[Released] Now-Crowd Billboards - Modern Sitting Crowd [Commercial]

RiverSoft Art

inquire said:

Well, thank you for fixing that issue. I learned some things about customizing DAZ Studio, too, and what normals might be, that I probably should have learned before.

 

Silent Winter said:

Thanks for fixing the normals on these

You're welcome!

barbult

RiverSoftArt said:

barbult said:

Silent Winter said:

barbult said:

Silent Winter said:

I'm seeing them as black in texture shaded view when using the 'face the camera' script - but if I rotate the view to the other side, they show up as normal (they render fine either way). Looks like the normals are flipped on this set (though why some of us are seeing this effect and not others I couldn't say) - all the other sets I've bought show in texture shaded view as expected.

Another thought. What is your setting in preferences for backfacing polygons? (I'm away from the computer right now, so I may not have that wording exactly correct.)

Not at my render pc either right now (on laptop in the library) - I haven't changed that setting so I guess whatever the default is - looks like you found it though.

Really odd that it's just happening with this set. Still, at least it still renders ok.

My orient to camera script is working fine - I can select multiple billboards and they all work with one click.

 

Edit: Chan, too many 'though' tho (Doctor Who reference for those who think I'm just being weird) - edit was just to remove excessive use of the word 'though'

If you open my scene that I posted above, does the orient script work on it?

So I tried it.  Ok, I think there are 2 problems going on.  

1. It is a limitation of the script that it only rotates the billboard on the first frame.  This limitation I can fix going forward.
2. BUT, even if the orient script worked on frame 40, you have a keyframe on the billboard there so it gets ignored

Postscript: it is weird though.  I can set up the script to set its rotation to the current frame but it is still getting ignored even if there is no key there.  I am not an animator so I don't understand this.

Was the orient problem on the timeline ever fixed? There has been so much discussion about the nornals, that I lost track of the orient issue status.

RiverSoft Art

barbult said:

RiverSoftArt said:

barbult said:

Silent Winter said:

barbult said:

Silent Winter said:

I'm seeing them as black in texture shaded view when using the 'face the camera' script - but if I rotate the view to the other side, they show up as normal (they render fine either way). Looks like the normals are flipped on this set (though why some of us are seeing this effect and not others I couldn't say) - all the other sets I've bought show in texture shaded view as expected.

Another thought. What is your setting in preferences for backfacing polygons? (I'm away from the computer right now, so I may not have that wording exactly correct.)

Not at my render pc either right now (on laptop in the library) - I haven't changed that setting so I guess whatever the default is - looks like you found it though.

Really odd that it's just happening with this set. Still, at least it still renders ok.

My orient to camera script is working fine - I can select multiple billboards and they all work with one click.

 

Edit: Chan, too many 'though' tho (Doctor Who reference for those who think I'm just being weird) - edit was just to remove excessive use of the word 'though'

If you open my scene that I posted above, does the orient script work on it?

So I tried it.  Ok, I think there are 2 problems going on.  

1. It is a limitation of the script that it only rotates the billboard on the first frame.  This limitation I can fix going forward.
2. BUT, even if the orient script worked on frame 40, you have a keyframe on the billboard there so it gets ignored

Postscript: it is weird though.  I can set up the script to set its rotation to the current frame but it is still getting ignored even if there is no key there.  I am not an animator so I don't understand this.

Was the orient problem on the timeline ever fixed? There has been so much discussion about the nornals, that I lost track of the orient issue status.

Because it is really an animation feature (not exactly the now-crowd billboard focus) and because it would require updating all now-crowd billboard products, this issue will not be addressed in the now-crowd products themselves.  This was a hard decision to make but it just made sense.  A companion product, already under development, will have an orient script that works with the timeline.

DoctorJellybean

Suggestion for either the next set, or add-on: groups of people to populate e.g. an airport, mall, etc. Groups of 5, 10, 20, etc, etc.

RiverSoft Art

DoctorJellybean said:

Suggestion for either the next set, or add-on: groups of people to populate e.g. an airport, mall, etc. Groups of 5, 10, 20, etc, etc.

Thank you for the suggestion.  The problem with multi-character billboards is that there are only a few angles you can use without the figures being too low in the ground.  For GROUPS of single figure billboards, I am working on something that will help with that.

