Best way to do crowds
josephlemons69_4db0991b45
Posts: 423
in The Commons
Whats the best way to do crowds, do I have to place each figure by hand or is there an easier way.
How did they create the promo images for this pose collection
Concert Crowd poses for Genesis 2
https://www.daz3d.com/concert-crowd-poses-for-genesis-2
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Comments
I can see a couple of repeats easily, so I think it was done with instancing - pose a few individuals for the front rows, then instance the rest from them (easier with one of the instancing tools, else you'll need to translate and rotate by hand).
Could also do it in layers I suppose - but with the crowd that close, you'd be doing a lot of repeats anyway to get shadows to fall correctly. Then again, if you're using focal blur, you only need detail on the front few. Mapping images to a plane (with transparency to cutout) can save on resources too.
But I'd go with instancing.
I recently struggled with that question myself. After considerable experimentation, I went with Predatron's Lorez figures (yes, placed individually) in the far background, blurred out with depth of field. On the closer figures, also slightly blurred, I changed the resolution to base, all except for the focal character. My hope was to create a scene that wouldn't take forever to render, but I had to bite the bullet and let this one go for around fifteen hours.
The "Best" way depends on what it is you are trying to achieve.
The closer to the camera/focus area that you are with the crowd, the more detail and effort you will likely need to make a crowd that doesn't look uniform or overly repetitive. Varying the figure is the easy part, the hard part is the clothing/hair. There are many ways to add randomness to a number of figures' features, adding variance to the clothing/hair used on the figures is where the headaches start.
The farther away (or more out of the focus) the crowd is, the more you can repeat without the viewer seeing that it has been done.
Kendall
Rendering in layers is another way to go, and I think how the promo picture for crowd poses was done. Do one group of people at a time, using either transparent backgrounds or masks for each group after the first.
For Daz Studio, there is a plugin called ultrascatter which allows you to create multiple instances and control how they are placed.
http://www.daz3d.com/ultrascatter-advanced-instancing-for-daz-studio
Carrara has a built-in replicator function.
The nice thing about a Studio plugin like ultrascatter or Carrara's replicators is that you can also create a map to control where the figures are placed (have the crowd behind the barricades only, or perhaps on the balconies just on the left side of the street). Great way to save time and reduce strain on system resources. Same functions can be used to make forests, gardens, traffic jams,...
I buy stock photographs from online stock photo agencies. They are usually royalty free.
I think it all depends on whether you want to do it all inside Studio or to what degree you're comfortable with postwork. In general, the more objects and morphable/posable figures you have in your scene the slower your render time will be however.
Within Studio you can use instancing (although this does limit you to not only repeating a character but with the exact same pose). I've also experimented with exporting posed characters as OBJ files and then importing them and positioning them. This technique is a little spotty - sometimes the textures don't work quite right. But if you combine both techniques and are careful with your depth-of field and lighting, you can get some great results.
If you're not adverse about planning your render in detail before you render, you could render several versions of the same scene with characters loaded in different places and then combine them in postwork. This requires a lot of planning to minimize the masking and cut-and-paste in the Photoshop-style program of your choice.