Arena Full of People

[upsidedown]

I work for a sports architect firm and we do a lot of stadiums and arenas. My arena shots have always been a bit lifeless because the thought of placing 16,000 people in a shot has always frightened me, but clients are starting to ask for the arena renderings to be full of people. I have seen several examples on the web, but how they were done has baffled me. Organizing all of the maps for individual planes seams almost impossible and using RPC people would be too ram intensive and take forever to render. Does anyone have a system for doing this that they would be willing to share?

 

Brian

[Ernest Burden III]

My arena shots have always been a bit lifeless because the thought of placing 16,000 people in a shot has always frightened me

I have not tackled this problem personally, but I would look first to a particle system. You could probably program colors and behaviour that would look appropriate from a certain distance. That would be very dynamic.

 

Another idea would be to use a displacement map on a surface that would 'bump up' the heads and upper body shapes of the crowds, and this could be animated with a little random variation.

 

In Star Wars Ep. 1 Lucas used Qtips dipped in colored paint in physical models for the PodRace backgrounds. They could be wiggled from below. I guess now he would do it all digitally, but the point is a simple object can suggest a lot.

 

To do it model-based you could have a set of avatars that include LOD (level of detail) layers and addressable animated motion paths. That was how crowds on the Titanic were done in that film.

 

In the end, I suspect there is a simplistic method that will yeild results that look organic enough to be convincing. Just watch out for trying to be too PR (photo-realistic.

[mzagorski]

I've not done this myself... but I remember seeing postings buy a guy on the Splutterfish IRC channel.... the guy had crowds of people on seats. Might be worth going to that channel... ask for some advice. I cant' remember the guys name... but I think he's one of the regulars.. .and the Splutterfish/Brazil forum is way more populated than the CG Architect one...

[nisus]

Hi upsidedown,

 

Do you want to make an animation? Or do you only need stills?

 

This is important for 1) the final resolution 2)the used technique

 

If going for stills, setup your camera so you don't see too many people up close. If you can't avoid this, use photo's of crowds at games and photoshop them in. Background crowds can be easily sketched, pasted from photo's or mapped with a basic image map.

I recommend you use photo's of crowds as the interrelation between the humans will always be correct, missing in most single object-spray-techniques (like rpc, avatars,...)

 

For animation, any small avatar object will do well to simulate distant crowds. Images maps, small objects animated at random running a small script...

You might want to take a look at old racing games for ideas. Even the good old stunts drive (accolade, wasn't it?) used a simple pixel-color-map to simulate crowds. It worked well!

 

rgds

 

nisus

[upsidedown]

Thanks for the replies.

 

I do have to make a photo realistic still rendering. The final rendering will be a poster 5'X 8' that people will be walking right up to and looking at from roughly 2-3 feet away. There will be people very close in the view that have to have on team memorabilia, so I was going to photoshop these in. The view that's set from the short end looking across the arena the long way and shows the back of heads in front of the camera and both sides of the arena. I've tried photoshopping in croud scenes in the past, but I was never able to make the crowd shots line up with the actual rows and aisles (yes, the client noticed this and rejected the image). Thanks for the help, but it looks like I am up for the most tedeious job ever.

 

brian

[John Dollus]

I do this quite often for animations using 3d people and Charcter Studio. It helps if you have a compositing app like After Effects or Combustion.

I render out each seating sectiom as a layer and comp them in post. It saves a great deal of time and lets you vary each section to mix things up a bit. For kicks, I keep the top few rows seperate and have them do the wave.

[bigcahunak]

I would give the RPC Photoshop plugin a try... no probs with photorealistic, angles, resulotion... then just copy and scale different areas of the crowd.

[John Dollus]

Problem with RPC is that they really don't work in an animation and you end up with a bunch of business suits at a hockey game. The demographics just don't work. No giant foam fingers either.