Church Hall

[shelsby]

thanks tricky. i take it the people in the main hall were all done in PS?

regards

steve

[tricky]

Aye! (yes )

[mcphep]

I have to say that we are finding the low poly people really useful in scenes. They 'fit' a scene really well in terms of the lighting which makes up for their less photorealistic appearance than rpc. And if you are doing stills they are great! They don't animate that well though.

-Peter

[tricky]

I have to say that we are finding the low poly people really useful in scenes. They 'fit' a scene really well in terms of the lighting which makes up for their less photorealistic appearance than rpc. And if you are doing stills they are great! They don't animate that well though.

-Peter

Yes - we bought some low-poly beople - XYZ? - they are OK, but I think some look better than others. I agree that you can get away with less 'realism' in the actual people because they fit the lighting perfectly - thats what is really nice. Its also good to have people physically in the scene - it makes a refreshing change from placing them all manually in PShop afterwards!

What do you mean by them not animating well? Do you been putting bones/skeletons in them or just animating a camera around the posed characters?

[andrius]

I downloaded the sample lowpolygon3d demo human with a sample .bip, connected it to the biped and wow, some pretty cool motion! The motion makes up for the weak model, from a distance, close up forget about it. The only thing I wish I could do is scale the model to match my scene. Anybody know how to do that????

[tricky]

I don't know a lot about Character Studio type stuff. All I know is my colleague attempted to add bip motions to some of those low poly people, and we found that the characters behaved very strangely - they looked like they were all leaning backwards too much.

I really do think that Character Studio could be improved greatly - its great to be able to put footsteps down and have a character follow them, but the standard 'walking' style should have more randomness (is that a word?!). You should be able to add a random head movement or nose scratch or something!

[Erik N]

Speaking of low-poly people: I've been using the axyz-design ones , and, like you say, they look really nice because they get correct lighting, but when they are close-up, they can look really crap because of the low detail. So the question is: Does anyone know where you can by high-poly people?

[tricky]

Mmmm. I have often wondered if Poser would work for this (that is if Poser still exists). Actually, I've just remembered it DOES exist - I saw their booth at Siggraph this year but never got a chance to speak to them.

Anyone used Poser for people yet?

[mcphep]

yeah, we used character studio on our low poly people and they have strange deformations due to the low geometry. They are really good in the middle to background though - that little bit of movement helps so much.

Poser works pretty well too. You can export posed characters for still positions which is quite quick. Preparing a poser character for animation with character studio though is quite time consuming and then you need to place them in the scene so we end up allowing a lot of time for that. They still don't tend to be much good for anything other than middle distance viewing though. DOF effects are good when you are close to a character!

Look around for bip files as there are a few general movements which really add to a scene. Not every character needs to move, just a suggestion of movement here and there will do the trick usually.

-Peter

[nvanherpt]

have used axyz people at my previous job too. got them animating like spiderman after spending a couple hours each fixing the mesh, adding a skeleton and shifting verticies to suit the moving joints. laborious work tho.