Daz How to build a scene with a crowd?

[Thomas Turbating]

Hello guys!

I have a question:
I'm trying to build a scene (on DAZ) full of people around the main characters, but I know how heavy that would be for the final render.
I have already researched some premade scenarios and this is a cool idea, but the scenario that I want to set up is not there among those premade ones.

Can anyone give me a hint on how to put together a highly populated scene in a practical way, with figurative characters that are not so heavy for the final render?

Thanks in advance!

 

[megaplayboy10k]

Well, short of doing the weird Milfy City thing of featureless black figures, you could try using G1 figures instead of G3 or G8. Also could try angles that imply a large crowd without having to show all of it. And pan way back for a render of the full crowd, so the level of detail remains very low. I'm sure much better renderers than I will give you additional technical tips.

 

[hakarlman]

EDIT: This solution doesn't capture shadows unfortunately. So when you render the character in a separate layer via DAZ canvas, no shadows are casted on surrounding objects in the scene. I'm trying to find a better solution.
1) Render a base layer scene without any characters.
2) Add and pose the character #1 and render it in a layer (DAZ specifically supports this functionality of layer rendering). Overlay this character render over the base layer render from step 1.
3) Delete the character.
4) Add and pose the next character and render it in a layer. Overlay this character render over the render from step 1.
5) Repeat this process until you have 100 characters all in a single scene.

 

[rainbowpunfz]

1) Render a base layer scene without any characters.
2) Add and pose the character #1 and render it in a layer (DAZ specifically supports this functionality of layer rendering). Overlay this character render over the base layer render from step 1.
3) Delete the character.
4) Add and pose the next character and render it in a layer. Overlay this character render over the render from step 1.
5) Repeat this process until you have 100 characters all in a single scene.

seems rather excessive, does DAZ not have support for decimating meshes and/or LOD ?

 

[hakarlman]

seems rather excessive, does DAZ not have support for decimating meshes and/or LOD ?

It's actually not an excessive process. It's an EXTREMELY easy process. Also, no need to decimate meshes. Geometry isn't the major problem and doesn't take up a lot of memory; unless you purposely kick up the sub div levels of each character. It's the texture sizes that almost always take up the most memory. Fortunately there are optional scripts you can buy for DAZ that do a great job of compressing texture sizes, but even then it's still not enough. If you want 10 characters rendered, and you want each one to look great, layer rendering is the best and it's actually VERY easy to do. Render the background. Render each foreground character, export the renders, then just overlay on photoshop. It's extremely easy & fast. ( if someone is really interested, I could explain the process better) It takes barely any effort. Once you do the whole process one time, you'll be an expert, and you'll NEVER be limited. You can render a HUGE ass orgy.

I only have a 4gb video card at the moment, but I can quickly make renders with 10-12 people in it no problem.

Trust me, it's not excessive.

The alternative is to have a video card with 12-24gb of memory if you can afford it, but video card prices are insane right now unfortunately.

You mentioned LOD. You can do a manual form of LOD. If you're character is far away from the camera, you can select the character and all its clothing, then go into mesh resolution and set the sub division level to zero, in which its poly count is super low.

 

[rainbowpunfz]

It's actually not an excessive process. It's an EXTREMELY easy process. Also, no need to decimate meshes. Geometry isn't the major problem and doesn't take up a lot of memory; unless you purposely kick up the sub div levels of each character. It's the texture sizes that almost always take up the most memory. Fortunately there are optional scripts you can buy for DAZ that do a great job of compressing texture sizes, but even then it's still not enough. If you want 10 characters rendered, and you want each one to look great, layer rendering is the best and it's actually VERY easy to do. Render the background. Render each foreground character, export the renders, then just overlay on photoshop. It's extremely easy & fast. ( if someone is really interested, I could explain the process better) It takes barely any effort. Once you do the whole process one time, you'll be an expert, and you'll NEVER be limited. You can render a HUGE ass orgy.

I see, one would think you'd take a rather big hit on the render time this way. So then optimally you'd do each pass with decimated characters only tracing shadows, except one character which would be rendered in full, right? only lacking light bounces of objects/characters you decided to composite instead of render in one go, but that's a very acceptable compromise given the alternative.

 

[Dilly_]

You could make your own billboards if none of the Now Crowd ones suit your needs. Could potentially be very time consuming though if you need lots of characters/angels, but it's an option.

You must be registered to see the links

 

[GNVE]

Here's how I made this image, please note that it was a test:

First I started with making an HDRI(ish) image of the background.

1. place a camera near where you want your eventual camera(s) to end up but not to close to any walls. place the camera at about head height (in a smaller room you can just place the camera in the middle of the room).
2. Go to the camera tab
3. Click on list
4. Set lens distortion type to spherical
5. render the HDRI

After this pose your main characters and render them with the background (you want the best lighting on them):


Now safe the daz file with -2 at the end.
Set the HDRI

1. Go to the render tab
2. Go to environment
3. Click on environment map and set the HDRI
4. Make a test render with Draw Dome set to on
5. Check that the HDRI is aligned to the actual background (if not use dome rotation to align them)
6. Set Draw Dome to off

Remove the characters you rendered in the previous image
place and pose a new batch of characters in the scene. (I can render 4 or 5 characters at once so that is one batch for me)
Now make a primitive and cover the area these characters occupy
Go to the parameters tab
Set the visible in render to off for the primitive
Hide the background and render the image:

Repeat the steps above to fill the scene. The primitives allow you to know where you placed other groups so you don't have too much overlap:


Eventually when you have all your images you can combine them in your favourite image editing program.

