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Trying to make human silhouettes for crowds

Knightmare560Knightmare560 Posts: 7
in Technical Help (nuts n bolts)

My laptop is weak so loading multiple figures is hell. And I don't have enough memory for the "now-crowd billboard" assets. So how do I make massive crowds that are silhouettes? I've seen that in other works. Basically how do I make my own billboards and have just silhouettes in the background

Comments

  • Richard HaseltineRichard Haseltine Posts: 99,293

    The Now Crowd sets are huge because they have multiple angles - that doesn't reflect the amount of memory they will consume in an actual scene.

  • FenixPhoenixFenixPhoenix Posts: 3,070

    Knightmare560 said:

    My laptop is weak so loading multiple figures is hell. And I don't have enough memory for the "now-crowd billboard" assets. So how do I make massive crowds that are silhouettes? I've seen that in other works. Basically how do I make my own billboards and have just silhouettes in the background

    You can load a couple of characters and turn them into instances. Then, move those instances around to create a crowd. Our Faceless Product for Genesis 8 & 8.1 was intended for crowd creation in the shape of silhouettes. Most promos use 2-3 characters at base res turned into instances. Such as in this promo:

    While this one uses 4 characters:

  • TimberWolfTimberWolf Posts: 285
    edited September 2023

    To answer the question 'how do I make my own billboards', watch this tutorial. There are a fair few available on YouTube but they all follow the same workflow. You will need access to Photoshop or something with equivalent functionality like Gimp.

    With that out of the way, it would be a lot easier and a lot quicker to use one of the Now Crowd sets. They are a big download but they use very little (in fact negligible) VRAM when rendering as Richard points out. It would take you hundreds of hours to render billboards that match what you can buy for a few dollars. I suspect you would spend more on electricity during the process than you would on one of these kits.

    For a one-off, sure, make your own. For a huge crowd? Buy the expertise and someone else's time for not very much money.

    Using characters as instances works really well as long as you don't want something like different hair styles or different clothes on each figure - fantastic for homogenous groups like armies or zombies but less useful if you need each person to be a bit more individualistic and don't have a lot of VRAM to play with.

    Post edited by TimberWolf on
  • scorpioscorpio Posts: 8,364

    there's this

    https://www.daz3d.com/billboard-builder

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