Can We Get An Audience ?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,152
https://www.daz3d.com/the-royal-opera-stage
The Royal Opera Stage is a really magnificent interior - with hundreds of empty seats - which very sadly makes it virtually unusable. We did a previous thread about filling large indoor spaces with crowds - but in this interior the individual people can't be just scattered randomly like in a mall, airport, ballroom, or an outdoor environment. This interior requires the individual people to be placed in very specific poses and very exact places.
With all these wonderful Nutcracker costumes, using an empty theatre is useful for only 1 dress rehearsal. Ballets, operas, and Broadway musicals don't go through all their rehearsals in giant theatres. The giant theatres are booked with and hold shows that are already up and running - shows rehearse in rehearsal studios. No show can afford to rent a giant theatre for weeks or months of rehearsals.
Maybe with the collective talent and skill of DAZ and the content artists, they could come up with a way to fill the seats of the theatres, and the many seats in restaurants and nightclubs, with people. Simple to place, low-resource-intensive figures, or silhouettes, or something.
In the movie Citizen Kane, director Orson Welles overcame the problem by keeping the audience in the giant opera theatre in total blackness white shining his spotlights on only the stage, and one tiny section of audience - with an ocean of totally black empty space between them - giving the illusion of a full audience in a giant theatre, solely through sound effects.
In old MGM musical movies that had scenes in theatres, they had a permanent theatre interior built and filled the audience seats with ultra-low-paid extras (background performers) who wore their own clothes, not costumes.
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Comments
I had the same worry. Billboards seem the obvious answer - but even then there would be lots of work to create each scene.
I was about to buy https://www.daz3d.com/the-royal-opera-stage
but I couldn't think how to make it usable - except maybe for nighttime haunted scenes
I intend filling it quite easily in another software if I buy it, (am still struggling with my ethics over DAZ NFT choices)
otherwise my go to solution is instanced painted prop people I made from DAZ figures textured with Spotlight projection in Zbrush
my first solution actually works in Unreal Engine too using the free Twinmotion lowpoly prop people for Unreal product in the Epic Games permanently free collection. For use in Unreal Engine only
but
AXYZ Design models and you can get some free posed people from them directly too so there is that
I don't want a bill board solution to this. Bill board people alway look flat (not surprisingly) to me when used in renders. This is particularly true when trying to seat the bill board on a real 3D seat.
I would prefer proper figures to populate the scenes. This might sound impossible, but if they are say Genesis 8 figures with low poly hair and clothing they might only need some 50K polys, so you could get about 50 of these for the same cost as a single Sub-D 3 char. Those 50 different figures instanced to fill all the chairs would look much better than billboards and should be capable of being rendered with a reasonable set up.
The Diffeomorphic Blender bridge works great for this.
Once you dress up and export your Daz figures, inside Blender you can scale the textures down to 512x512 (or lower), decimate their hair, and use IK to easily pose them in chairs. Then just export the lo-rez figures as obj files to avoid the nightmarish loading times Daz requires to build a property hierarchy. With heavy depth of field and some creative use of lighting and composition, you can create a whole crowd with a dozen instances.
another more involved thing I do using Zbrush and Ultimate Unwrap3d is
export textured dressed posed DAZ people
import to UU3D convert textures to vertex colours and save
import that obj into Zbrush
create Unified Skin and Zremesh it and use the UV unwrapping plugin
Use Zprojection to transfer details and vertex paint to a subdivided version and export the created texture maps
export the lowpoly one to use with that map
1 Victoria 4.2 figure scatter instanced to 318 figures. WHAT is the lowest polygon human figure? Male and female?
Loretta and Lorenzo LoREZ would probably work here, espacially as they have various LoREZ clothing to add variation iothout too much strain on the system.
I added one M4 figure. This is the first time I've used this ultrascatter script, and there's a lot of settings to give variations to the instances. The script asks you what you want to scatter your figure over - if you created a rectangular primitive that is the dimensions of each section of the audience - you could fill the entire theatre.
Why did you use M4 and V4? Genesis 8 has around 20% of the polygons of those two figures.
Because it's a quick and dirty attempt. Is there a chart somewhere online that has the polygon count for the DAZ figures? And does anyone know the lowest resolution "painted on" clothing, and hair models?
Lorenzo LoRez instanced 500 or 600 times
Genesis 8 has the lowest polycount at 16k, but it's meaningless since 1.6 million polygons is nothing for a modern renderer. The main bottlenecks are texture size, hair polycount, and Daz's ridiculously slow property hierarchy system.
So we need an ultra-low resolution texture and hair solution. You can use Victoria 3 skin textures on Genesis 8 using one of the UV conversion products - right?
You could do this, however it would be far easier to reduce the existing Genesis 3/8 textures to 1K, or even 512, and then strip out the bump/normal/displacement maps. In theory the figures created could share a handful of texures, and you could use translucence or other settings to make the skins look different.
There is this that might help - Resource Saver Shaders Collection for Iray | Daz 3D
That will strip off the unneeded maps, but will not reduce their size, which you need to do for background characters. This is a better solution as it will do both:
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
See my earlier comment about exporting to Blender. It has everything you need.
I whipped something up in Zbrush using Spotlight and Polypaint, a Morguefile photo
....and this bloody forum
saved drafts each image and it lost them all
OK a few Cloudflares later....
I am not a texture artist
but it could do with a top hat on G8M and G8.1M
no restrictions share edit as you wish
You can also do everything you described in that post inside Daz Studio itself, if you have the correct add-ons, ie scene optimizer and decimator. That saves you the hassle of using two apps.
You could try multiple renders and layer them together in photoshop ... as well as creative angles that make it look full. This image was 3 renders: onstage, front row, and 2nd row. Only about 16 people in the audience and the rest of the recital hall is empty ... but it works.
No matter how much of a "hassle" it is using two apps, it's not nearly as much of a hassle as trying to make a good seated pose with Daz Studio's IK tools.
The time you spend exporting and importing is more than made up for by the time you spend not fidgeting endlessly with Daz's janky "soft pinning". Resizing textures and decimating meshes for free is just a nice bonus.
Well, there is always Loretta and Lorenzo Lorez, but even at their relatively small poly count, it will still add up over hundreds of seats ;).
Maybe, I have never used the IK tools for a seated pose, I normally just apply one of my hundred's of seated poses, and then adjust that, never takes me very long, but this is for a single render, not an animation, if that is what you are setting it up for.
Just testing my textures on 3 posed G8M converted to props and instanced
I will need to paint some hairs in but could do as LIE presets so can add variety
also Alienator may prove usefull here esp adding women
the ones in the peanut gallery needed to be scaled down on the Z axis to fit
I don't suppose anyone would have ideas in any type of animated audience solutions in the low res flavor, would they? I love the theatrical scenes but as one creates animated videos I find it very difficult to try to find animated audience bvh or other motion files.
well not in DAZ studio for me
I will try Microsoft Rocketbox avatars in Unreal later
I actually have Unreal seated animations I can retarget too and can just hold alt and duplicate my people
This looks great!
Yeah Wendy I have found a few seated bvh files, but they are only 30 frames long or so. Way too short for creating a beleavable audience.
I just looked at the set... It also has an orchestra pit! Quite simply a must-have for the Opera or a period ballet.
So, full orchestra as well as audience.
One could also simply extend the stage over the pit (cover with planes... err, plywood), and then do away with the orchestra, I suppose.
...
It is a beauty of a set. I think the "render heavy" warning is probably quite apt, and I'd have to render it in stages, myself, if I were to use this.