Now Crowd is a good idea, but a billboard creator would be a useful compliment

jdavison67

I like what they have done with this billboard crowd system , but to be truely useful, we would need to be able to generate bilboards with our own characters and designs.

It won't take long for these to star looking cookie cutter...or out of place...

 

JD

Petercat

You already can, but if you're going for multiple angles like in Now Crowd, it's pretty time consuming.
1) Place the figure (in the pose you want on a billboard), in a scene by itself, with no backdrop.
2) Add lights so it will look the way you want it.
3) Render and save (I render to 1024X1024). This will be your billboard image (Diffuse Color).
4) DO NOT MOVE CAMERA! In the Environment tab, add a black backdrop.
5) Select everything in the scene, figure, hair, clothing. Apply Uber shader, make emissive: Color white, temperature 4000, luminance 30,000.
6) Render. This will be your billboard opacity strength map.
7) Create a primitive plane, I use 2 meter X 2 meter. Rotate it 90deg with the X Translate slider.
8) Select the plane in the Surfaces tab.
9) Load the billboard image into the Diffuse Color channel, and the opacity strength map into the - heh - Opacity Strength channel.
10) Click on the plane in the scene tab and create a new group, name it whatever you want.
99) There's your billboard. Now do it 120 more times, from different angles. Have fun.

Works with people, plants, anything that can be rendered.

Oh, and there might be a halo around the image in the billboard, it won't show when you render the billboard in a scene.

agent unawares

Petercat said:

4) DO NOT MOVE CAMERA! In the Environment tab, add a black backdrop.
5) Select everything in the scene, figure, hair, clothing. Apply Uber shader, make emissive: Color white, temperature 4000, luminance 30,000.
6) Render. This will be your billboard opacity strength map.

Don't do this, though. Use the png alpha from your first render.

Petercat

agent unawares said:

Petercat said:

4) DO NOT MOVE CAMERA! In the Environment tab, add a black backdrop.
5) Select everything in the scene, figure, hair, clothing. Apply Uber shader, make emissive: Color white, temperature 4000, luminance 30,000.
6) Render. This will be your billboard opacity strength map.

Don't do this, though. Use the png alpha from your first render.

What's that? And where do you find it?

agent unawares

Petercat said:

agent unawares said:

Petercat said:

4) DO NOT MOVE CAMERA! In the Environment tab, add a black backdrop.
5) Select everything in the scene, figure, hair, clothing. Apply Uber shader, make emissive: Color white, temperature 4000, luminance 30,000.
6) Render. This will be your billboard opacity strength map.

Don't do this, though. Use the png alpha from your first render.

What's that? And where do you find it?

The transparency. Open in Photoshop/GIMP/your editor of choice and just select the alpha of the layer, fill white, invert selection, fill black. Should be overall much faster than changing materials and rerendering, definitely automatable in PS. There should be a way to batch extract alphas from pngs in ImageMagick as well.