Low-res "crowds" of people.
JD_Mortal
Posts: 760
I do understand that high-res is great, but even the lowest settings of the oldest models are a real high demand on rendering to make scenes look "lively".
My wish-list is a "low-res crowd of people", which is composed of individuals kind-of standing around, or doing things... With various "themes".
For instance...
A group of about 10 people, they can be individually hidden and rotated or shifted around, but pre-grouped. (Grouped for the following purposes.) Selecting a "mid evil poor" theme, dresses them appropriately, in low-res attire and skins. The bones and motion limited to "cheap action doll skeletons", arms move up/down/in/out, legs move forward/backward/in/out, heads turn/up/down and that's about it, on some of the models. Possibly some just being hard-pose objects, like they are just chatting or couples or carrying something appropriate to the theme.
The point is, that they are low-res in structure and images, with no uber-HD eyes, hair, nails, nostril-hairs, pores, veins, ears, lips, toe-nails, nipples, etc... Keeping all graphics on one 1024*1024 or 512*512 image for simplicity and realistic detail-levels, since in a 4000*4000 rendering, they would be in the distance, and not be taller than 1024*1024, in actual pixels anyways.
However, the importance of being actual 3D, is for the lighting and shadows, with consideration for the environmental effects and Depth-of-field rendering, as well as reflective considerations, where "sprites" or pre-rendered backgrounds" would not suffice, and would still require massive HD details to pre-render as a background anyways.
The reason I say groups, instead of individuals, is for the simplicity of mobility and organization, in both themes and "looks" of the crowds, since, the intent is to make things look lively with crowds. Having all individual "mini-people" would be a pain in the butt to "dress-up", "pose", "position", etc... Ultimately, simply speed. For creation and rendering.
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Comments
Have a look at this: http://www.daz3d.com/lorenzo-and-loretta-bundle
Maybe this is something you can use?
besides Lorenezo and Lorreta Predetron has a number of other low-rez figures in his store: http://www.daz3d.com/predatron
You could also Decimator to produce lower resolution figure: http://www.daz3d.com/decimator-for-daz-studio
Cool, Predatron has a bunch of great scenery stuff... The people are still too high-poly for crowds though. (Thinking like 100's of people, like you would see in a city or market-place, or anywhere in real life... malls, fairs, bus-stations, train-stations, castles, angry-mobs, protests, raves...)
That Decimator tool is a neat toy, and would make great crowd-people, for use in making crowds. Not a bad price, for what it does. Wish it did graphics too... But exporting and importing again, would isolate the graphics to make them unique. (Can make 10 people have the ply-count of 1 standard model. With a 75% reduction of the images, it would work perfect. 75% L and W, for 1/15th the RGB data-weight. Plus stripping micro-surfaces like bumps and stuff. Still have to re-map to a mini-skeleton, without all the unneeded bones.)
Decimator would be a neat function to permanantly include with Daz3D, in a lite-version... opposite to the subdivision control sliders. Better as scene-LOD auto-feature, for distant objects, once it determines the scene height and widths, prior to rendering.
this I totally support, at renderosity for example there are sets with low rez zombie crowds with scatter and posing morphs, these sets look great unfortunatelly they are just zombies so no other use possible or you are good in texture editing :)
Predatron has some low rez people "loretta" and "lorenzo" but these are single characters so you have to build your own crowd and there are not so many clothing items for these. I have suggested some medival clothing as also roman and other historical clothing for them but until now nothing happend in this case.
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/instant-zombies-the-swarm/112133/
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/instant-zombies-2-the-herd/112520/
I like using miniman and miniwoman for distant crowds, very low poly and I can set them up in groups ahead of time and save as a scene subset. Then just click and add them to my current scene when needed. :)
Link for Porisimo's Minman and Miniwoman:http://www.porsimo.net/3d/other.htm
Thanks again for those great suggestions. I have a use for the zombie stuff. :P
Let me now how it works in DS maybe with an image
I use the predatron lorez figures for crowds. The trick is to make 12 or more different crowd members, and then use Instances to duplicate each of them many times. I've described my technique (with an example of a 500 person crowd) here: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/970131/#Comment_970131
You don't say explicitly but if you are wanting some sort of mideviel fair atmosphore at game resolutions you are probably best off using Morph 3D characters and they have alread mideviel clothing themes sets on offer both directly at their web site and in the Unity 3D Asset Store. They problably have them on offer at UE4 and other asset type marketplaces too but I haven't checked. Morph 3D I believe is just a daughter business of DAZ 3D. The characters are based on Genesis 2 and I compared them and there is a 1 to 1 corespondance. Also there are a lot of morph and other controls already built in that you can control in the Unity editor or programmatically.
Otherwise do what chris-2599934 does and it works good.
Another option is to do an instance of a half dozen people then use Marshians awesome Kalediscope to bulk them up. They are mirror images, not actual figures, so should lighten the system load considerably:
http://www.daz3d.com/kaleidoscope
*edited because I can't type worth a dam*