Render millions of animated characters in Unreal Engine 5 in real time, with a custom GPU-driven crowd system powered by Vertex Animation Textures (VAT). Supports up to 16 million characters and multiple character types in the same crowd, all without a separate Unreal actor for every character.

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. Ultimate Crowd Renderer uses its own GPU pipeline for drawing, culling and detail levels, without relying on Niagara, HISM / instanced static meshes or Mass for rendering. 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: 5 million characters at approximately 58 FPS in a 4K Shipping build, with Lumen and shadows enabled.

Note: this plugin depends on Unreal Engine built-in HairStrands, Niagara and ProceduralMeshComponent plugins (enabled automatically) for groom hair baking and distant character image generation.