Large Scale Rendering/Postwork Help
MJ007
Posts: 1,701
Hello All,
I have a scene Im trying to put together where I want to have a varierty of aliens in the stands of a stadium (I am using Meshbox Baseball Stadium) and the stadium needs to appear to be full of them. I know I could easily do a close-up with maybe 50 or so figures, but for distance scenes, the stadium needs to look full.
Rendering several THOUSANDS of figures, even lo-res would probably crash my machine. So what would you guys do to pull off a render like this? And if you've done something like this, I would LOVE to see it.
Any and all tips are welcomed!
-MJ
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Comments
Egads, no don't even try to render all that out. You need to make what's called a billboard, which is basically a flat plane oriented to the camera, with your crowds on them as textures. If your doing an angled shot like the one you have, I'd just add them in with an image editor after. I've never actually seen anyone do huge crowds in a 3d image.
You could also render figures out out in managable blocks, and add those in postwork too. I have seen this approach used for complex scenes.
Just some thoughts.
Do a render of a small crowd and in Postwork you can clone or duplicate it. Alternatively you can cut\paste a crowd from a photo and apply a few overlays to change the colour so it looks non human. If you have Starwars Ep.1, the pod race scene, you can print-screen or capture the right crowd at the right angle etc and use something like that. There are tons of ways you can achieve this:)
You sure about that?
http://www.massivesoftware.com/
But that's just a bit of overkill... ;-)
Personally, I'd probably go with rendering up a couple of small groups to png and maybe a shadow catcher, then use those renders in an image editor (GIMP/PS) to fill in the stadium.
Won't instancing help as well? Make a handful of different billboards and then instance them around the stadium, one instance group overlapping each other for variety.
get Carrara and use a replicator
or instancing in Bryce maybe
one of my videos with lots of replicated figures ANIMATED
A few years back someone here posted a couple of images they did of very large scenes with over 100 characters each. What they did for that was setup a few characters at a time, render them and then post work them into the main image. It was carefully planned out and worked well. So what you could do is seperate the aliens into sections and render one section at a time and post work them together. To line sections up where you would have overlapping characters you could always have the last row from one section included in the next just and make sure you layer correctly in your paint program.
I would go for billboards, (see both my renders) and instances.
Lot of postwork, and one or two alien heads very close to the camera, that already fills up the screen for a fair part.
A technique that i have used for years is to render several small vignette scenes and then combine them all together in 2d ap. I rarely render more than 2 or 3 figures and a few props at the same time, i keep the same camera angles and lighting for each render. I used to save my renders in PNG format and then just build up the layers in 2D, but now i am starting to use mask layers more. I figured out how to render mask layers in Poser and i've really been moving more to that method, i like the results better than png.
Another technique i use in "large crowd" scenes is well point blank i fake it. I will render my foreground characters first because they will block a lot of the stuff in the distance, then i only need to fill in the crowd in areas not blocked by the foreground figures. Why render figures that will never be seen because they are behind something?
A large stadium crowd scene will take time, but with patience and creativity, it can be done
Exactly what I meant: couple of alien heads close to the camera, a few heads further away and your brain is filing in the rest.
Correct me if im wrong but with "Billboarding", you are essentially overlaying the image of the stadium seating, with another image of a crowd and you complete lose the essence of the stadium itself correct?
Attached are two promo pics of the stadium. If these were the very same renders I were using, basically the billboard image would complete overlay the image of the seats themselves, so i wouldnt see the seats in any way, just however the billboard of the people are arranged in the billboard?
Correct? If so, I lose the essence of the color coded seats for example?
Am I understanding this correctly?
So does this mean, there is basically no way to make it appear people/aliens are actually sitting in THESE seats?
-MJ
Not if the billboard has a transmap. But I think you're gonna need a lot of billboard people . . . :bug:
Fun fact: the people in the stadium in Anikin Skywalker's pod-race scene were paint-dabbed Q-tips.
Not if the billboard has a transmap. But I think you're gonna need a lot of billboard people . . . :bug:
Fun fact: the people in the stadium in Anikin Skywalker's pod-race scene were paint-dabbed Q-tips.
