Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/edit?video_id=wlzKFGFOz-I

If you want to make this scene for yourself I have several tutorials in a "3d animation tutorial playlist" on each aspect of the scene including:-

1. Low Poly People creation.
2. Converting BVH files for walk loops
3. IES lighting
4. Animated textures (for the dirigible)

Steve
Sci  Fi Funk
http://www.scififunk.com
http://www.facebook.com/scififunk

I think you want your hyperlink to be "watch" and not "edit"?  Like this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlzKFGFOz-I

"edit" probably works for you, not for us.

...but it is a very cool video!  Kudos!

Attached Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlzKFGFOz-I

I don't know how to edit my original post on here?

Anyway http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlzKFGFOz-I is the link thanks.

Yea, you only have a limited amount of time for edits.  It's a pain.

Great!  I was looking on your facebook page and it says that IES lighting won't network render?  Do you know was this ever discussed over on the daz forums, that would be a HUGE bummer and needs to be rectified.

As far as I can tell it doesn't pick up the custom definitions. It will render the default definition over a network.

If you ever find a solution to this please do let me know as this video would have been a joy to render instead of being hair pullingly frustrating.

I have never dealt with IES but now I am curious.  When you create a custom definition, is it saved in scene or is it a seperate file that is saved out when you create the definition?  Have you tried manually copying that file to each of the rendernodes.

When I get some time I will have to play with this.

Hi.

It can be saved with the scene or picked up. I (think) I tried it both ways, no joy.

I also tried copying the file out to the same (realtive) place on the render nodes.

It is possible that they only work in some default folder within "program files".

So there is room for my conclusion being wrong. However my experiments all proved fruitless.

Please feel free to have a go and report back. That would be great!

I have a tutorial on creating IES lights (with free software), so you can create definitions that are very different from the default one.

Its just wonderful, and I love the narration "there's happiness elsewhere" -- so true!

I thought the rendering was terrific, weakest point was the similarity of the speeds and gaits of the people.

Thanks Crocodilian.

This time around the excersise was to see how many of these low poly people I could stuff into one scene before it becomes impractical.

The answer is 132.  Regarding the speeds, they walk at different speeds. I know this becuase I had to (hand) edit them to avoid walking through each other!

Regarding the manner of the walks. Yes that can be improved. I had 32 individual people using 24 distinct walk loops. The rest was down to replication.

I can probably fit a few more distinct people in at this resolution. The max walk loop to people ratio is 1:1 so maybe 40 people / 40 walk loops.

The other improvements (for next time?) are lower poly people (for more people) and different sizes and gender.

 I didn't want my comment to come off sounding critical . . . I'm really impressed. Walk cycles are just one of those things that the eye catches.

I thought it was brilliant, and to have achieved it with inexpensive software -- well, wow.

I guess the question I'd ask is: under what circumstances would you want to actually have this many meshes in movement in a scene, vs instancing? Or multipass?

I think of low poly for realtime applications . . .

That's ok - I didn't take it as such, and thanks for the wow. :-)

The great thing about these little demos is that it throws up questions.

Also I have no idea how much my viewer knows about 3D. Many will know more about this subject and see improvements.

I should come clean and state that there are only 32 unique models, the rest is down to instancing and copying. I used a variety of techniques.

I hate multipass with a passion. That doesn't mean I won't use it - but for me it's a last resort.

This stubborn attitude got me into problems with epsiode 7 (see ealier post), which believe it or not is a single scene file in most cases! (multiple thousands of houses in one scene) - the downside was that I had to reduce to 1% of original size to make the scene file workable, and this led to rendering problems. (No shadows).

Anyway - this scene is a precursor to episode 8 which has a load of people walking about outside the walls of "the new city". That is my motivation for this scene.