Low poly prob figures for groups of people?

paul_ae567ab9

I have tried to make props of figures with little luck. Always seems to be missing file errors or if I get the figure to load as a prop it has lost all the age morphs and cloths in the process making it useless.

Is there a way to load a G3 charactor, apply any morphs and clothing then save that entire set as a prop?  No need to pose or change clothing after that. I just need to make some background figures for scenes that don't involve actual figures and clothing as too many of those chokes my computer.

I have tried a couple of the 2D options but they are poor substitutes for a 3D prop due to lighting, reflections, shadows etc. not working for a flat 2D (basically a plane with an image on it )

Basically I need to make non-posable fully clothed figures I can load and group as needed for a scene whithout running our of computational resources.

Please DO NOT refer me to any 2D alternative.  Tried it. works but is pretty bad quality.

Thanks.

barbult

V3Digitimes made low poly clothed people for the Medina Cityscape Generator product, but I don't know how she did it. Maybe you could ask in that product's commercial thread, where she participates several times a day. Perhaps she can give you some pointers.

kaotkbliss

First off, once you pose your character, you can go to edit->figure->geometry->convert figure to prop

This will help reduce some of the stress, but be sure to unparent any clothes or other props before doing this or they will be lost in the conversion.

After the figure is converted, you can then go and do the same to the clothes they were wearing.

If you have decimator, you can go even further and reduce the poly's of the figures.

and for the final step, you can use the built-n texture atlas to reduce the texture sizes on them and also combine all the textures for the figure into a single file.

paul_ae567ab9

Thanks.  Is there a step-by-step, a script or plugin to do this?  Decimator is too costly for me.   This is a hobby after all.

 

Also can this be applied to a group of figures as a whole so I could make a single prop of say 5 figures?  Or do I need to be content with 5 separate low poly figures?

paul_ae567ab9

kaotkbliss said:

 

and for the final step, you can use the built-n texture atlas to reduce the texture sizes on them and also combine all the textures for the figure into a single file.

I am having problems finding this texture-atlas.   You say it is built in but I am unable to find it?  OOPS found it as an un-activated plugin.  Lets try that again. LOL

paul_ae567ab9

Well not much luck yet.

I see texture atlas in the list of plugins but can't find how to actually use it. No buttons or anything I can see.

Also I tried two G3F figures.  One the resulting reduction from regular figure 3.3MB down to 64K  Great except no hair or clothing of course.

Did another original 1.25MB the converted to prob size 15.5MB a huge increase in size. I started this second with cloths and unparented as you stated then went back to convert the hair.  It lost it's "shape" but was not that hard to manually adjust then convert to prop. Cloths not so much because seems they no longer fit the figures.

Basically I'm at a loss how to create a single figure with hair and clothing then convert that to a smaller file as a prop.

Seems someone would have had that need before and come up with a solution.

 

Just for giggles converted second G3 to .obj file. That really blew up in size!

kaotkbliss

the texture atlas (I know it's a real pain to find and I always forget where it's hiding) is under Window->workspace->customize

You will find it on the left side and can then drag it to the right side under menus or tool bars

 

What you can do with the clothes (I used a lot of hair that didn't require posing, like mohawks) and should work with long hair too

After you have your character posed and before you convert to prop, select the character and go to edit->copy->copy figure. Then load the clothes and go to edit->paste->paste figure pose.

Place the clothes at the same x,y,z coordinates as the figure and after converting both figure and clothes to props, apply a smoothing modifier on the clothes to remove any pokethrough from not being fitted to the figure.

Griffin Avid

I still don't understand how no one sells a crowd as a prop. Or "Shoppers" or "Fans" or "Club goers" etc...

Not 1 figure but a group..They don't move- dont do anything but populate landscapes....

I could have a whole store-mdedicated to all these groups...people on line...

Thnk of much more interesting renders would be if there were figures all over..

I would get a a ton of those...

Make dystopian ones...or a few figures in a few poses...looking off, looking up, looking down...layed out relaxing..hurrying along.

Stonemason could use them to populate his cityscapes...

 

This

and this

Starting another thread with these sentiments as a feature request.....

kaotkbliss

There are the lorretta and lorenzo lo-rez people for background figures. Also, for extreme distances someone had created the miniman and miniwoman extreme low poly figures which are free

http://www.porsimo.net/3d/other.htm#mw

paul_ae567ab9

kaotkbliss said:

There are the lorretta and lorenzo lo-rez people for background figures. Also, for extreme distances someone had created the miniman and miniwoman extreme low poly figures which are free

http://www.porsimo.net/3d/other.htm#mw

Got them to play around with. But those seem suitable for stuff like architecture layout with blank faces etc. A bit to-low res  I'd like figures that look pretty much like a posable DAZ charactor minus all the bones and other complicated bits but still decent facial and clothing. No need to pose these, just place them in scene backgrounds

kaotkbliss

They are good for extreme background people where you wouldn't see the faces anyway. Like the back row of a stadium crowd, or pedestrians on the street that are a couple blocks away, ect.

The same method of turning figure to prop can be used with the lo rez people too. What I've done is once I got a few posed and ready, I then saved them as a scene subset so I can easily add the group to other scenes in just a click.

WendyLuvsCatz

for a start you are prob better off using genesis 3 of all of the DAZ figures as it has the least polygons and at base resolution 

hide any parts covered by clothes

try to remove any unneeded texture maps and use colours esp for skin

prob only opacity maps really needed

then export the obj with the hidden mesh option ticked

then use instances lots of instances if you have a few variations of figures its less noticeable

Syrus_Dante

@th3Digit instances - that makes sense - but wait how much diffrent can a instance be - I think you can just alter transformation, scale and rotation.

Maybe apply some diffrent shapes and poses on male and female figures with a few diffrent hair and clothes and export them as obj.

How do you decimate the geometry? I would prefer loading it into blender and use the decimate modifier with unsubdivide and after that maybe tris to quads in edit mode [ PS*1 ]. But first load in all obj variations and use "join as shapes" where possible to have all variations as shapekeys in this one object with same geometry (hair, clothes). Then apply modifier or export the variations one by one with the export option "apply all modifiers". You get a set of low res figures choose one as base and load in the others as morphs with morph loader. If you do a second or more exports with even lower res versions you could even setup the prop figures with diffrent "lod-levels" to have the higher res version in front and lower res versions in the back. Then I would do instances of them.

Some Scripts to do this:

Instances Plus+ https://www.daz3d.com/instances-plus-for-daz-studio

Send In The Clones https://www.daz3d.com/send-in-the-clones-ds4

UltraScatter Advanced https://www.daz3d.com/ultrascatter-advanced-instancing-for-daz-studio

BTW read this - havent tryed it jet but it could get handy in future:

Low-poly versions @ http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.de/

[ PS*1 ] I read somewhere someone did notice that blender dosnt care about the UV map island seams with decimate modifier and producing glitches in the UV map. I tryed the UVs>Seams From Islands command first and had good results with that.

All in all much work to do and if done well - in combination with the random seed generator script - it could definitely become a product named something like crowd generator for DazStudio. So easy to think of so hard to realize . But on the other hand maybe other software packages are more specialized in doing such things.