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Alternatives to Now-Crowd Billboards

bradassociatesbradassociates Posts: 106
edited October 2020 in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

Merchants promote their now-crowd billboards as resource-easy ways of building background crowds with pre-rendered images.  I own a couple and have found that aside from the huge amount of disk space needed (16 Gbs + for each product), one is limited as to the characters, clothing and poses as the merchant has made those artistic preset decisions.

One option I am exploring is to build background characters using conventional G8 characters, clothes and poses, then, export each one as an OBJ to be later imported into a final scene.   Has anyone done this, and what has been your successes and failures in doing so?  Does it make much of a difference in easing the amount of render time and resources?

 

Post edited by bradassociates on

Comments

  • RexRedRexRed Posts: 1,323
    edited October 2020

    Genesis characters take up exponentially a lot more space than billboards.

    The reason why Now-Crowd images seem to take up hard drive space is because they give you each character from many different angles on a simple plane.

    Gen 8 character have many shaders and textures while a now billboard has ultimately only one plane and roughly two images the main image and the alpha.

    Billboard only take up hard drive space to store the many angles but they take up hardly no scene space at all.

    You can render a 2D image of your characters and place them in scene on a plane yourself.

    Rendering characters to obj will save you hardly no space at all in fact they will take up even more space on your hard drive having them saved in a folder for later retrieval.

    Billboards save a ton of scene rendering time and allow you to have lots of people in your scene  with very little overhead.

    Attempting to use obj characters would be disasterous waste of effort and time. 

    Billboard files may take up hard drive space but they take up nearly no space at all in your scene.

    Learn to make your own billboards and the possibilities are endless.

    Post edited by RexRed on
  • GordigGordig Posts: 10,046
    bradassociates said:

    One option I am exploring is to build background characters using conventional G8 characters, clothes and poses, then, export each one as an OBJ to be later imported into a final scene.   Has anyone done this, and what has been your successes and failures in doing so?  Does it make much of a difference in easing the amount of render time and resources?

    Exporting as OBJ wouldn't accomplish anything except make your models less flexible. It would have the same number of polygons and the same textures as the original figure, only now you can't pose it.

  • bradassociatesbradassociates Posts: 106
    RexRed said:

    Genesis characters take up exponentially a lot more space than billboards.

    The reason why Now-Crowd images seem to take up hard drive space is because they give you each character from many different angles on a simple plane.

    Gen 8 character have many shaders and textures while a now billboard has ultimately only one plane and roughly two images the main image and the alpha.

    Billboard only take up hard drive space to store the many angles but they take up hardly no scene space at all.

    You can render a 2D image of your characters and place them in scene on a plane yourself.

    Rendering characters to obj will save you hardly no space at all in fact they will take up even more space on your hard drive having them saved in a folder for later retrieval.

    Billboards save a ton of scene rendering time and allow you to have lots of people in your scene  with very little overhead.

    Attempting to use obj characters would be disasterous waste of effort and time. 

    Billboard files may take up hard drive space but they take up nearly no space at all in your scene.

    Learn to make your own billboards and the possibilities are endless.

    Thanks.   Excellent suggestion.

  • bradassociatesbradassociates Posts: 106
    edited October 2020
    RexRed said:

    Genesis characters take up exponentially a lot more space than billboards.

    The reason why Now-Crowd images seem to take up hard drive space is because they give you each character from many different angles on a simple plane.

    Gen 8 character have many shaders and textures while a now billboard has ultimately only one plane and roughly two images the main image and the alpha.

    Billboard only take up hard drive space to store the many angles but they take up hardly no scene space at all.

    You can render a 2D image of your characters and place them in scene on a plane yourself.

    Rendering characters to obj will save you hardly no space at all in fact they will take up even more space on your hard drive having them saved in a folder for later retrieval.

    Billboards save a ton of scene rendering time and allow you to have lots of people in your scene  with very little overhead.

    Attempting to use obj characters would be disasterous waste of effort and time. 

    Billboard files may take up hard drive space but they take up nearly no space at all in your scene.

