Crowded scene with limited Resources G2vsG8

Chumly

Here is my scene (or at least what I want)

Environment Fantasy Inn

Crowded Inn with patrons at tables eating and drinking, Focus on Main Character standing/talking in front of fire place.

I have a GTX 1060 6GB card.... am I best off using G2 Characters to be the crowd at the Inn (if they use less resources - and I have some), and out of focus etc and the main character a G8 where the focus will be or ?

What do you feel is my best approact?

Leana

Genesis 2 characters often have lower res textures and less maps, so they might be useful indeed. Most of them don't have Iray materials though, so that means some work on the materials.

 

I don't know if you have these shaders but they could be useful:

• https://www.daz3d.com/resource-saver-shaders-collection-for-iray
• https://www.daz3d.com/mmx-resource-saver-shaders-collection-2-for-iray

Chumly

Thanks for the fast repsonse Leana...
I have the first one (and forgot about it)...
Don't have the second one, but for $15 it is worth a try.  I thought about the Medieval Now-Crowds
https://www.daz3d.com/now-crowd-billboards-medieval-city-life
Price isn't too bad, but it looks to be a bazillion gigabyte download....

Leana

Yes, the Now Crowd products are huge, because they include tons of textures: each billboard is provided with 72 angle variations so you can use them in lots of situations.

 

Another idea could be to render various parts of the scene separately and composite the different renders afterwards.

Paintbox

Also think of instancing, someone here posted a crowd not a long ago made with a ton of instance characters.They will be exact copies, so you have to obscure that they are clones a bit.

WendyLuvsCatz

honesly Michael 3 and Victoria 3 use the least amount of RAM and are good enough for extras

are also actually higher poly than genesis + but way less overheads 

I used a few instanced in this video

Iray will even render it but I used Filament as faster

 

chris-2599934

Genesis 2 has (I believe) more polygons than Genesis 8, and it also has more surfaces - so you may find the older character is also more demanding.

Frankly, with just 6GB of VRAM the chances are that you'll drop to CPU whatever generation of characters you use. That's not the end of the world though, just be prepared to leave your renders running overnight (and remember to set the Max Time to something big, or to zero).

Here's an image I made 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 use G3F for the women, because that's the figure I like best and have a lot of resources for - I'm only an occasional G8F user. I use G2M for the men because I want to use the Extraordinary Men morphs to make a crowd of gnarly peasants instead of fashion models.

What I have done to lighten the load is to remove all textures from their clothes, just using solid colours instead. Parts of bodies that don't show - legs and feet inside pants and boots, for example - I set to visibility off so the renderer doesn't have to worry about them. I find the resource saver shaders a bit extreme when applied to faces, so I retain the original textures for the face/eyes/lips (though I use the same texture for all the G3Fs and another for all the G2Ms). The rest of their skin uses a resource saver shader adjusted till the color matches. I apply a resource saver hair shader to the hairstyles.

If this is the kind of fantasy inn where it's lit by candles, and people smoke pipeweed, you might want to add a smoke layer to give your picture more atmosphere. Check out the depth canvas tutorial in my sig for a handy way to do it. You can use it to play with depth of field effects too.

Chumly

Dang Chris...
Yours is awesome. I am going to check out your toot now!

fred9803

I assume you're going to do a number of shots. So remove the figures/props that aren't in camera view for each shot and save eash scene seperately, with the full scene as your base to work from.

Also, this (free) script is an absloute life saver - swap the textures between small/medium/full depending on distance from camera. There's no sense having a 4K map on a background figure. And use DOF and low-rez maps for those out of focus.

Give the scene plenty of light... you can make it darker with a photo program like Gimp later on. This will make rendering faster on a low-end GPU.

WendyLuvsCatz

in case you didn't realise, my post is a video BTW, I only have a 980ti and all the tavern is populated just different camera angles 

Mattymanx

fred9803 said:

Give the scene plenty of light... you can make it darker with a photo program like Gimp later on. This will make rendering faster on a low-end GPU.

More light generally helps Iray render faster.  However, it is actually easier to add more light in post than it is to take it out.  Same goes with digital photography.

FirstBastion

chris-2599934 said:

Genesis 2 has (I believe) more polygons than Genesis 8, and it also has more surfaces - so you may find the older character is also more demanding.

Frankly, with just 6GB of VRAM the chances are that you'll drop to CPU whatever generation of characters you use. That's not the end of the world though, just be prepared to leave your renders running overnight (and remember to set the Max Time to something big, or to zero).

Here's an image I made 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 use G3F for the women, because that's the figure I like best and have a lot of resources for - I'm only an occasional G8F user. I use G2M for the men because I want to use the Extraordinary Men morphs to make a crowd of gnarly peasants instead of fashion models.

What I have done to lighten the load is to remove all textures from their clothes, just using solid colours instead. Parts of bodies that don't show - legs and feet inside pants and boots, for example - I set to visibility off so the renderer doesn't have to worry about them. I find the resource saver shaders a bit extreme when applied to faces, so I retain the original textures for the face/eyes/lips (though I use the same texture for all the G3Fs and another for all the G2Ms). The rest of their skin uses a resource saver shader adjusted till the color matches. I apply a resource saver hair shader to the hairstyles.

If this is the kind of fantasy inn where it's lit by candles, and people smoke pipeweed, you might want to add a smoke layer to give your picture more atmosphere. Check out the depth canvas tutorial in my sig for a handy way to do it. You can use it to play with depth of field effects too.

 That is an impressive number of extras!