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Adding (lots of) people to a render


aemkei
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Hey,

 

so... first post in this forum, and I have a specific question.

Let's say I'm designing a soccer stadium and for the three main presentation images I, of course, want the stadium to look alive (i.e. having it filled to the limits with people). How do I do this best? I have the actual stadium rendered and all, and I have now tried for days to add a convincing crowd, but nothing has come out satisfactory. Adding 10-12 people is pretty easy - adding hundreds or thousands of them is harder.

 

Any suggestions to (or examples of) different approaches to achieving this? (the people of course doesn't have to be 100% life-like as long as it's a good representation of a cheering crowd... I'm sure you know what I mean)

 

Thanks.

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Concidering the complexity of such a venture and the inprecise topic i chose for this thread I feel that I should emphasize that I'm primarily concidering adding the people post-render, but even in Photoshop or such it's hard to find a manner which doesn't have the people come out looking like a photo blanket rolled out over the stands or something like that, since I'm not about to add them one-by-one..

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Ok. Well obviously my idea is not to add it in post for the tedium required to do so.

 

The only other thing I can personally think of is using the image-hose function of painter. Its like a brush tool in photoshop but saves colour information. You can basically setup a file with as many different objects in it including the alpha channels then define it as a hose preset then just start painting. It is limited and its likely you dont own painter but thats the only "quick" way I can think of without going back into your 3d scene.

 

Good luck!

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Hmmmmmn, there was a similar thread very recently...might be worth a search. I think the solution was to use 1 plane per row of seats. The guy then rendered a sequence of people seperately and put all those people as one material onto the plane (animated). Do this a few times then array the planes around the stadium.

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If you're doing a still shot, my suggestion would be to find a photograph taken at a stadium where the stands are at a similar angle to your shot, and photoshop the people in using layer masks. applying people textures to 100K planes of people would be tedious, not to mention rendering the alpha transparencies of that many planes would probably start to weight heavily on your CPU.

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here it is.....

 

I am also looking to do something like this for a stadium soon, anyone know what library of people these might be? My guess was axyz, with mocap added, but not sure.

 

I've no idea, but it's a pretty impressive bit of animation I reckon. Looks like a lot of work gone into that!

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I think I would use several different techniques depending on distance. Perhaps break it down into Near, Medium, and Far. Maybe on Near, you post-process and in Far, where each person may be only three pixels, use a texture map. Just don't lock yourself into trying to find one system that solves the entire image. In the attached image, (a VERY old one), the people in the far side of the stadium are not people at all but rather a texture of mixed pixels of appropriate colors.

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  • 2 weeks later...

I directed baseball stadium project in New York ( erm, wonder which one ;-) ). We added thousands of characters all animated.

 

Yes, you are right, its a comp pass. You can use low ploy people scattered and applied with randomly selected mocap via scripts, super simple and effective. The nice thing is, you can add team shirts and colors to represent the home-team as required. PM me if you need to know specifics

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I directed baseball stadium project in New York ( erm, wonder which one ;-) ). We added thousands of characters all animated.

 

Yes, you are right, its a comp pass. You can use low ploy people scattered and applied with randomly selected mocap via scripts, super simple and effective. The nice thing is, you can add team shirts and colors to represent the home-team as required. PM me if you need to know specifics

 

Our animation project need alot pp animate for a big square- Could you please give me some idea to do? Thanks alot

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