(Please note that I used a batch render and not rendered the image one by one. Saves a lot of time rendering while sleeping)
(In theory you can place all the people in a crowd in one image and render a subset of those people in one go but you'll run into Ram issues quite quickly. My PC cannot handle more than a 10ish G8 women in one scene without Daz crashing and it becomes unusable at around 7ish or so)

Now as I said this was a test to look at how to make a crowd. The crowd in this case are all named NPC characters.
what I'd do to speed up the process is to make a few generic crowd groups (e.g. dancing group 1), with the save scene subset and merge existing file, and quickly place them in the scene change hair and clothes colour and render those. This would speed up the process considerably.

Edit: I'm not saying it is the best way to do this by the way but it is a way that works

 

[Thomas Turbating]

Sorry for late reply, guys!
I read all the comments and thanks for the help, i can get an idea of what to do from this.

I've been studying this since yesterday, when I made the post.
Of all the options, I think working with billboards is the most viable.

Here's how I made this image, please note that it was a test: View attachment 1103462

First I started with making an HDRI(ish) image of the background.

1. place a camera near where you want your eventual camera(s) to end up but not to close to any walls. place the camera at about head height (in a smaller room you can just place the camera in the middle of the room).
2. Go to the camera tab
3. Click on list
4. Set lens distortion type to spherical
5. render the HDRI

After this pose your main characters and render them with the background (you want the best lighting on them):
View attachment 1103502

Now safe the daz file with -2 at the end.
Set the HDRI

1. Go to the render tab
2. Go to environment
3. Click on environment map and set the HDRI
4. Make a test render with Draw Dome set to on
5. Check that the HDRI is aligned to the actual background (if not use dome rotation to align them)
6. Set Draw Dome to off

Remove the characters you rendered in the previous image
place and pose a new batch of characters in the scene. (I can render 4 or 5 characters at once so that is one batch for me)
Now make a primitive and cover the area these characters occupy
Go to the parameters tab
Set the visible in render to off for the primitive
Hide the background and render the image:
View attachment 1103561
Repeat the steps above to fill the scene. The primitives allow you to know where you placed other groups so you don't have too much overlap:
View attachment 1103573

Eventually when you have all your images you can combine them in your favourite image editing program.

(Please note that I used a batch render and not rendered the image one by one. Saves a lot of time rendering while sleeping)
(In theory you can place all the people in a crowd in one image and render a subset of those people in one go but you'll run into Ram issues quite quickly. My PC cannot handle more than a 10ish G8 women in one scene without Daz crashing and it becomes unusable at around 7ish or so)

Now as I said this was a test to look at how to make a crowd. The crowd in this case are all named NPC characters.
what I'd do to speed up the process is to make a few generic crowd groups (e.g. dancing group 1), with the save scene subset and merge existing file, and quickly place them in the scene change hair and clothes colour and render those. This would speed up the process considerably.

Edit: I'm not saying it is the best way to do this by the way but it is a way that works

My GPU is quite modest, I have a 1050 TI, so some ideas, like the one GNVE gave, would take me too long, but thank you for the answer anyway, because now I know an extra way to do this.

It's actually not an excessive process. It's an EXTREMELY easy process. Also, no need to decimate meshes. Geometry isn't the major problem and doesn't take up a lot of memory; unless you purposely kick up the sub div levels of each character. It's the texture sizes that almost always take up the most memory. Fortunately there are optional scripts you can buy for DAZ that do a great job of compressing texture sizes, but even then it's still not enough. If you want 10 characters rendered, and you want each one to look great, layer rendering is the best and it's actually VERY easy to do. Render the background. Render each foreground character, export the renders, then just overlay on photoshop. It's extremely easy & fast. ( if someone is really interested, I could explain the process better) It takes barely any effort. Once you do the whole process one time, you'll be an expert, and you'll NEVER be limited. You can render a HUGE ass orgy.

I only have a 4gb video card at the moment, but I can quickly make renders with 10-12 people in it no problem.

Trust me, it's not excessive.

The alternative is to have a video card with 12-24gb of memory if you can afford it, but video card prices are insane right now unfortunately.

You mentioned LOD. You can do a manual form of LOD. If you're character is far away from the camera, you can select the character and all its clothing, then go into mesh resolution and set the sub division level to zero, in which its poly count is super low.

Overlay rendering is interesting, the only cons I see when doing this is that the shadow will not always be applied correctly depending on the scene, so I would have to render the same character again if I wanted to change the angle of the camera to make a second render from a different angle, for example.
Still, thanks for the hint!

You could make your own billboards if none of the Now Crowd ones suit your needs. Could potentially be very time consuming though if you need lots of characters/angels, but it's an option.

You must be registered to see the links

I decided that I will keep this option.
I watched some videos during that time and it seems very practical to use these billboards, you can even rotate their angle to match the camera.
It seems the most practical and feasible option.

In the end, I want only a few people to decorate at the back of the scene, so that they are not so empty in places that should be crowded, such as cities, for example.
So I think billboards do the job!

 

[Dilly_]

In the end, I want only a few people to decorate at the back of the scene, so that they are not so empty in places that should be crowded, such as cities, for example.

There's a Now Crowd billboard pack for cities, you can find it

You must be registered to see the links

. I know you said you already researched some premade scenarios so apologies if the billboards you need are more specific than this, just thought I'd share it anyway

 

[Thomas Turbating]

There's a Now Crowd billboard pack for cities, you can find it

You must be registered to see the links

. I know you said you already researched some premade scenarios so apologies if the billboards you need are more specific than this, just thought I'd share it anyway

What I want to create is a scene in a crowded subway and there is nothing like that in the Now Crowd products.
But I took a better look and realized that you can use the billboards of other products to improvise this scene, maybe even this cities one can work.
Thank you very much for the help! ^^