animated people

[SgWRX]

hello. noob question, but heck idk! so i've seen a lot of great animations with moving people that look like animated gif's or whatever format. they appear to be cut-out people, ie flat non-mesh. i've seen some for sale too.

 

so do you add those in post processing or do you have panels with them applied as material in the scene when you render the animation?

 

thanks

[Francisco Penaloza]

Nobody is answering this so I'll chime in.

For what I know you can use both methods, one will have more advantages than the other one depending on your scene of course.

The animations that you see with people that fit perfectly in the scene, angle and lighting wise, there is a big possibility that those actors are green screened specifically for that project. Medium-large companies rather do this than using stock photography that is very hard to match their client's needs.

[SgWRX]

ok. yeah i figured it's like billboard still people. but you mention the green screen "custom" ones i suppose i was thinking of those. some of the animated people look really good match for the animations. thanks for that.

[Francisco Penaloza]

Yes you'll get the best result when you green screen your people, now those usually are not places as billboards in your 3D software but they are inserted in post.

I would recommend rendering some passes, such, GI, shadows, reflections, refractions, glossiness, Mats ID so you can have some flexibility to integrate them into your comp.

It is not necessary to build your hole image from those passes but they can help you to match the people to the environment.

[paulsmith3]

3DS Max comes with the 'populate' function which is great for adding moving 3d figures to your scenes. We customise them to show in silhouette form which looks really cool and also gets round the issue of clothing type/ethnicity/age etc. Can sometimes be a pain sourcing the correct people otherwise. Clients love it also

[SgWRX]

yeah i'll probably never do green screen! we just don't have anyone other than 1 or maybe 2 people that would do it for me too shy i guess! i have used the populate people. even some with just a white or grey material. i have customized some too. i can't get over that in this day and age autodesk couldn't get better textures for populate.

 

adobe has a promising thing for making people, custom clothing and hair and even down the shoes! then you can export/upload to a site to rig them and load animation files! export all that down to 3ds max and it works pretty good. forget what it's called but it's included with my work creative cloud account.

 

however it's pretty time consuming and seems like you never get exactly what you want for the given situation!

[Ernest Burden III]

adobe has a promising thing for making people, custom clothing and hair and even down the shoes! then you can export/upload to a site to rig them...

 

I'm not aware of this, could you elaborate or share a link?

[Chris Harris]

I'm not aware of this, could you elaborate or share a link?

 

Here it is (I haven't used it but was aware of it for a little while):

https://www.mixamo.com/

 

More specifically this video to see all the variations:

https://www.mixamo.com/videos/home-create.webm

[SgWRX]

yes that's it! maximo. and the adobe program is called "fuse" on my system it shows as "fuse beta".

[Ernest Burden III]

Here it is (I haven't used it but was aware of it for a little while):

https://www.mixamo.com/

 

Huh, interesting. The four figures in the middle are creepy as hell. Mouse over the left woman... dance of the un-dead.

 

Wow, I'll have to look into this soon, after a big deadline. I'm animating bridges, and the client wanted cars driving and changing with detoured traffic lanes, then people walking/biking... It would be great to have an easy way to add figures with general movement. Close-up might not work, of course.

 

The problem might be baked rigging, as opposed to getting the rig with controllers and such to customize. Those don't always transfer well between programs. I wouldn't think Adobe would be sleeping with Autodesk, so I have hope for this. All this speculating on my part...I should just do the research. After bridges.

[Chris Harris]

Pretty much 90% of all my work is dealing with roads, bridges, traffic, and recently adding bicyclists and pedestrians walking and/or standing in place with movement. Right now, we use PTV Vissim for traffic and bicyclist simulation, either what is the current amounts or projected out 20 years. For pedestrians, using the built-in 3ds Max people and fortunately the camera is usually 100’ feet above the road so their quality and movements are perfect for our needs at the moment. But mixamo is also on my to do list when time permits. In the meantime, I’m dealing with a bloated MAX file that doesn’t want to render on the farm...my forehead is flat from banging it on my desk.

[Ernest Burden III]

Pretty much 90% of all my work is dealing with roads, bridges, traffic, and recently adding bicyclists and pedestrians...

 

It's not going to make the magazine covers, but I really enjoy engineering work. For me it's mostly bridges in the last few years. Actually it all ends up under NDA, national security reasons, so I've been invisible.

 

...But mixamo is also on my to do list when time permits...

 

Yeah, deadlines, I'm looking forward to time permitting...anything.

[Robert Lamp]

 

Should be useful!