How customizable are the add-ons that create crowds of people?

heisdave

HI, I need to populate a a space with alot of people and they all have to have certain appearance. For example if it is a school in Japan, then all the figures would be of a certain age and have some facial similarities.

I see some add-ons to create a crowd, do any of them allow you  to configure parameters for the crowd?     Ex.  Set M/F body type for age then, config it to apply 3 random hair types for the boys and 3 for the girls, plus boys and girls wear their school uniforms, and pose them randomly in one of 20 poses. Now generate 20 figures with random faces.

Are there any products that will do that?

diogenese19348

No, the now crowd products are all pre-rendered 2D planes.  They allow you to match the character alignment to the camera with scripts, but you can't alter their appearances.  There are two ways to do what you want to do, first you can use instancing if you want to create a number of idential characters to use in the background, one instance per type.  The other would be to create your own billboards with the characters you want to use.  There is a now crowd set for asian students, you could use that to start out then create other billboards to use with it. 

Toonces

Not that I'm aware of.

But if we're talking about extras, the existing products work nicely, e.g., https://www.daz3d.com/now-crowd-billboards-asian-school-life

They're canned 2D billboards, but easy on the hardware. Plus they can be rotated for different angles. Toss in some depth of field for some background blurriness and you've got a convincing school scene.