Populating Renders.

[tomoty]

Hello there.

I have a general question for this community.
I was wondering why artists don't seem to populate their visualizations with animated 3D people. In cityscapes and interiors I cant help but feel sometimes they look slightly deserted.
I understand the potential drawbacks, the challenge make CG humans look convincing, clients would probably want to look at the buildings rather than people, ease of integrating the rigs into the scene files.
I was wondering if any of you have had experience, good or bad with using 3d people in your work.

Thanks, Tom.

[pnhatton]

It's an interesting question.

There are varying levels of detail that people adopt, usually based on the size of the studio.

Some will have no people. Others will start maybe by putting see through people into the scenes. This can be surprisingly effective and can be done as a separate pass and composited afterwards. This will give you control over the opacity in post production.

The next step would be to include fully fledged 3d people and the models (mainly due to texturing) are getting better and better. You could also utilise a plugin like Anima to do crowd simulation. Very effective but if you're a very small studio then the cost outlay might be tricky.

The next thing that the large and more adventurous studios do is to green screen real live footage of people into their scenes. This looks incredibly good if everything is matched correctly. Once again it's just dependant on costs.

If you're looking to explore then I would work through the above stages of detail and just keep pushing yourself harder.

Hope that helps.