Return of the Gi-normous Now-Crowd Sailors

I was excited to see, and just purchased, the Now-Crowd Seven Seas billboard product. Just the thing to add to all the sailing ships in my collection !

When I went to download, though, I found that there are 14 separate download files, totalling... well, I didn't add them up, but it looked like well over 10 gigabytes. The promo mentions it, I think, but I didn't notice that while I was busy imagining how great the sailors would look climbing the rigging on some of the wonderful ships I have.

I really don't see how a handful of billboards, even 40 of these purportedly resource friendly critters in multiple pose angles, could total such an outrageously huge resource burden in downloading, scene use, and in my computer's storage capacity.

I mean, a billboard is not a fully posed 3d figure in costume, it's a photo of that figure, a ONE quad primitive with transparency. That's two quads, times forty poses, times 72 angles. Half a dozen megabytes? Add shadows... what, maybe another 10 megabytes? Even multiply that by 10 for some unkonwn reason. 1 or 2 gigabytes or so, max? Is my math off?

Where the heck is the TEN plus gigabytes coming from? Some frivilous duplication of unecessarily large and unnecessary texture files, perhaps. Billboards are background scene elements, not close up props, and don't need large texture files. No bump, no Normals, no emission, no metalicity, no glossiness, no top coat... none of the subtle Iray settings and their maps are required, and most would cause reflection and other problems, so it's just one plain base image texture of the posed character; 512 x 512  woiuld work great in background props that small, but whatever.

What lives in the download will live in my scenes, and I would choose a billboard to reduce resource overhead, not increase it for no good reason.

Since I have to pay for downloads by the mb, I decided I just wouldn't pay for a download so unnecessarily huge, and went for the refund.

Billboards are supposed to be resource friendly, and in use they may be, but if Sailing the Seven Seas is a typical example, with Riversoft Art's Now-Crowd sets, there is HUGE resource overhead in just getting the sets in the first place.

The good news is the Daz makes returns like this simple and painless. and now I have a great incentive to create a few custom sailor billboards of my own, which is not at all hard to do. I have all the costumes, all the figures, and my custom boards will be in keeping with the purpose of billboards, to save on resources. I do have to invest a little time in posing my characters in situ, but, hey, that's fun too.

Happy sailing !