LOTS of people needed for large scene- HELP!

[dlparisi]

Does anyone have any ideas on quick ways to populate a scene like this one (it's still a WIP)? The client wants a lot of people sitting at the tables and now they additionally want me to swing the camera to the left a bit so we'll see some of their faces too. 2D people would hold up best for faces and closeup people but putting in enough people would be a ton of work, let alone trying to find enough 2d people that match the proper perspective (I don't see how that's possible). 3D people would probably be the easiest (I could vary the model and their clothes to create a lot of variety) but I'm worried about how they'll look up close. Any ideas? Any help is much appreciated.

[Neilg]

Tell your client they can either have a lot of people which don't look very good, or a few photographed people which look better. Be transparent and let them know it's not easy. Unless you've already agreed to do it.

Filling it with 3d people and photoshopping new faces/bits of clothing over the closest ones to remove the hard look of the models would be easiest. Still a massive job though.
Just using sections of people to cover up the 3d ones will give you a lot more room to use slightly out perspectives.

[steveblake]

Maybe try 3d people in 5+ poses rendered as silhouettes? For added interest and to help separate them in the low camera angle map in a light gradient on each. You could also offset the values slightly so that they have a random element. A slight fogging would also help separate the forms.

I did this in an image a few years ago - think the gradient needs more contrast than I used here tho:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m1...y5zo3_1280.png

Basically when in doubt about model / map quality - use silhouettes.

[EDIT: sorry just re-read about faces! - I guess it's sometimes worth trying to persuade clients that there's other options available..]

[tricky]

Not sure what your timescale is, but you could book a ticket to a suitable nearby theatre production/football match with a view to taking photos from roughly a similar perspective? Either that or 'Google image search is your friend'

[dlparisi]

Thanks for the tips everyone. My personal preference would be for the silhouette people. The space is rather unexciting (basic walls, ceiling, tables and chairs) and it seems like the image is going to be all about the people, silhouettes would help with this a bit. Part to the problem is that all of the people need to be in business attire so something like Richard is suggesting probably wouldn't work unless I could find a suitable venue. I think I'm going to go Cube's route and propose either 2d or 3d people with pros/cons of each.

Thanks again.

[Neilg]

See if you can get more money for it, too. It's a massive job you've got ahead of you and not something that you'd normally do.

[steveblake]

Agree with cubiclegangster!

..maybe worth considering silhouettes with clothing? Worth a quick mock-up for client to at least see... kind of like this but showing shirt'n' ties or something:

http://static4.depositphotos.com/100...er-clothes.jpg

I did a stadium job recently - ended up purchasing a set of fully textured and animated people from Turbosquid. Still ended up taking several weeks to convert, place and tweak 60,000 proxies!

[dlparisi]

Not sure I'd get them to cough over more dough at this point plus I'm super busy so I'd rather just try to limit the number of people in the shot rather than going for extra fee. The silhoutes with clothing looks cool but I doubt the client would go for it. Thanks.

[dlparisi]

Just to follow through with this... I ended up going with 3d people purchased from AXYZ. I purchased 10 different business attired people all rigged along with a pack of BIP motion capture files (one of them was a nice sequence of them sitting in different positions). I then made an animated proxy of each person running through the motion capture (only about 15 different frames). From there I wrote a quick script to randomly put each in a chair and select an animation offset of 1-15. Lastly, on a few of the people I was able to randomize their clothing color using a VrayMultiSubTex where I tweaked the clothing map in photoshop. All in all, I think it turned out acceptable in a rather reasonable amount of time (took me about 1.5 days) to get everyone in place (I still need to tweak the image a bit though). Thanks again everyone.

[Morne]

With the exception of their hair and hands, the people turned our well for this shot!
Well done

[tricky]

Not bad at all. Well done.

but...what is it with AXYZ people that they all seem to have broken necks? We had this when we last used them a few years ago. I seem to remember animated ones are also the same. They just look so unnatural. Quite scary!

[raymarcher]

Pretty ace, you got a difficult job done with a nice result.

[Donald2B]

With the aXYZ people, we have always had to add layer adjustments to the animation to fix some strange things with the heads as well. I just figured we were doing something wrong since we don't have that problem with other rigged 3d people with different mocap data.

Looks good for the quick turnaround!

[dlparisi]

Yes, there were a few quirks to the people when I applied the BIP file but most of these I callously ignored due to the number of people I needed to get done. The specific motion capture I used had their head looking a little bit up which works ok for the people in the close rows but towards the back a few look like they're looking at the ceiling. Some of the women's feet got messed up due to heels which I tried to fix most of (I think this is due a mismatch of the motion capture angle to the position of the ankle in high heels). I don't have a ton of experience using these mocap files on rigged models so may have done something wrong too! I should also add that I converted/tweaked all of the materials to either vraymtls or Fastsss2 (it came with a few vray materials already set up), especially the standard anisotropic shader for the hair which was taking ages to compute the irradiance map on.

[Morne]

... especially the standard anisotropic shader for the hair which was taking ages to compute the irradiance map on.

Yes their hair looks crap and one of the main things bothering me with this pic, unfortunately I don't have any advice on how to make it better so not sure how to go about it if I had to do it myself...