    Learn to make your own billboards and the possibilities are endless.

    Today I tried to make a billboard.   I loaded a soal individual in Victorian clothes, but no environment.  I rendered and saved as a .png file.    I opened an environment, created a plane primitive and applied the image.  But there's no way to separate the plane from the image to cutout of the scene.

    How are billboards made, and is there a tutorial?

    EDIT:

    Just found this tutrial, I'll try it...

     

     

     

    Post edited by bradassociates on
  • MarcCCTxMarcCCTx Posts: 924

    I just wish there were more Predatron LoRez figures https://www.daz3d.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=LoRez . A medieval set and a zombie set would be nice.

     

  • chris-2599934chris-2599934 Posts: 1,804
    edited October 2020

    I've found I can do quite big crowd scenes using full-fat genesis figures with Resource Saver shaders applied to them and a lot of instancing.

    The watching crowd in this image comprises 6 G3Fs and 6 G2Ms, each instanced many times. I've retained the original textures for their faces, but the rest of their skins and their clothing all use flat colours instead of images.

    harvest01a.jpg
    1000 x 1500 - 247K
    Post edited by chris-2599934 on
  • barbultbarbult Posts: 24,240
    chris-2599934 said:

    I've found I can do quite big crowd scenes using full-fat genesis figures with Resource Saver shaders applied to them and a lot of instancing.

    The watching crowd in this image comprises 6 G3Fs and 6 G2Ms, each instanced many times. I've retained the original textures for their faces, but the rest of their skins and their clothing all use flat colours instead of images.

    That's very impressive, Chris.

  • Xandyr78Xandyr78 Posts: 117

    I realize this thread is nearly 2 years old...but I thought I'd try asking, anyway...the Now-Crowd Billboard products have multiple camera angles.  Is there any sort of tutorial on how to replicate that?  I'd love to make my own billboards, as my poor potato PC is over 10 years old and, while beefy, it's beginning to show its age.

    Any help would be appreciated.

  • felisfelis Posts: 4,304

    Xandyr78 said:

    I realize this thread is nearly 2 years old...but I thought I'd try asking, anyway...the Now-Crowd Billboard products have multiple camera angles.  Is there any sort of tutorial on how to replicate that?  I'd love to make my own billboards, as my poor potato PC is over 10 years old and, while beefy, it's beginning to show its age.

    Any help would be appreciated.

    Riversoft Art who has made a significant part of the billboards, also make scripts, so I would guess he has made a cutom script for that.

    But you could look at https://www.daz3d.com/billboard-builder

     

  • SevrinSevrin Posts: 6,306

    felis said:

    Xandyr78 said:

    I realize this thread is nearly 2 years old...but I thought I'd try asking, anyway...the Now-Crowd Billboard products have multiple camera angles.  Is there any sort of tutorial on how to replicate that?  I'd love to make my own billboards, as my poor potato PC is over 10 years old and, while beefy, it's beginning to show its age.

    Any help would be appreciated.

    Riversoft Art who has made a significant part of the billboards, also make scripts, so I would guess he has made a cutom script for that.

    But you could look at https://www.daz3d.com/billboard-builder

     

    I'm sure Riversoft has a script for producing his billboard products, but it has not been shared with the public. 

  • FishtalesFishtales Posts: 6,119

    You could use this and render it as an image series, choose the angles you want and make the masks for them.

    https://www.daz3d.com/360-rotating-turntable-animations

    Make sure Draw Dome is off; Ground is off and shadows turned off; the Dome Map is a soft non-directional light or is in a shaded spot; and the figure is on, or very slightly below, the bottom of the frame which makes it easier to drop the billboard to the ground using ctrl/d.

  • barbultbarbult Posts: 24,240

    I create billboards with the timeline. I create keyframes for the different rotations and then render an image series. No scripting needed.

  • ChakradudeChakradude Posts: 257

    barbult said:

    I create billboards with the timeline. I create keyframes for the different rotations and then render an image series. No scripting needed.

    I read this before but it didn't click for me what you were discribing, This time I got it. Exellent work flow thanks!

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