Adding People

drafter69_696b99e42b

How do you are a bunch of people to something like the   "Lotus Flower Auditorium" without it taking months to render???

Richard Haseltine

You can probably downsize the textures on most of them, since they are presumably nott hat many pixels high in the render. You may even be able to dispense with some textures if all the areas of the body that use them are covered, or remove some of the maps that have little visible impact on the look of the skin at a distance.  You may also be able to hide body-parts that are covered by clothing. You might also be able to use instances for figures that are only partially visible.

Paintbox

There also people billboards, where you use an image of a figure instead of the 3d model. Its trickier to get the light and the angle right, but its a ton faster to render.

example https://www.daz3d.com/now-crowd-billboards-modern-city-life

ArkadySkies

In addition to the above suggestions, remove subD (Parameters->Generall->Mesh Resolution->Resolution Level: Base) and HD, use hair and clothing models with simpler geometry (as well as no subD or HD). For distant characters' clothing using diffuse-driven fabric shaders can probably save time as well. Eyelashes (if you bother with them) and mouth textures can be reduced and reused across all figures of the same base (eyes probably work too), and you can probably use diffuse color channel trickery to minimize the number of skin and hair textures without being obvious.

Distant characters probably don't need any texture maps above 1024 px and you can probably go as low as 512 px for everything (except maybe the face). Eyes and mouth can probably be 256 px. I haven't done a crowd scene yet, but these are the values I'd try.

Imago

You can alsi use the Decimator form the store to reduce their poly count, the plugin is so reliable and precise that you can bring the chars to less than a quarter of their original polycount without losing their shape or the rig.