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Description
I've been a bit quiet of late. Part of this is a lack of muse, but part of it is buckling down and doing some much needed prep for background components. I toyed with using a larger scene with real figures and instances, with a final process compositing shots, but the process is not as sound as I would like it to be. So I shifted gears and pulled my Ball Guests and Staff characters into scene and created a series of Billboard images for them. In all (so far) there are 12 characters, with 6 rotated shots at ~ eye level, for a total of 72 billboards. All are set up as hierarchal materials so can be readily pulled into a billboard once it is placed. Each billboard took about 5-10 min to render, which is comprised of 3 canvases + the main render (an Alpha layer, a Normal layer and a Specularity layer). It took another 5-10 min per canvass to pull into GIMP to convert to .png and then setup in Daz as a material for the billboard (which is essentially just a 4-vert plane and an empty base to make posing it easier). Quite a lot of prep work overall but worth the effort I think. I have a test render I'll post shortly showing a scene with a mic of 'real' figures and background billboard figures.

I expect I will need to make more, but I'm starting to get a sense of the workflow now. This drops a figure's render cost from 500 mb+ to around 2mb. It obviously won't work for close shots, or even really in-focus shots, but for crowds rendered at the same time as main figures I can't see a better way.

Description
I've been a bit quiet of late. Part of this is a lack of muse, but part of it is buckling down and doing some much needed prep for background components. I toyed with using a larger scene with real figures and instances, with a final process compositing shots, but the process is not as sound as I would like it to be. So I shifted gears and pulled my Ball Guests and Staff characters into scene and created a series of Billboard images for them. In all (so far) there are 12 characters, with 6 rotated shots at ~ eye level, for a total of 72 billboards. All are set up as hierarchal materials so can be readily pulled into a billboard once it is placed. Each billboard took about 5-10 min to render, which is comprised of 3 canvases + the main render (an Alpha layer, a Normal layer and a Specularity layer). It took another 5-10 min per canvass to pull into GIMP to convert to .png and then setup in Daz as a material for the billboard (which is essentially just a 4-vert plane and an empty base to make posing it easier). Quite a lot of prep work overall but worth the effort I think. I have a test render I'll post shortly showing a scene with a mic of 'real' figures and background billboard figures.

I expect I will need to make more, but I'm starting to get a sense of the workflow now. This drops a figure's render cost from 500 mb+ to around 2mb. It obviously won't work for close shots, or even really in-focus shots, but for crowds rendered at the same time as main figures I can't see a better way.