I need a virtual audience...

[tica]

Hello again,

Does anyone have a suggestion on how to produce a large audience for a sports event? My problem is, I can't use 3D people, because that would make my scene too heavy (it already is...), but I am not able to find a site anywhere that offers 2D images of SITTING people - there are plenty of people standing and walking, but not sitting, in a front view.
I would be very grateful if anyone that has had a similar experience, and solved it, would share some hints on how to do this without spending dozens of polygons on each person - and there are going to be thousands watching "my" competition!

Thank you!

[prospector]

Use Poser or yourself and friends.
Just render poser people sitting or take pics of you and friends sitting, and use them:D

[richpr]

Simple clip-mapped polygons... Like a rectangular shape with a picture of a person on it... Use an alpha channel to remove edges/background

You could make them into particles too, I guess... and have them affected by motion...

[prospector]

Take all the photos into Photoshop,
cut and paste them all into 1 long pic.
Then use that pic on 1 poly for a complete row of seats

10 people=1 poly:D

[richpr]

Arms race ;)

Take a picture of an audience in a stadium or a crowd ;) and put that on a poly... Subdivide the poly a bit and have some deformation on it for a bit of movement...

100s of people in a poly...

[prospector]

ARRGGGG !!
1 upsmanship:D

Take richprs pic and in Aura make a new layer and offset it just a bit.
Use that merged pic on a poly

200 people (ALL TWINS:D double your pleasure, double your fun) on 1 poly

Top THAT:D

[tica]

OK, thanks for your ideas!

But the most important question was: do you know any sites that offer images of people sitting, in a front view? I've tried all the obvious sites I know, like marlin studios, or corbis, and some lesser obvious ones, like sports magazines, but I've found nothing. So are there any ideas - I'll take "myself and friends", if I don't find anything else, ok? Thanks again!

[Adrian@Stufish]

I have to put massive audiences into almost everything I do, and I have never found a mapping solution that works for anything other than a single still render using an image that happened to be taken from exactly the right place.
I have a few different arrays of low-res people ranging from 250 - 80 poly per person, but most effort goes into arraying and colour mapping to avoid a chequerboard effect - particularly if they're sitting in rows. - I usually array something like 2 lots of 50 people on top of each other (sort of M & F) with an appropriate jitter in x y & z, weed out obvious overlaps, then select them one at a time and size them so their feet touch the floor ( i.e. h or H clicking at the top of the head to start.

Let me know if you find a magic trick, otherwise buy more memory !

(the attached image is a v.low res version of part of the design visualisation for a current rock tour.

[meshmaster]

Quick search on turbosquid brought up this:



http://www.turbosquid.com/HTMLClient/FullPreview/FullPreview.cfm/ID/141278/Action/FullPreview

I bet a more thorough search will get you better images... if not, post on the forums at ts and ask if anybody has what you are looking for - I'm 99.9% sure that others have needed such images before, so would probably be willing to sell them to you. I don't have em, but they have to be out there somewhere.