The Amazing Ever Growing Massive Multi-Figure Muse

Greybro

Having been a big fan of Neelzonline's works over the years, I've become infatuated with massive multi-figure compositions. I decided to start work on another one and leave it perpetual wip. Each time I add a new figure or figures, I'll come back to this thread and update the image. Reccommendations, comments and feedback appreciated as always. The image is created at 2000 px wide so please expand for a better view. In some case the figures may be very small and in unexpected placed.

Name: Mutantville Central 2017

Llynara

Oh, wow! That's very cool! How many figures are you up to now?

RGcincy

I was wondering, how are you adding in all the figures. All in one scene? or are you compositing images as you go? 

Greybro

RGcincy said:

I was wondering, how are you adding in all the figures. All in one scene? or are you compositing images as you go? 

Well, at first I try to establish how many figures I can render together inside the enviroment without running into memory troubles. Then I'll lock off the camere and create the base scene with no figures. I resave that file as a subsets of the scene. For instance Zombies Upper Right. Then I load my maximum sized group into the scene in that are and render that. Then the same proceedure for lower right, upper left, lower left, once I kind of have the scene laid out I'll go to adding 1 or 2 figures and rendering that off to composite.

Greybro

Today's update for a single figure can be seen right behind Muticia The Movie Goddess above int the updated original image. It's Elvis, but not exactly. This character is my old friend Ray Keziah who used to do a Youtube Skit called, Big E's Used Cars, where he'd do car sales commericals as Elvis and things like that. I used Face Gen Pro and got a pretty decent likeness of him.

RGcincy

Greybro said:

Then I'll lock off the camera and create the base scene with no figures.

That's a good idea. I always forget about locking the camera and end up slightly off.

Greybro

2 more figures added!

Greybro

A pretty significant addition, this one.

RGcincy

Spiderman!

Greybro

RGcincy said:

Spiderman!

Spiderman, does whatever a spider can!

IceDragonArt

I'm quite enjoying figuring out where the new ones are!  Of course, the larger groups are much easier to spot lol.

Greybro

It's going to be touch to get a final count when this one is done! 

Knittingmommy

Wow! That's a lot of figures!  :)

Greybro

Knittingmommy said:

Wow! That's a lot of figures!  :)

Just getting started. My record on any image done to date is something like 265. I hope to double that with this one.

Griffin Avid

OMG. Do NOT Zoom in. lol

I saw this 30 minutes ago while rendering and was going to comment on how cool a scene it was to be in.

Then I zoomed in, I have changed my mind.

I would NOT want to be here. lol

Griffin Avid

Don't want to derail your thread, but now that I think about it.

What kind of system do you have to put so many figures in one scene?

Greybro

avxp, I do it something like this.

1. compose your environment scene with lighting.
2. create your render camera and lock it down. Never even touch this camera until you are ready to render and then only switch to it in the dropdown camera view so as not to move it accidentally.
3. Save the file as 4 variations for the 4 quadrants of the screen. ie Scene-L1, Scene L2, Scene L3, Scene L4. Scene R1, Scene R2, Scene R3, Scene R4.
4. Fill the first quadrant or part of a quadrant with figures. Best to keep your figure groups small, say no more than 4 or 5 humanoids or animals. Render this composition. Delete everything but the figures and lights, ie delete the environment and render these figures with the dome set to not render so as to provide a shape for all figures in the scene.
5. In Photoshop or the layered editor of your choice pull in both the full render and the cutout version of the render. Ctrl + left clock the Cutoutlay, then switch the solod full render layer and press Crtl + C to copy. This will give you a clean, properly lit version of yourt figures to composition over your back ground render.
6. Complete this process as many times as need, composition the figures over your scene background. In this way memory is not an issue. Just be carefull to include things like shadows or manually paint them back in.
   
   My system info is attached. Nothing all that special machine-wise.
   
    

Griffin Avid

Bless you for sharing, but how in the heck did you figure that out?

I was going to guess one of those polygon-reducing add-ons.

But that's very clever.

Greybro

I talked to neelzonline. Google him. He does really amazing works so far beyond what I'm doing using Vue. He pioneered a similar technique which I appropriated for my own ends in Daz Studio and Poser.

Griffin Avid

Hate to tangent in your great thread, BUT.

I saw a thread called scatter - can't find it now, but it was about randomly scattering objects around a plane and it wasn't good for people.

Is there something that "Copies" a figure or asset and makes clones of them? I saw the word instance somewhere but my brain can't find the context.

I saw bring in the clones and that's for Poser....

So your idea seems like something you do manually, but then, should there be product that does this automatically.

In music, we call it "bouncing down" where it's not Mixing down the whole song, only parts of it. You can bounce down and combine elements..In Photoshop it's called merging layers.

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Basing off your suggestion/tip -- I could Render the people as .png files and reimport them in - as artwork attached to a flat plane. If I do as you say and finalize the camera, it should fool the eye.

Once the camera moves, the illusion would be blown. Shadow and lighting might be an issue if you look close, but you could also draw that around the crowd's feet.

So is there a wat to EXPORT/RENDER a whole character as an Obj and when I re-import them, they are a single fused object - no more editing, but they should be a solid object that reflects light and casts shadows.

I'm saying I want to turn my live 3-d actor into a  satue that eats up less computer resources.

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Problem is, I want to do a scene with an army in the background (sometimes in formation, sometimes fighting)- and I don't know the best way to achieve this.

I can do this in post and compositing, but I wonder if I could do something for animation or at least an animated camera and everything remains 3-d.

 

 

carrie58

Any chance you are still working on this Greybro ?

Greybro

carrie58 said:

Any chance you are still working on this Greybro ?

I misplaced my original project file, sadly. So, no, I recon it's done as it sits now.