THOUSANDS of people

[CCS]

I knew this day would come.

One of my projects is a baseball stadium. So far, views have been outside the stadium. Now they want some inside views, so I'm faced with populating about 5000 seats, as well as vendors, walking people, etc. I can handle the latter, but I'm trying to decide on the best way to do the seated people.

My first try was planar geometry outlining shirt, arms, face, etc. Very simple, low poly, etc., but render times were not great.

Thought I'd try some vraymeshes of a simple model to see how it compared. Turned out much better. Under 2 minutes each!

I'm here looking for ideas. I could find some photos of other filled stadiums, but that would limit my view angles. Plus, crowds would change from view to view. And, that would wipe out the possibility of animation. (Not sure iof they want it, but better safe than sorry.)

I don't anticipate getting anywhere near the people. Views will likely be from the pitchers mound. What I'm looking for is a way to somwehat randomize the people's positions, clothing and hair colors, etc.... Again, don't need much detail because of distance.

Here are samples of the nasty models I made for testing.







As rough as they are, maybe my models are even *too* detailed, now that I look at some photos. I'm wide open to any ideas.

Some reference photos:
http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~foxga/pics/pics.html
http://best.me.berkeley.edu/~jhey03/...C%20Sept03.jpg
http://veniceblog.typepad.com/venice...alciofolla.jpg
http://www.jackhammerbaseball.com/st...augural_7.html


THanks!

[percydaman]

isnt there some scripts out there that will randomly place a material on a list of objects? might take a look at scriptspot.

[Da_elf]

im not sure about colors but for sizes etc you might wanna try scatter for the people. beats me.

[CCS]

Yeah - there is a Blur script for randomly assigning mats. I've actually had it running about 10 minutes. Wondering if it will work!

If I can get an image after the hourglass goes away, I'll post the result.

Any other ideas?

[CCS]

Ok, it just finished. Realized the weak point of my idea though. The people are instanced. They are all assuming the same mat. How can I keep geometry instanced, but vary the mats?

[davision]

Couldn't you use PFlow to place instances? -- it has controls for varying materials randomy on particles.

Also, if you attached the people together, you could use MaterialID by element (it's a modifier) which lets you vary materials easily.

If it was me I'd try the Pflow route since you can should be able to have them randomly scattered over the surface of the bleachers.

[CCS]

PFlow is MAX, right? I'm using VIZ.

Also, if I attached I'd lose the benefit of vrmesh/proxy, wouldn't I?

[powerandrubber]

RPC. A spendy option but it would work well in this case.

[priad]

you can use forest with people it work fine.
you make spline in the gradin and put a random of people map.

[CCS]

hmmm... won't that kill render times? (rpc)

as for forest, I take it you're talking about billboards? If so, then #1 - I'd have to make a number of them (for variety), and #2, flat people will look funny

[priad]

with forest you have not more flating than RPC. there are turn to the camera.

[CCS]

That works fine for plants, but I can't have crowds of people turning 45° in their seats. Would look funny I think.

[priad]

I'm agree

[priad]

I think that you have only two choise for animation:
RPC (on a layer) or lowpoly model. I don't see other thing
I know very well the Fu**** Rpc but sometime they are very usefull (with scanline you can have good rendering time, I know the RPC time loading)

[CCS]

What do you think of this?

These image sizes are probably representative of what will appear in the final.
















Here's a closeup to show what I had to do to get the varied clothing, hair and skin colors without losing the instancing. (If you have a better idea, let me know!!)




(About 3800 people in test scene)