Daz Hi, I need help creating silhouettes to increase performance

[metalblinga]

Hey guys I'm completely new to game development, I've been a programmer for about a year now and I wanted to try my hands on some 3d rendered art for a game I have in mind. So far I've been grinding through the internet for tutorials and I'm pleased with the progress so far however I have a 760GTX video card and it can get a little tiring having to wait several minute/hours just to see a preview of the render.

What I would like to know is if there is a way to turn objects and characters ( in the background ) into black ( or any colored ) silhouettes. This is mainly to reduce render times but it can also come in handy to create interesting looking scenes.

Any help will be greatly appreciated, thanks!

I also included some renders from my progress since day 1 (it's about a week ago so go easy on me )

 

[DreamBig Games]

You can change the materials on some of the models to a single color material.
So, a scene would look like: 1-2 characters that you are focusing on are in their default appearance. The others, say in a coffee shop, the other customers, you select them, go to Surfaces, and turn every surface into a single color material, remove any other maps, apart from the Defuse one. Once you have rendered that, start individual renders of the other people, but keep the original camera position, and delete everything else apart from the characters you want to render. Do that for all the characters and save the renders as PNG. Then, in PS or Gimp, compose the image, placing the individual renders over the black/ single color shapes.
To change the color/ texture on models, you might also use a low-cost shader, the simplest/ lowest resolution you could find in your library.

This is a time-consuming process, but for low-end GPU's might be the solution.

Another thing I have done was using billboards. Basically, you create a scene with one character, in the pose that you want it to appear in the final work, render that as PNG, then in the final scene, add an Empty Plane and use the previous render on it Defuse map in Surfaces. Align the Tiling so it fits. This might be way faster, but the lights will look a bit off.

 

[DreamBig Games]

But man, you really need a better GPU...

 

[metalblinga]

That's a lot of info haha, thanks. I'm definitely hoping to upgrade my crappy card very soon, right now I'm just learning so I'm ok with keeping it simple. I gonna try the first option out, but one question tho, how do I remove maps?