Characters for crowds/background
synechodus_b7d65b3411
Posts: 125
I am sure this has been asked before, but what is the best way to have characters suitale for background or crown scenes without vastly increasing render times in iRay? Detail is not important but render time is.
What is the best character to use? (V4, V5, V6, V7, V8)? I assume V4 is best but is there a lot of difference?
What skin/materials? Is it worth resaving these as lower resolution? Are there changes to iRay surface settings other than the default conversion (for pre V7) that improve rendr time? Presumably removing any reflectivity and transluscency/SSS helps.
What hair? Presumably lowest poly and simplest textures
What clothes? Again does poly count make a lot of difference? What about texture complexity or iRay settings?
Thanks
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these can help fill in the background.for modern scenes. https://www.daz3d.com/lorenzo-and-loretta-bundle
Thatks, they look great for real background, I just need advice now on 'middle distance'- the characters who are not at the front of scene but still reasonably recognisable.
For still shots your best option is to go with pre-generated billboards of the people in the crowds. If you're dealing with animation, it is a bit more complex. You can decrease the resource usage by using the texture atlas to lower the resolutions on the textures and to use the base resolution on the figures as much as possible. There are additional methods that can help but they will likely add significant time and effort to the creation.
Kendall
Thanks for the answers, but still has nor really answered the qusetions- how do you set up a character to render easier?
This is an answer, but not the only answer: You can decrease the resource usage by using the texture atlas to lower the resolutions on the textures and to use the base resolution on the figures as much as possible. The largest resource hogs on a figure are the 4Kx4K textures that are attached to every surface. Use the texture atlas on the figures, clothes, hair, etc to lower their impact.
Kendall
If you don't want to use the billboard method (don't blame you) you can create low poly and lower res texture figure with the decimator (lowers the poly count of the figure) and the texture atlas (combines the various textures onto one sheet and any res you want). It's a bit of work, but the results are nice.
I've never used Texture Atlas but I do use the Scene Optimizer script from V3Digitimes. Do they work in a similar way?
Gen4 figures are really high poly. Pretty much any version of Genesis is lower than that. But you still have to dress them.
The thing about the Loretta/Lorenzo Low-res figures is that they include the clothing as well as the figure.
Use G3, hide parts that are under the clothes, remove normal, bump and displacement textures from materials (make material presets for future use), consider if you really need SSS and specular textures, remove too if you can. Limit material variations, use colors to add variety, not textures. Do the same with clothes (hide invisible parts too, maybe you'll need some normal maps for clothes). If you're doing crowd scenes than legs might not be visible so shoes might not be needed and both legs' and shoes' materials may be simplified to not use textures at all or even be made invisible (experiment here).
If still it's too much, shrink texture sizes. Texture size should be no more than twice the largest dimension of your character on image. Switch resolution of characters and clothes to base.
If the above didn't help, open Texture Atlas pane and merge all textures from all materials into one for each character. Texture size no more than twice the largest dimension of your character on image.
If still out of luck, check vertex count on clothes, use Decimator to diminish it. Make cornea, tears, eye reflections, nails materials invisible (this is desperate move actually :) ). Look at iRay log for VRAM utilization info.
Edit: forgot about instancing. Use it to place copies of figures in different places without impact on resource usage.
V4 has more geometry than later generations; just a note that V5 and onwards is a subset of G1, 2, 3 and 8; Victoria 4 was and is a base, whereas for Genesis the base is Genesis.
G8 has slightly lower poly-count than earlier generations; you could also delete the eyelashes; but later figures are more likely to have 4K maps, and G3 and G8 always do (with rare exceptions).
You can reduce textures, or use the same textures on multiple figures, then tweak the shaders for very slightly different skin tone. You can also reduce the quality of the .jpg file; for example, with default G8 Female, the Face is 884KB compressed on disk; lowering the quality when saving could have it as 617KB, 152KB or lower; too low and you could have issues unless far from camera. Not that compressed jpg on disk are stored uncompressed in video RAM during rendering.
Load Genesis (I'd go with 8); if some distance or facing away from camera, remove eyelashes.
Optionally - but would help - save lower resolution textures.
