I am currently working on a special scene, to showcase some products, I have been fortunate enough to be involved in beta testing. My problem (at the moment) is two-fold. The first part is the seating. This image is currently showing chair 04 which I downloaded from baument's (sp?). It needs to be multiplied in masses to be commensurate with a fashion show. The polygon count on each chair kind of increases drammatically and vue decides it doesnt really want to play nicely...it has crashed 3 times in the previous scene builds. Are there any other suggestions anyone can give me, (or even model locations for lower polygon count chairs that would be a better alternative for mass seating) to make this multiplicating of seating less stressful for vue to handle. Problem 2 : On each chair is going to sit a person..they need to be low res....other than p3 models, can anyone else suggest a better alternative? I currently have 384mb of pc133 ram on a pIII 600 Intel Coppermine....and it isn't often that vue chokes on me in the primary stages. So I am somewhat perplexed, and hoping to think ahead and avoid too much conflict with vue for this scene. Any advice, suggestions or leads would be gratefully appreciated, as always. :) ~Beck ps....yeah I know the catwalk itself is crappy, but hey....at least I tried to build it myself ;]

Render one or two chairs with different people and add on volume in post work. This same technique was use by another artist about a year ago in doing a gladiator scene. Yoa can also bring individuality to the characters in post work. For a Fashion show go for a more metalic chair, king of like the stuuf you rent at party hire.

Not sure how to help with the chair problem, Beck. Sorry. I did want to say that I don't think your catwalk looks crappy at all. Mayhaps a tad bigger...or longer. But, looks good to me. -Kage

I would increase the size of the catwalk width and length for a start. I agree on the chair model, lovely though it is, have a look on 3dcafe, I am sure there are some much lower poly models there, more modern. Of course you could always lower the perspective a touch more, only placing chairs in the immediate foreground with figures on, and then simply place seated pose figures in the next rows, you may not even see they dont have chairs. i assume that this will be all dark with spotlights anyway!? - so if the light focus is on the catwalk, you could get away with a lot in the audience!? - maybe as you get further away from camera and alongside the catwalk, you could simply have poser heads, shoulders and torso., simply deleting bits of the meshes not visible!?

PS - the other alternative is to create the scene, populate the audience a s above, render it and then using a scene without the audience, import your 'models' and render that! - halving size so you can re-connect in Photoshop!?

heyas; either put the showcase models on the runway in vue and render, then import them as a background to put behind the people in chairs in poser... or, put all the chairs and people in poser and render them to an image. use the tiff alpha channel as a transmap in vue, and map the suckers to a square. it would be harder to match up the ground plane and camera view with this second method.

Hi Beck...if its the final image that matters, do the stuff you need to do, that is rendering man/woman on chair, some folding arms, some clapping, some laughing etc.. As for the model on the catwalk, render them individually too. After all that you want is set, take all the bmp file and compose them in a Paint program using layers. Just know that the scene you use for the setup must be a "constant", in this case don't move your camera and the catwalk stand. Good luck.

I would get much different chairs with much lower polygon counts to begin with and listen to the others for finishing your pic. Good idea though!! S Verdie of Dreamspinner

Thanks for the advice. Here is a closer version of the fashion show set...minus the people and models. What do you think? Suggestions are always welcome. Beck

Yea I think ppl got the right idea with breaking it up into parts and then putting together.

Attached Link: http://www.3dup.com/models/index.cgi?direct=3Dup_Models/Architecture/Indoor_2&img=18

I think I found the perfect chairs..pretty low res stuff...but great for mass production. In fact 3Dup models has some fantastic models of every variety...well worth a look. I'll do another test render and see what the polycount is..you never know, if I'm lucky, it will save me multiple renders and photoshop compositories. I have to be totally honest with you...I'm not the best photshop user in the world..at least I can honestly say that it worries me, since I picked up Vue, my photoshop skills have dwindled to almost non existancy ;] Wish me luck...I think I may need it. ps. Using mainly booleans to build the set cut my poly count by 2/3's..this was a huge shock. The only imports in the scene above were the curtains and the droplights...both very low res (thank god) :) Thanks again for everything so far. I really appreciate it. ~Beck

Or speller so it seems {{..I'm not the best photshop}} should have been .....photoshop LOL sigh.....when does typing 101 start again mike? the fall? ;]

The chair's indeed were perfect. The polycount was beautiful. However, as soon as I began to inport the audience......the polycount shot up and vue started to die. I deleted their hips, thighs, shins, feet etc..but it made no real difference. Looks like a compository is going to be the only other way out. Can someone please tell me which way would be best to do this...step by step would be great, cos I'm pretty thick. the count at the moment is as follows : 5072 objects 4 lights 1323400 polygons. I did a prelim render to show you the latest disaster. As always your advice would be gratefully appreciated. ~beck

LOOKING REALLY GOOD!!! Verdie of Dreamspinner