People going places: lightweight crowds for Geometrynodes / Blender 4.2

A lightweight geometry nodes setup to simulate large crowds in the distance. This simple simulation uses curves, paths and instances of low poly characters to quickly populate streets. The user only needs to provide a mesh for the people to navigate. The model does not feature collisions between people and is shipped with low poly characters with simplistic animations, so it is mostly suited for distant crowds

This has been built and tested on Blender 4.2, I provide no guarantees it works on other versions.

The nodes setup is available for free but you can leave me a tip if you can afford it (you can even come back after you tried it).

I also included 32 textured, low LOD, animated crowd characters (built from license free images) for an extra 2€ (coz these took quite some time to make and your girl needs to eat).

Free geometry nodes setup

- Basic procedural characters

- The geometry nodes setup:

- instantiates Count people over the the paths, picked from the Instances collection

- Speed is picked in range Min speed, Max speed, and a lateral random movement is applied based on Lateral spread

Path computation

- Increasing Diversity increases the number of different paths (does not increase the crowd population)

- Min path length removes stupidly short paths

- High Path cost variability add higher random values on edge cost, creating more chaotic (longer/less optimal) paths.

- Increasing Used path avoidance nudges the path-finding to avoid edges where paths already have been generated

- Paths are generated between I/O vertices using the base mesh. Vertices with a single connection are automatically picked as I/O.

Baking paths

- For high Diversity values (~50+) the real-time performance will decrease, using the bake button in the geonodes graph will allow for greater performances.

Free procedural people

The free tier comes with these procedurally-colored characters

Extra little textured people

For an extra 2€ you can get 32 textured, low LOD, animated crowd characters (built from license free images)

How to import to your projects

To import the node setup to you file you can either mark the node setup as asset (right click the geonodes name and "mark as asset") and place the downloaded file into your asset folder (preferences>File Paths>Asset Libraries>Path). Then it should appear into your assets in any file, and you should be able to drag an drop it.

Otherwise you can use File>Append, navigate to .../peopleGoingPlaces_v1.blend/NodeTree and append "people going places" into you file, it should then be available into the geonodes modifier.