NGS Agenesis2 uses far fewer textures and achieves great results - or can, like much it's down to our own skills. So this is a useful product regardless of texture size. (https://www.daz3d.com/n-g-s-anagenessis-2-revolution)
All I'd do with NGS, and similar otherwise is:
Load lower res textures to just the base: Surfaces > Genesis 8 Female > Default Templates > Base: (Template 1 to 4 for skin textures; Template 5 if you use mouth; Template 6 for eyes, which you'll need if facing the camera. Template 7 has no textures.)
Then apply the NGS shader setting.
For template 6, with NGS, you should also replace the texture in Top Coat Weight and Top Coat Curve 0; this is automatically generated you could end up multiple copies of it. I'd save a copy of it (at a reduced resolution) wherever you have saved your reduced resolution textures. (If you go with G3 and not G8, this would be Template 7 and not 6.)
Once you have this, save it as a preset, subset or whatever method you use.
Edit:
For hair, clothes, (and perhaps worth a try on G8 after saving a copy first) is the Decimator. It reduces the number of polygons; IRAY is less concerned with geometry I believe, but it still takes up a little RAM. It isn't cheap (I waited until I could get some discount) https://www.daz3d.com/decimator-for-daz-studio
Oh and you would need to reduce the texture sizes on clothes, hair, and other items perhaps; there is a script somewhere that does it for you. Maybe someone knows the link?
There are some brilliant answers there, thanks. I will go and play.
By Decimator, you mean this?
https://www.daz3d.com/decimator-for-daz-studio
Crikey! That's a shell or two....
So I could create a figure, dress them, pose them etc....run this....
((((Doesn't say what it is...a script? Does it open in Daz or is this a separate piece of software to install?))))
And save or export the low-poly version of the character as a scene or scene subset.....
LOAD them into a scene and they would be there as a low-rez figure?
- eating very few resources and capable of filling up ....city shots, battle fields, etc.....?
----------------
I ask because I have never heard anyone sugest this product as a solution for crowds and traffic.....
This could work on objects too? Cars?
Whatever I load into the scene for decimating?
It could work, but might not. It might also be better for 3Delight as opposed to IRAY, but I don't use 3Delight - I have always been rubbish at using it. :)
Decimating the mesh could change the shape if there ended up being significantly fewer.
Just preparing to decimate triangulates the mesh - I seem to remember it was released to allow V4 to be reduced and made more suitable for games (but I could be wrong).
Try different amounts, see what works best; i use it before sending some meshes to VWD, although generally I find things work fine without. Some hairs benefit there though. And decimate makes for an interesting (horror story) looks to characters.
Oh, and I was trying stuff out; the second and third images have 16 Default G8F. Reduced size textures and NGS 2 for the shaders; the hair too was loaded with reduced size textures - I used a shader that applies to most hairs (some available from Daz, and my preferred one from elsewhere - but where from doesn't matter.) All the hairs use exactly the same textures - I could use multiple base texture, but I used a greyscale one and tweaked the colours.
The renders took 11 minutes 13.21 seconds on a 980ti and used:
Geometry memory consumption: 365.887 MiB (device 0)
Texture memory consumption: 26.9359 GiB (device 0)
As you can see, textures use a lot more RAM; recall that I didn't use decimator, but did reduce the sizes of all textures except the clothes
There are a couple of characters I tweaked the shaders slightly, so there are very slight differences in skin tone on a couple of the closer characters.
Edit, the 980ti card used: 2844 MB of RAM.
It's plugin, it'll add a pane into DS interface.
Here is the problem :) New DSON format doesn't support saving LODs, so when you load the scene it'll again be in original vertex count.
That's why I suggested it only as last resort measure, when reducing texture sizes and using texture atlas don't work but you need to free a last bit of memory for scene to finally render :)
It works on everything. I often used it to export to game engines, now UE4 has built-in LOD tool for static meshes and I use Modo for final touches on characters. But it's still rather good thing.
Thanks for all the comments. I played with a group for a party; I used Genesis 1 characters and all but one have this low poly hair:
http://www.sharecg.com/v/85130/gallery/21/DAZ-Studio/MakeHuman-v1.1.0-Hair
Long dresses seem to be all high poly (for obvious reasons) but I found some free Poser dynamic ones for various characters that I draped and imported and they look pretty good. I kept surfaces as simple as possible- all skins mats I reduced to 1024 px and removed SSS, glossy etc. Clothes I kept as simpla as I could and stuck to minimum glossy to look like satin and some low rez textures.
This is a 60 second render on my laptop.