Autodesk Media & Entertainment
“Fortiche” means “Ace” in French, a name chosen deliberately by co-founders Jérôme Combe, Pascal Charrue, and Arnaud Delord when they founded their animation studio Fortiche Production in 2009. Since then, they have worked tirelessly to establish Fortiche as a globally renowned animation studio.
Based in Paris, Montpellier, and Las Palmas, Fortiche operates as a tightly knit creative team. Producers, directors, storyboard artists, animators, compositors, and editors all collaborate in-house, ensuring consistency from first concept to final delivery. The studio has built a reputation for its distinctive visual style, which skillfully blends 2D and 3D media. This approach has given rise to their signature #ForticheTouch, a hallmark of their work.
The studio’s latest achievement is Arcane, a Netflix series made in partnership with Riot Games. We sat down with Crowd Supervisor Michael Etienne to discuss how his team used the Golaem plug-in for Maya to create crowds for Season 2 of Arcane.
Can you introduce yourself?
My name is Michael Etienne, and I was the Crowd Supervisor on Arcane Season 2, produced at Fortiche Production. My first production experiences involved creating crowd shots using Golaem. I worked on commercials and later on the feature film Asterix & Obelix: God Save Britannia.
After that, I alternated between crowd production and working as a Maya TD before fully committing to production. I pursued a year of training in 3D animation at Gobelins. Following this, I joined Fortiche as a hybrid artist—both an animator and a Golaem expert—on Arcane Season 1, before stepping into the role of Crowd Supervisor for Season 2. I have now been at Fortiche for four years.
How did you assemble and train your team? How long did it take a new hire to be productive?
At its peak, the team had five artists, one supervisor, and one production manager. The talented artists included Estelle Parein, Garance Duchène-Ribas, Aurélien Schmitt, Karl Chan, Eloi Vidal, Delphine Gay, and François Bamas. Each team member quickly found their footing and delivered optimal results for the series. One of our animators, Estelle Parein, was in another department during Season 1 before joining the team. I trained her in crowd production and the Golaem plug-in, and she became fully operational in just a few weeks.
The balance between generalists, FX artists, and animators allowed us to work efficiently in a task-force structure. We created assets from tertiary models, adapted rigs, developed lookdev, produced animations and FX, and delivered crowd simulations to other departments. Our Production Manager, Marlène Torest, greatly facilitated the workflow during the two and a half years of production.
What were some of the challenges Golaem solved for you?
Given the close proximity of certain characters to the camera throughout the show, we had to push the level of detail to a very high standard. This involved converting Yeti Groom into Golaem Fur, using Apex for cloth simulation, simulating full-screen flags with Golaem in specific shots, and hundreds of blendshapes for facial animation per character. The look development was highly refined, with multiple AOVs (skin, metal, clothing, hair) managed for rendering in Guerilla Render.
On the animation side, to match the quality of animation seen in main and secondary characters, a significant effort went into producing and refining animation cycles within our team—around 500 cycles were created. The animation requirements led us to treat the crowd as full-fledged actors. High expectations for facial animation—such as blinks, eye darts, and expressions—as well as body mechanics, required careful attention. Golaem allowed us to faithfully reproduce nearly all animation intentions.
How many crowd shots did you create?
Across nine episodes, we created 313 crowd shots. They ranged from as few as 3 characters to over 600 in large-scale scenes. We used 49 unique crowd assets with all the necessary variations in combinations and colors. Crowd atmospheres included idles, reacting, cheering, wandering, panic, battle, and cloth simulation.
How did you customize your tools and pipeline around Golaem?
On the asset side, we implemented a constraint system on the Golaem rig, linking it to the rigs of Fortiche’s main characters. This setup allowed us to easily reuse animations from the animation department or create original cycles with maximum control over body and facial animation.
Our motion capture sessions enabled us to retarget takes on our crowd characters. A custom IK-based retargeting system mapped the XSens FBX outputs onto our rig controllers, which was highly efficient and required minimal cleanup.
We worked directly on the Fortiche rig for cycle production, muting any parts incompatible with Golaem’s animation engine. That gave us complete control over character selection and allowed us to automatically export animations as .gmo files.
On the shot production side, integrating the Golaem plug-in streamlined our workflow. We could quickly begin working on the shot by starting with a scene-build containing the camera, environment, and animation caches of the main characters. A dedicated Crowd Asset Manager allowed us to assemble and manage each scene’s required crowd character types. A Work and Release scene system handled the output paths for simulation files and eliminated the need for manual file management.
Did you integrate FX with Golaem characters? What was your workflow?
We integrated the hairstyles created by the grooming department for the tertiary characters into our crowd simulation assets by converting the Yeti groom into Golaem fur. For the cloth, we used Apex to define the properties of the props and manage their simulation within Golaem. We handled the lookdev ourselves for both of these elements. For interactions with 2D and 3D FX, we exported Alembic files for the body parts involved, which other departments used in Houdini.
How did the Layout tool help you make the shots faster?
Given the high number of animation retakes, we needed to transition from global control to fine control easily. Using this tool in conjunction with the staging capabilities offered by the Layout department allowed us to handle all character animation and direction retakes.
From placement and animation timing to pose editing and preparing the crowd in different layers for compositional needs, the Layout department played a central role. It ensured non-destructive edits that were quick to implement, allowing us to be responsive to the directors’ requests.
What was most rewarding about this project?
Despite the expected complexity in animation and the demands placed on asset designs, our team produced all the shots on time and in an ideal atmosphere. The fact that the crowd was considered animated characters and not FX characters was a source of immense pride. From my early years as a developer, I had always sought a bridge that would allow me to transition from tech to production, and that bridge turned out to be Golaem. I thus have a special connection with this plug-in, but more importantly, with the developers behind this project, whose success story is truly remarkable.
The exchanges with the Golaem team over the years have helped me grow and enabled me to work on increasingly ambitious projects. I can only praise the engineers’ dedication, their continuous efforts to introduce game-changing features, their thorough documentation, and, above all, their legendary customer support.
Golaem’s recent acquisition by Autodesk marks a new milestone for them, and I’m confident it will enable them to better address the technical and artistic needs of an ever-evolving visual effects industry.
Get powerful artist-friendly crowd simulation, character animation, and layout tools with Autodesk Golaem—now available exclusively in the Media & Entertainment Collection.
Plus, gain access to essential tools like Maya, 3ds Max, Arnold (on up to 5 machines), and Bifrost for Maya (on up to 15 machines) for less with the M&E Collection.