low poly people for G8
pixelquack
Posts: 288
Sometimes it does not have to be hordes like Billboard crowds, sometime you just need a handful people for the background with a bit of varying clothes for the seasons and some simple hair.
Comments
Perhaps this might help?
https://www.daz3d.com/decimator-for-daz-studio
I would wait for a good sale, though. It says it cannot be a part of any sale, but it recently was.
my solution for that is skinsuits, I am not artistic enough to create my own original ones so cannot share but what I do is paint the outfits on the people which is easy using Zbrush polypaint with Spotlight and A posed front and back renders, Blender projection painting can do this too, the results would count as derivative works though so I cannot share the textures.
There is a vendor at Renderosity that does rather garish IMO skinsuits for genesis 8, the old Clothim and Clother Poser plugin was a similar concept.
My favourite vendor made skinsuits are for V4 though by another vendor.
At renderosity, there is a set of very low poly people by Biala "Crowd figure". They are custom chars, but can accept any g8 pose (and some cloths/hair as well, but the simplest g8 cloth is at least 10 times heavier than the char)..
The appearance is not excellent, but also you should check marPoser freestuff. at renderosity. https://www.renderosity.com/users/marcPoser/freestuff?sort=newest He made tens of addons for this char, improving largeley their appearance, adding expressions, several very low poly clothing, accessories, etc.
I have made scenes with 40+ chars with this asset and, provided the distance is sufficient, the result is good and fast to render.
How low are you wanting? The base mesh is well under 20,000 polygons anyway, if you turn down the Render Divisions level in the Parameters pane, and you can resize the maps (or use Scene Optimiser) - which will probably have the greater impact..
I think the more pertinent approach is simplified hairs and some way of limiting/simplifying clothing. This is something I've often thought about doing in some respect... but there are challenges.
Helmet hair isn't so hard to do, but clothing... do you do a morph of the figure? If so, then it becomes necessary to have a bunch of morphs to reflect things like shorts/slacks... how do you do dresses and skirts?
You'd almost need a suite of super simple clothing, simplified rigid hair, and a few other things.
Maps reduction might be the way to go for closer people, the suggested items above for distance fill. Thanks for the plenty good suggestions.
@watchdog, I saw that but it's a bit pricey and seriously old, does it still work on today's actors/clothing items?
I have really been wanting to pick this up. https://www.daz3d.com/casual-outfits-for-genesis-8-males
from the description, it looks to only have a diffuse map and a normal map which would really help with resources and still look great.. Too bad this didn't catch on and the PA create more like this.
Did some experimentation a while back and got the standard G8F with clothing and hair down to 12MB's of VRAM, geometry took less than 3MB's.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/7213201/#Comment_7213201
THIS ^^^^ Some other day I`m trying to resize all my textures into 2048 since I`m only doing NPR stuff .
I couldnt believe how much space I can spare for my SSD ? A lots !!
Imagine if your GPU should chewing them .
DAZ Studio 101 should be about how to flesh out texture or complex shaders which only get tiny space in your complete renders .
And I think not every texture map have equal quality, so bigger but bad ones still get you bad renders