DoctorJellybean

That would be great, as I have an airport terminal to populate :) And you know how busy they are LOL

rrward

It hurts my brain to think of the number of renders these products take to make. Your poor electric bill!

RiverSoft Art

rrward said:

It hurts my brain to think of the number of renders these products take to make. Your poor electric bill!

LOL.  My poor computer and graphics card.  That thing runs almost constantly for 3 weeks when I make one of these.

Silent Winter

I'm a bit late on this one but just been using the Modern Sitting Crowd along with the Modern City Life set to populate my next set. I love how easy it is to fill up an environment with these billboards. George is the only non-billboard in the scene (hadn't used him in a while and he just jumped in, lol).

I should probably have cooked the render a bit longer but it'll do for now. (click for larger/clearer)

RiverSoft Art

Silent Winter said:

I'm a bit late on this one but just been using the Modern Sitting Crowd along with the Modern City Life set to populate my next set. I love how easy it is to fill up an environment with these billboards. George is the only non-billboard in the scene (hadn't used him in a while and he just jumped in, lol).

I should probably have cooked the render a bit longer but it'll do for now. (click for larger/clearer)

That looks great!  Lots of life in the scene.  Thanks for sharing.

Silent Winter

RiverSoftArt said:

Silent Winter said:

I'm a bit late on this one but just been using the Modern Sitting Crowd along with the Modern City Life set to populate my next set. I love how easy it is to fill up an environment with these billboards. George is the only non-billboard in the scene (hadn't used him in a while and he just jumped in, lol).

I should probably have cooked the render a bit longer but it'll do for now. (click for larger/clearer)

 

That looks great!  Lots of life in the scene.  Thanks for sharing.

Thanks for continually solving my 'scene needs lots of people but with low resource requirements' issue

mavante

RiverSoftArt said:

I am not an animator . . .

 

With due deference to that fact, and with great admiration for your products, I have a question about using these billboards (or any of them) in animation. I'm hoping you or somebody here can answer it.

Given that the billboard "characters" can and do turn to "face" a camera (with the appropriate angle image), what happens if you "dolly" a camera through a crowd of them in an animation? Do they "jerk" from one angle to another?

To try to make my question as clear as possible: I can pose a G8 "person" one way on frame 1, then travel to frame 30 and change the pose significantly, and all the intervening motion of that "person" will be smoothly interpolated into apparent continuous motion when the animation is played. But with the billboards, a script is determining when and how to "move" or "rotate" the "person," so I'm wondering what takes place.

Thanks to anyone who can unravel this for me.

RiverSoft Art

mavante said:

RiverSoftArt said:

I am not an animator . . .

 

With due deference to that fact, and with great admiration for your products, I have a question about using these billboards (or any of them) in animation. I'm hoping you or somebody here can answer it.

Given that the billboard "characters" can and do turn to "face" a camera (with the appropriate angle image), what happens if you "dolly" a camera through a crowd of them in an animation? Do they "jerk" from one angle to another?

To try to make my question as clear as possible: I can pose a G8 "person" one way on frame 1, then travel to frame 30 and change the pose significantly, and all the intervening motion of that "person" will be smoothly interpolated into apparent continuous motion when the animation is played. But with the billboards, a script is determining when and how to "move" or "rotate" the "person," so I'm wondering what takes place.

Thanks to anyone who can unravel this for me.

They would "jerk".  The billboards only have so many angles so it would be an abrupt change from angle 0 to angle 30.  That said, if you used a jump cut you could disguise, i.e., animate the camera with all BBs with angle 0, just as it would be obvious that there are missing angles, jump the camera to look at something else, and then jump cut back to the BBs now at angle 30.

mavante

RiverSoftArt said:

mavante said:

RiverSoftArt said:

I am not an animator . . .

 

With due deference to that fact, and with great admiration for your products, I have a question about using these billboards (or any of them) in animation. I'm hoping you or somebody here can answer it.

Given that the billboard "characters" can and do turn to "face" a camera (with the appropriate angle image), what happens if you "dolly" a camera through a crowd of them in an animation? Do they "jerk" from one angle to another?

