People

[nisus]

Hi all,

 

As human scale is very important to architecture, we are often forced to add humans to our scenes or images. Personally I don't like this at all, because I prefer scenes without humans so the architecture stands out.

Unfortunately our clients ask for humans in their/our images. As I prefer to model in a 'painters'-attitude photogrammetry is not spent on me: these 'real' photo's stand out a lot against a modelled scene because they don't catch scene lighting.

 

But what alternatives do I got?

Manikins/puppets do cast the scene lighting but lack realism. Any other suggestions?

 

What techniques do you use for humans? And why?

What are your experiences on those?

 

rgds

 

nisus

[STRAT]

well years ago i went out and took about 50 photos of ppl. scaned them in, cut them out and put them in my ppl directory.

 

now at the time (well up until the last year or so recently) i'd always use these ppl as opacity maps in my scence - they give scale, the reflects and they cast raytraced shadows.

 

But, only in the last year or so have i personally upped the level of my work. ie, i use GI in nearly all my renderings now.

 

the result is that my modelling (imho anyway) looks allot more realistic now than it did, and my ppl just look way out of place these days. infact it's like the lens flair sindrome - looked good once, but dead as donkey jackets these days.

 

but i'm still requested to put them in, which im reluctant to do.

 

max isn't a problem because i can use RPC ppl and i'm personally so impressed with them. but my other major rendering engine, cinema 4d, as yet hasn't got an RPC interface (should do in the near future so im told, altho they been saying that for the last year).

 

so wat to do? well not much alternative i think. i'm going to re-take my ppl photos so i got a fresh batch, scan them in at a higher resolution, digitally cut them out more acurately then desaturate them all to a similar standard so perhaps they look more nutral in a scene. dunno.

 

any thoughts?

[matt_vinoir]

Well its a tough call, personally i negated the real people thing and turns 3d moddles white or even inot a glass, it depends on you type of scene. THeres a guy who has some LS stuff on the gallery, Mark someone, he had almost card doard cutout in tones of white and grey, i guess adeed in photosop, i quite like the look of that. But as for people, RPC is a little bet too chesy for me, they never interact well within the scene.

 

Foliage is similar but always comes of better. I think you need to alter you scanned images to the right tones and contract first before you put them in but it's a time comsuming thing.

[STRAT]

problem with ppl opacity plain mapping is light.

 

obviously you angle the opacity maps till their perpendicular to the camera, but what if the sun is like at 90 degrees to the camera? the ppls shadows turn into annoying long lines

[nisus]

Hi all,

 

Tnx for your reply. The problem of opacity-mapped people perpendicular either to the camera or to the sun can be solved, though not too easily. First you'll have to make your planes 'look at' the sunlight. Second render a very high bitmap of only the people in your scene, using the sunlight as a camera. Next you'll save the alpha channel as a bitmap and use this map as a projector image. Maybe you'll have to invert the image.

Eventually make your planes look at the camera and render.

 

Unfortunately even this technique does not fit the plane-people well in your scene. So you still have to tweak your images, but in contrary to matt_vinoir's suggestion I would tweak them after I've rendered the scene - using photoshop - instead of tweaking them before placement.

 

And what about animation?

 

As I don't like people on visualisations, I really detest them in animation because they distract focus on the architecture, which in the end is our final goal. Or isn't it? (Yeah I know... too hard-boiled I guess...) Fortunatelly not many shopping-malls are really great architecture so I guess it's ok to use people in that situation...

 

Anyway, the human eye is configured to enforce the difference between moving things and inanimatable objects. As soon as something is moving in an animation we notice it... even it is a badly animated car far in the background...

 

So where photogrammetry was already an issue in stills, it's even worse in animation because you got this 'second' distraction going on.

 

For architectural walks I've tried animated manikins/puppets - some of you might know HX from polygems - to get at least real scene lighting on the people, but as I've said movement is immediately spotted.

In the past this result was okay because I could use these puppets in the background. (I used them in an animated sunset-scene in the background so they were quite believable masked away.)

But for our next film our client asked 'real people' (medium-shots and shoulder-shots) AND an animated nightfall. Anyone got any idea how I can catch this cat?

 

rgds

 

nisus

[Guest hajer]

how about a lowpoly people rendered seperatley

but under the same lighting condition than in PS

composed over the sceen and than a motionblure filter is passed on the ppl layer this shold giv u the same look u usully see in photograph

[Sawyer]

I would love to see if there are any samples out there of using non-photo real planar bitmaps/cutouts. The project I am working on now was developed to not look photo-real. It looks really pretty sharp but we needed trees. I tried drawing the trees as sketchy lines. I thought that looked bad. We tried photo-real cut out trees but it covered up most of the building. So what I came upe with is rendering the trees to a seperate file and adding them in photoshop. Then once it was composed I made the trees partially transparent. I almost like the effect. I would really love to see what other people are working on if they happen to come up with this problem.

[nisus]

Hi hayer,

 

Gonna try your technique, because I like it. I still got the lowpo animated manikins from polygems. tnx a lot

 

Hi sawyer,

 

Here are some ideas in the mind of your sketched trees for a project we did almost five years ago.

The first link are original images from the competition entry. The second is a more recent version of the reworked design just before construction. The last link is the final design as build.

 

http://www.ams.be/projecten/pr/cg_f.html

 

http://www.ams.be/nl/cb.html

 

http://www.ams.be/projecten/pr/zgl_f.html

 

These will also do for non-real images, but within a few weeks, we'll probably post our latest works, one of which is in a collage-style.

 

rgds

 

nisus

[nidas]

Originally posted by STRAT:

max isn't a problem because i can use RPC ppl and i'm personally so impressed with them. but my other major rendering engine, cinema 4d, as yet hasn't got an RPC interface (should do in the near future so im told, altho they been saying that for the last year).

I hear it's better to use Photoshop RPC plugin

to place RPC people into rendered scene - it's

faster and you have better control (add/remove,

move/rotate RPC's untill you have the best composition, no need to re-render the scene)

 

Or even better to use new 3.0 release of

Piranesi software which now supports RPCs.

It's unique file format includes 3D information

of 2D scene, so you can have RPCs cast correct

shadows on other objects in scene (on stairs

for example).

 

all not tested in practice by myself. Ain't

got commercial RPC's and no time to make my own.

 

-nidas

[nisus]

Hi nidas,

 

Piranesi is great to place RPC's, but the democar doesn't work.

 

rgds

 

nisus