The Lorez family - still useful as BG people in Iray renders ?
Mazh
Posts: 499
Hi,
yes I know there are things like billboards and possibilities to reduce resolution and textures of the Daz original figures, but I like the great variety (ages, clothing, poses, textures) Lorenzo and Loretta come with, also I would guess that it is easier to add BG people matching the context of the scenery using these products, than using any other solution.
So anybody can confirm that he uses these products (max midrange, maybe slighty DOFed, altered shaders) as BG people in his Iray renders and it doesn't look outdated ? 
Thanks
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2026 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
I just bought these today and haven't used them yet. I imagine that using them with DOF will negate any shortcomings of the models in terms of their age and resolution. As they are on sale today for $2.99 for both, I would say grab them and give them a try.
I have used them a few times, but last time was a year or so ago. In my opinion they do look a bit dated when used as mediumground figures, and sometimes even background. I was not blurring them with DOF so that might make a difference. I struggled to make the characters look that different using the morphs provided, and whilst more than one outfit is provided, it is still a tiny fraction of the wardrobe available for the modern Genesis bases. The clothing is also contemporary only, but there is a limited set of others if u hunt around.
Personally i prefer to use optimised Genesis figures for medium or near background, and billboards for far background.
what do you mean by "optimized" ?
Thanks for your answers, decided to buy it, the biggest con are definitely some textures, but the concept itself is great and at these are rigged figures, imo useable as BG/ midground people.
Perhaps this? https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
It has even Orcs and Zombies, two figures out of the box, no shader conversion (which means automatic conversion)
Carrara users get a lot of milage out of Lorenzo et al
we even have a thread for them all....
I know we don't have iRay... but we do have fun and find them all useful
I've not had much chance to use them yet, but I've played with them enough to be convinced that they've got potential, particularly on my low VRAM system, so I've been picking up most of the sets.
I'm currently playing around with some tweaks in Blender, seeing if I can update them to use G3 shaping and rigging to modernise them a bit. (Maybe even to the point of baking across some figure shapes and textures; being able to make low res versions of existing characters would add to the utility of these figures even more).
It'd be nice to see an updated version of the concept, but at this price I'm not complaining if they need a little polishing up.
I think they're good if you want really far away, background characters. They exist to hide in depth of field. If you're not using DoF, they're gonna stick out like a sore thumb.
As Divamakeup said above, I use Scene Optimizer to reduced the figures textures to 2048x2048 for medium background, and 1024x1024 for further back than that. In addition, strip off all of the maps except for color and specular. Finally reduce the resoution of the figure to base. It will still use more resources that Lorenzo/Loretta, but not by that much more.
Resource Saver is really useful too since you can use it to strip out textures altogether and just set certain objects and figures to match whatever color you want.
Lorez figures have one massive advantage over billboards: they have correct shadows for lighting from any angle. Billboards are problematic when light falls nearly parallel to their plane.
@ StezzaKarara Thanks for posting, visit the Carrara forums from time to time (own it myself), and it really seems that you've all fun over there
@ MattCastle Yes, an updated product would be great, would be an insta buy for me *wink wink*
@ all
this concept is so great and versatile, (the "newer" Lorenzo a little bit better than Lorena), mesh just for the visible parts, lower rez textures, different morphs, poses, clothing, accessoirs and colors.
Its a bit fiddly atm. with its old poser structures, but an updated version would be my go to solution for populating scenes.
Made a pic to show the options (render time < 1 min)
left to right (all figures SubDed)
latino skin with beard, baseball cap, older, belly and heavy morph, walking pose
caucasian teen skin, teen and face morph, M4 hair (read about that in the Carrara forums) , walking pose
caucasian skin, original hair, glasses, shopping bag, walking pose
black skin with beard, face morph, M4 hair, walking pose
P.S. And of course Scene Optimizer and Resource saver are great and useful products.
The more I'm messing around with it, the more convinced I am such a product could have potential.
Despite keeping the same mesh and texture resolutions (and before I've even really nailed the material parameters down), I think it's fair to say that it's an improvement:
(I have cheated slightly by adding in a normal map to the materials to fake a bit more mesh detail, but I think that adding one texture map is within reason given the advances in hardware!)
Of course, they'd still not be foreground figures (although with a SubD modifier, it wouldn't be out of the question for them to be reasonably close, just as long as they're not the focus of the image), but that's not what they're supposed to be.