To try to make my question as clear as possible: I can pose a G8 "person" one way on frame 1, then travel to frame 30 and change the pose significantly, and all the intervening motion of that "person" will be smoothly interpolated into apparent continuous motion when the animation is played. But with the billboards, a script is determining when and how to "move" or "rotate" the "person," so I'm wondering what takes place.

Thanks to anyone who can unravel this for me.

They would "jerk".  The billboards only have so many angles so it would be an abrupt change from angle 0 to angle 30.  That said, if you used a jump cut you could disguise, i.e., animate the camera with all BBs with angle 0, just as it would be obvious that there are missing angles, jump the camera to look at something else, and then jump cut back to the BBs now at angle 30.

Hey, whoever said you aren't an animator ought to rethink that. 

I was thinking along exactly the same lines for a workaround. I want to do a follow-dolly on a character walking through a scene, and I can cut back and forth between the follow-dolly shot and an extreme close-up on her face as she walks though a sparse "crowd" of these non-moving (mostly) other people. (I know, it's kind of avant-garde-era, weird, but it is part of a dream sequence, so that's what I'm going for.) I will fully render each complete take so when I pull them into FCPX I can precisely time the various cuts.

And just to be clear (about my not really hijacking this thread), it's an outdoor scene with an outdoor eating area. I have several of the standing versions, but am considering getting this "Sitting Crowd" version, and this has helped a lot. Thank you, Mr. Antonioni. 

RiverSoft Art

mavante said:

RiverSoftArt said:

mavante said:

RiverSoftArt said:

I am not an animator . . .

 

With due deference to that fact, and with great admiration for your products, I have a question about using these billboards (or any of them) in animation. I'm hoping you or somebody here can answer it.

Given that the billboard "characters" can and do turn to "face" a camera (with the appropriate angle image), what happens if you "dolly" a camera through a crowd of them in an animation? Do they "jerk" from one angle to another?

To try to make my question as clear as possible: I can pose a G8 "person" one way on frame 1, then travel to frame 30 and change the pose significantly, and all the intervening motion of that "person" will be smoothly interpolated into apparent continuous motion when the animation is played. But with the billboards, a script is determining when and how to "move" or "rotate" the "person," so I'm wondering what takes place.

Thanks to anyone who can unravel this for me.

They would "jerk".  The billboards only have so many angles so it would be an abrupt change from angle 0 to angle 30.  That said, if you used a jump cut you could disguise, i.e., animate the camera with all BBs with angle 0, just as it would be obvious that there are missing angles, jump the camera to look at something else, and then jump cut back to the BBs now at angle 30.

Hey, whoever said you aren't an animator ought to rethink that. 

I was thinking along exactly the same lines for a workaround. I want to do a follow-dolly on a character walking through a scene, and I can cut back and forth between the follow-dolly shot and an extreme close-up on her face as she walks though a sparse "crowd" of these non-moving (mostly) other people. (I know, it's kind of avant-garde-era, weird, but it is part of a dream sequence, so that's what I'm going for.) I will fully render each complete take so when I pull them into FCPX I can precisely time the various cuts.

And just to be clear (about my not really hijacking this thread), it's an outdoor scene with an outdoor eating area. I have several of the standing versions, but am considering getting this "Sitting Crowd" version, and this has helped a lot. Thank you, Mr. Antonioni. 

I should say I am not a Daz animator   Good luck with your video.

Peter_DA

Does anyone else have the problem?

So far the Now-Crowd Billboard has worked really well and I love the product (Fight / Medieval City Life / Modern City Life / School Life / SantaS Elves). I suspect that the problem has existed since the update to DAZ Studio 4.14: If I change the angle of the figures, it looks as if the texture changes, but the pane remains.

