Amount of Detail in Backgrounds/Crowd Scenes

[shane999]

I'm wondering what amount of detail is really necessary for backgrounds to sell the scene. My personal favorite so far is Milfy City, but they have a clever trick to have all background bystanders as solid black, and the only actual crowd scenes so far have been saved for the school. Other games I've seen have literally a bare minimum of detail and assets to make the location clear (such as a kitchen with just a sink, a table and a couple of glasses on top). DFD is a good medium between the two, with good detail on the location, but nobody in the background, just the characters mentioning it's busy.

So what is preferable, or does it really matter as long as the location is clear and the narrative explains whether it's a quite or noisy place?

Thanks for any advice!

 

[Philly_Games]

It can be tough, often I did not have much in the way of background characters because the reason was two fold. One, not enough memory, and two it causes renders to take much longer. Back before 0.8 in my game I did everything on just a 1060. I had a 3some scene and that was harsh. CPU in daz was constantly being hit and i would have to restart daz for each frame. I also was not aware of tools such as the mem optimizer and the like back then. I still use the 1060 as my second card so I still try to get scenes under that so I can do all the renders that I need. It sucks because it is a limitation on hardware. I have learned a few tricks though and now I will turn off the 1060 if need be to more fill out a scene.

I don't think it is a huge issue to have sparse scenes but you should have an establishing shot to show if a place is busy if it is meant to be. I am guilty of not doing this and it is something i plan to rectify in the future.

 

[DarthSeduction]

I'm wondering what amount of detail is really necessary for backgrounds to sell the scene. My personal favorite so far is Milfy City, but they have a clever trick to have all background bystanders as solid black, and the only actual crowd scenes so far have been saved for the school. Other games I've seen have literally a bare minimum of detail and assets to make the location clear (such as a kitchen with just a sink, a table and a couple of glasses on top). DFD is a good medium between the two, with good detail on the location, but nobody in the background, just the characters mentioning it's busy.

So what is preferable, or does it really matter as long as the location is clear and the narrative explains whether it's a quite or noisy place?

Thanks for any advice!

I had FunFiction create Billboards specifically for this.




There are only 3 actual full 3d characters in this scene, and the third one might not even be rendered in yet, because she's sitting behind the desk at the front of this line.

This game takes place in a school, similar to Milfy City, in that respect, I wanted my class to appear to be populated. I did tell FunFiction I'd be ok with just making them greyed out characters, but he was not as happy with that idea, so billboards were the compromise.

 

[Sumodeine]

I'll also recommend trying out billboards, they are somewhat limited, but they're fine for most backgrounds. It took me a while to discover them, and I don't use them too much, but I faced the same struggle of my PC crawling because I had too many characters in one scene.

 

[shane999]

Thanks, everyone! I've heard about billboards before, but I never really looked into what they were for. I'll definitely check them out.