Daz Any advice for creating a sports crowd?

[whizzeee]

I was thinking of making a football(soccer) vn at some point in the far far future but one thing I'm not sure how to approach is the crowds in the stadium, I found a nice stadium that I am happy with but it doesn't have any crowds in it. I found "Now-Crowd" by RiverSoft Art but my issue with that is that each version of that is anywhere from 10-15GB of space, which is just so much for a single thing in daz. Is that the only way, RIP storage space if thats the case. Attaching an image to help you picture what I want, imagine those red seats with people in them lol

 

[Winterfire]

There are many crowd generators, but the basic concept is the same: Use Lowpoly people. Depending on the distance, you could even get away with doing billboard. For closer crowds, low poly is the way.
Obviously I'd suggest against doing it manually as that'd be a painful work.

 

[SicarusDK]

You should check out The Beautiful Game, if you haven't already. It will be pretty tough to compete with that

 

[whizzeee]

I used UFC_MMA_Stadium by Shredder and used the crowd assets there, and i got... alright?ish results, definitely going to need to keep experimenting with stuff, two sections here and I could hardly move around in DAZ studio it was so laggy

 

[jamdan]

If you look at IRL sports crowds at events, you can't really make out any specific person. So you may even be able to stick images like the one below on a plane and position the plane to match the angle of the stands your using. Blur it and you probably couldn't even tell it's just an image (or several of them). The end result is basically a billboard of a lot of people instead of just one at a time.

 

[osanaiko]

Seems like an excellent place where AI tools might be useful.
Render the image without the character.
Use img2img mode of a Diffusion imagegen tool, inpaint mask the seat area.
use a prompt like "3d semi-realistic render of a stadium with bleacher seating, bleacher seating filled with a crowd of people, mainly blue and black team color jerseys and scarfs".
play with the settings, prompt, and multiple generation cycles to get the look you want.
Then carefully combine the generated image with the original using overlay mask and color/tone/exposure correction as needed, and finally overlay the foreground character render.

Couldn't help myself, i love a challenge...:




The background could even be blurred a bit more than the original render to simulate a stronger depth of field effect... and then use masked color adjust to match the crowd's colors to the blue of his shirt:



Not bad for 15 mins work. the cutout masking for the foreground character is a bit shitm but you can render him separately and get perfectly sharp lines.

Remember the eternal truth: the background details don't matter much, the players will concentrate on the foreground unless you mess it up!

 

[MissFortune]

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(Try not to use Billboards unless absolutely necessary, imo.)
If you use Blender at all:

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I tend to just use very heavy-DOF or one of the above assets with DOF (but I'll likely be doing future stadium scenes in Blender):

 

[MissFortune]

Not bad for 15 mins work. the cutout masking for the foreground character is a bit shitm but you can render him separately and get perfectly sharp lines.

Imo, it really on how many renders feature the crowd in some form. Many of my scenes will basically have 50+ renders with a crowd being shown in some form. Consistent AI just isn't feasible for that many, nor is all the postwork involved.