(Windows 10/ NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 TI)

The log file shows the following error message:

2021-01-08 16:04:34.663 *** Scene Cleared ***
2021-01-08 16:04:34.711 File loaded in 0 min 0.0 sec.
2021-01-08 16:04:34.712 Loaded file: Couple Walking Billboard.duf
2021-01-08 16:04:34.956 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:35.077 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.mask.png
2021-01-08 16:04:40.792 Loading script: E:/DAZ 3D/Props/Now-Crowd Billboards/Scripts/Now-Crowd Change Billboard Angle.dse
2021-01-08 16:04:40.949 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:45.983 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 -30 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:46.150 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 -30 0.png
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: Script Error: Line 144
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: TypeError: Result of expression 'colorMap.getFilename' [undefined] is not a function.
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: Stack Trace:
    <anonymous>()@E:/DAZ 3D/data/RiverSoft Art/Common/RSBillboardFunctions.dse:144
2021-01-08 16:06:14.951 Error in script execution: E:/DAZ 3D/Props/Now-Crowd Billboards/Scripts/Now-Crowd Change Billboard Angle.dse

Peter_DA

Peter_DA said:

Does anyone else have the problem?

So far the Now-Crowd Billboard has worked really well and I love the product (Fight / Medieval City Life / Modern City Life / School Life / SantaS Elves). I suspect that the problem has existed since the update to DAZ Studio 4.14: If I change the angle of the figures, it looks as if the texture changes, but the pane remains.

(Windows 10/ NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 TI)

The log file shows the following error message:

2021-01-08 16:04:34.663 *** Scene Cleared ***
2021-01-08 16:04:34.711 File loaded in 0 min 0.0 sec.
2021-01-08 16:04:34.712 Loaded file: Couple Walking Billboard.duf
2021-01-08 16:04:34.956 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:35.077 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.mask.png
2021-01-08 16:04:40.792 Loading script: E:/DAZ 3D/Props/Now-Crowd Billboards/Scripts/Now-Crowd Change Billboard Angle.dse
2021-01-08 16:04:40.949 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:45.983 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 -30 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:46.150 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 -30 0.png
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: Script Error: Line 144
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: TypeError: Result of expression 'colorMap.getFilename' [undefined] is not a function.
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: Stack Trace:
    <anonymous>()@E:/DAZ 3D/data/RiverSoft Art/Common/RSBillboardFunctions.dse:144
2021-01-08 16:06:14.951 Error in script execution: E:/DAZ 3D/Props/Now-Crowd Billboards/Scripts/Now-Crowd Change Billboard Angle.dse

Sorry, but it seems I have fixed the problem. I have downloaded one billboard again and installed the data-files and the script-files and the problem seems to be gone.

RiverSoft Art

Peter_DA said:

Peter_DA said:

Does anyone else have the problem?

So far the Now-Crowd Billboard has worked really well and I love the product (Fight / Medieval City Life / Modern City Life / School Life / SantaS Elves). I suspect that the problem has existed since the update to DAZ Studio 4.14: If I change the angle of the figures, it looks as if the texture changes, but the pane remains.

(Windows 10/ NVIDIA GEFORCE RTX 2080 TI)

The log file shows the following error message:

2021-01-08 16:04:34.663 *** Scene Cleared ***
2021-01-08 16:04:34.711 File loaded in 0 min 0.0 sec.
2021-01-08 16:04:34.712 Loaded file: Couple Walking Billboard.duf
2021-01-08 16:04:34.956 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:35.077 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.mask.png
2021-01-08 16:04:40.792 Loading script: E:/DAZ 3D/Props/Now-Crowd Billboards/Scripts/Now-Crowd Change Billboard Angle.dse
2021-01-08 16:04:40.949 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 0 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:45.983 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 -30 0.png
2021-01-08 16:04:46.150 Loaded image Couple Walking 01 -30 0.png
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: Script Error: Line 144
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: TypeError: Result of expression 'colorMap.getFilename' [undefined] is not a function.
2021-01-08 16:06:14.949 WARNING: Stack Trace:
    <anonymous>()@E:/DAZ 3D/data/RiverSoft Art/Common/RSBillboardFunctions.dse:144
2021-01-08 16:06:14.951 Error in script execution: E:/DAZ 3D/Props/Now-Crowd Billboards/Scripts/Now-Crowd Change Billboard Angle.dse

Sorry, but it seems I have fixed the problem. I have downloaded one billboard again and installed the data-files and the script-files and the problem seems to be gone.

I am glad you were able to fix it!  I was worried that 4.14 broke something! 

(I apologize to anyone for not responding faster.  I had issues accessing the forums since Friday Jan 7th.  Thank you for your patience; everything seems resolved as Jan 14th.  A special thank you to @Marshian and @Sickleyield for stepping in and helping me.)