atoms Agents: A modular crowd framework widely used in VFX and animation for tools like Unreal, Maya, and Houdini. It includes ready-to-use human and animal agents with hundreds of variations and renderer support.
Compared to OverCrowd, Atoms is more oriented toward cinematic and offline rendering workflows rather than real-time crowd systems for games.
- uCrowds: A large-scale crowd simulation solution often used in city planning, infrastructure, and event management. It can also integrate with Unreal and Unity for interactive simulations.
Unlike OverCrowd, which focuses on artistic and real-time crowd generation, uCrowds is designed for analytical and predictive simulations, emphasizing realism and large population data.
✨ You can get the OverCrowd Plugin on Fab.
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