Asset: 33 Low Poly Crowd Figures (Patreon)

Low poly crowd figures as a dime a dozen online, but almost none of them seem to have any textures??

This is mostly just a test from this evening (version 1), but it gave some handy results until I can do better. Ideally this would be done with more than 3 people, but! Quarantine! What'ch'a gonna do?

Thanks as always to Sean and Kaitlin for being very accommodating models :D

I'm working on the HyperBowl sequence, and I wanted to have crowds standing around, and while I'd usually just put something together using stadium images, I wanted to see if I could come up with something that might be a bit more flexible. The goal kind of being using these guys to fill out the deep background, then ideally some of the higher quality scans as the foreground dudes. 

I recently got a drone with the hope of snagging some big landscape photoscans, but it has a "quick orbit" feature, which works alright!! You can pick a point for it to orbit, and it had a little trouble since there were 3 of us, but it worked! I sped up the footage 400% in an editor, so when I exported a jpg sequence I was only using every 4th frame, and the end result in RealityCapture was like 50 cents per 3 folks- not bad!

Also, since it's just instancing the same few low-poly figures, I was able to create 80,000 of them with a particle system without blender breaking a sweat (well. Maybe a bit of a forehead glisten), which means you should be able to instance a ton of these guys even on a laptop. 

Oh also- I set up a few hue-randomizers just to keep too many obviously repeating shirts from appearing. It definitely helps hide duplicates, but it also means every color will be slightly off- up to you if you want to keep it.

(Right click, save as:)
-Crowd Asset Blend File
-Crowd FBX (for non-blender folks)

Things I learned:

-Scanning/processing multiple people at once definitely helped as far as time investment, although it obviously introduces occlusions and such, so the scans aren't as good overall.
-I might see if they have a different color profile or something I could shoot in? Something lower contrast? This might just be what I have, though.
-Wear less dark black (gets underexposed then there's no data to work from)
-I set everything to manual (you don't want auto-exposure changing all the values as the camera moves), but I forgot to set the white balance! I think it was on auto- didn't seem to affect much, though.
-I shot in 1080p, even though I think this camera can go to 4k? I'll try 4k next time, even though I'll probably end up downscaling.
-Dark jeans vastly increase the likelihood of legs disappearing (Kaitlin's missing her legs in like half of the scans (I tried to add them back... sometimes)).
-The drone has similar utilities where it'll continuously orbit, and changing the height during that rotation would obviously give a much more complete scan. This one worked well for me also being in the scan, though :D
-This went quick though! Maybe 20 minutes of scanning, then an hour of babysitting RealityCapture?? Definitely excited to do more of these!