How do you populate tall buildings with furniture?

[ahmeds]

I'm aware of this great guide by Itoo software but I don't have their products.

 

Is there another way to do it faster than manually placing them by hand?

[notamondayfan]

I'd just buy Forest and Railclone and save the headache. They're really not expensive, and will save you 100's of hours in the long term.

[James Vella]

agreed, i use them in every project I work on - definitely worth the money

[Lewis Garrison]

Depending on camera distance you can also just use image cards with a light material to make interiors look populated:

https://www.textures.com/browse/night/51213

[ahmeds]

Thanks for the link Lewis, those will come in handy for the background buildings. But I'd like to render close ups as well, just like in that video so I need real interiors.

 

Itoo products are way out of my budget at the moment. I gave SiNi SiClone a go today but it's not the right tool for this particular task. Still for £5 a month I'm sure I'll find a use for it. I'll experiment with the Scatter plugin and place the furniture using the Painter tool. It also doesn't support grouped objects as a segment, so I'd have to attach each table set as a single mesh which is not ideal.

 

It won't be my long term solution, I only need to create a couple of images for my portfolio and then we'll see once I find a job.

[James Vella]

I have heard good things about Sini.

 

If you want to cut down your time - albeit a little manual but i still use this method for certain things, you can have a scene where you put all your most common furniture into and label them with text for Dining, Living, Kitchen, Balcony, Accessories, Curtains/Blinds etc. Keep putting all the furniture you use on a daily basis in this max file (as proxies) and then when it comes time to populate your scenes you can just bring this file into your scene and populate based on the floorplan, it doesnt take long if you are organised well and have everything on the same Z axis, pivots correct, mapped, etc so you can just dump things in. Once you put enough curtains in and look from the camera, only half of what you see needs populating anyway.

[maxryhan]

You can also try particleflow with vrayinstacer to get light render . It is quite underrated way to scatter but it's very powerful