More fun facts, in Star Wars IV, V and VI, often when you see large groups of Imperial Soldiers and Troops it is often card board standees
Here is a Bryce tutorial from the old AZ wiki.
http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/tutorials/bryce/bryce-render03
Oh I remember that project. It was an overhead view, though I don't recall what the main object was in the render.
I don't use DS 4.6, so am not sure about the billboards option, but I have on many occasions used the method Mattymanx describes, even for small groups. I find compositing the easiest way to get things to look right, including lighting and shadows.
Well, if you are really doing an image based on the Montreal Expos stadium you should only need 3 or 4 figures. Let's be honest nobody is going to believe that the Montreal Expos sold out... even if it was to a crowd of aliens. There's a reason the team was moved to Washington DC.
In case it helps, here's a link to a post I did recently discussing strategies for rendering group scenes. Though I was thinking more Little League scale, not MLB. :)
@MJ007:
I give you a link, only to understand the basics of billboards:
http://fitzel.ca/dart/crowds/crowds.html
Powerage has the MOM crowd generator and add on products over at Rendo.
Is there a way to use the Vue Ecosystem to generate low poly figures instead of vegetation?
You could also try Send in the Clones
http://www.daz3d.com/send-in-the-clones-ds4-pro
http://www.daz3d.com/send-in-the-clones-pro-for-poser
Hahaha! That was just an example.
-MJ
Thanks everyone for the tips and suggestions.
Much appreciated.
-MJ
I just did this book cover with a horde of approaching zombies in the background.
I first rendered a few zombies for those in the near foreground, and then rendered like 8 or 10 using varied poses for use in the background.
I assembled those zombies into a row on one layer, duplicated the layer, darkened it, shrunk it a little, and laid two copies of it side by side behind the first layer.
I then did the above again, this time making the last layer into silhouettes. The camera angle is low, seen from the child's perspective, so I didn't need to portray a sea of heads.
...nice work there.
I remember a while back there was someone here who worked on a piece (I believe back in the old forum days) that ended up with something like 1,200 characters or so in it. Actually had a WIP thread devoted to the process. The work was all assembled in postwork and took him quite a while, but looked fantastic.
The most characters I rendered in a single pass was 9, none of which were low res (couldn't figure out how to decrease the level of detail).
Instancing is your friend.
If you have Carrara, or are not adverse to learning a new tool and get it, its instancing is more than powerful enough to handle this. There are likely almost as many Trees in some of Howie Farkes' products as there are seats in your stadium.
DS also has Instancing, not as powerful or as versatile as Carrara but with some work, enough to handle this task, especially on a 64 bit system.
In both cases the difference between using Billboards and instanced figures is not enough to crash you on a 64 bit system.
Greetings,
Minor caveat; DS's instancing doesn't work very well with the SSS shader. Both the instance and the original get...real ugly. It's probably something about SSS groups.I admit, I've never completely understood why instancing saves so much memory. All the poly's are still there, and have to be treated differently by the render engine because the lighting is going to hit them differently, right?
-- Morgan
I admit, I've never completely understood why instancing saves so much memory. All the poly's are still there, and have to be treated differently by the render engine because the lighting is going to hit them differently, right?
-- Morgan
Not quite...a pointer is there and the polys are created on an as needed basis.
Not quite...a pointer is there and the polys are created on an as needed basis.And since it renders in small bite sized pieces and not the entire thing at once.... :)
Using Geometry Shells rather than Instances would allow you to change the SSS group for each figure, but I'm not sure how quickly the extra resource demands would become an issue.
...my concern is why bother at all with SSS for a background crowd scene? The detail of the figures would be so small that it's effects would be negligible and not worth the trouble to set up.
+1
Not everything needs SSS...
And minimal shaders/textures/details will save even more resources.
You sure about that?
http://www.massivesoftware.com/
But that's just a bit of overkill... ;-)
Personally, I'd probably go with rendering up a couple of small groups to png and maybe a shadow catcher, then use those renders in an image editor (GIMP/PS) to fill in the stadium.
massive is the software I think the have developed for "lord of the rings" right?