Creating Crowds for stadiums etc

[Syndicate]

Anyone have any ideas? I tried RPC the other day but it looks pretty bad. I am after a realistic render of a crowd in stadium. They dont have to be too photorealistic, just as long as they dont look look flat from a distance (say 50m?)

I have looked up sprites etc.. there must be some way of making a heap of people without spending "Massive" amounts of money (excuse my pun :)

Thanks.

[hotknife]

Have you looked into the Crowd solution in max.....or even a particle system of people waving standing etc.

we've used both in the past with success

[Steve Green]

Prior to today, I would have said particles would have been a good bet, or maybe using mesher on low-poly meshes combined with facing particles.

Take a look at this...

http://crowdit.worldofpolygons.com/

It only seems to have been announced today, and it is currently freeware beta but it looks promising.

- Steve

[Syndicate]

Thanks Steve. Looks amazing.

I will try to post my work with this plugin.

Thanks again.

[Steve Green]

No probs, I'm just having a look at it myself.

I'm not sure how easy it is at the moment to have crowds on irregular surfaces, and how easy it is to add your own custom meshes (ideally you would have a library of characters in a project).

It's still beta, so it will be very interesting to see how it develops.

Cheers

Steve

[joconnell]

Hi julius,

If you look on http://www.edwardbruce.com/ at the eircom 360 and carlsberg ads, there are shots in each that have large stadiums with crowds - in each case the stadiums are modelled and then a scatter is used to put tiny matchsticks all over them (literally a cylinder for each with 3 sides and 3 height segments). The scatter object is mapped with a picture of a crowd (get one from google images or sxc.hu) and then a noise is applied to the matchsticks to make them move - it works fine just once you don't try and do any close fly ins. If you add atmosphere from the stadium lights the effect builds up quite nicely and there's too much stuff going on in the image to pick out anything.

As someone else mentioned, the like of gladiator was done by filming people against a greenscreen fro different angles and filling the stadium with animated cards - they made sure that their clothes were keyable so the could colour correct the footage and make more variation again.

Hope this helps in some way.

[Steve Green]

Hi John,

that's a great tip - thanks.

Just for anyone following this thread, I've found that material by element added to the scatter compound object lets you assign multiple materials to the crowd.

Cheers,

Steve

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