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Ok, you got to help me understand this.
So yesterday I was checking out all the usual 3D share sites and I often see these billboard products by riversoft.
The one i was looking at was called Modern City Life and i thought yeah why not, I might need a crowd to fill a scene one day, so i start the download and i see that the file size is 15 gig. I thought WTF is going on there?
Wow, 15 gig for some transparent textured cutouts of people? That's a bit suss, and I cancelled the download and moved on.
I come across another now crowd billboards product called Party Time. Same thing again, started the download and I see the file size come up as 12 gig this time.
WTF ? Are you kidding me? why are these things be so dam big? It will take me forever to download that product. I got curious and wanted to see if it was the same size for other sites.Well I found 2 torrent listings and 5 other share sites with the same products and they all had the same big ass file sizes.
I went to Daz3D site to see if the file size of each product is listed, but it didn't.
15 gig is a lot space taken up on the hard drive for a single billboard product.
All the now crowd billboards products range from 10-15GB.
I agree, it is a large file size, but with today's HD's being Terabyte's in size, 15GB is nothing.
well,it's not matter of the HDD size, but the billboard size is in my honest opinion, it is indeed pretty ridiculous
Some vendors manage to acheive small file sizes with good quality, but they are in the minority.
I can't see why something like that which is designed to save resources, should have such a large file footprint.It looks like it's the texture files since each angle uses multiple files to create each billboard.
I won't buy them because I don't have space for multiple installers which are totalling over 18GB, for just a billboard. If I need people either I do a separate PNG render or I use lightweight figures or the LO-RES figures from Predatron to fill in a scene.
Imagine DOWNLOADING the product thru DIM from Daz, and a copy of it being saved in the DOWNLOADS folder (provided you don't delete file after install) then the 18GB unpacks to its full uncompressed size of 25GB for maybe one or two uses??? Sorry no.
The maker of the Colosseum included billboards in their product to make crowds of onlookers in Roman style/garb and the entire product plus the billboards is about 550MB.
I don't understand what is in these Billboards that must be so HUGE, unless they are 4K TIF Files uncompressed in any way at like 2400 DPI etc.
I'll pass on downloading those, just too much bandwidth and too much disk space wasted.
AnjaBear
I use Crowd Billboards now and then.
The reason for the size is that there is NOT one or two billboards per character... as Living Pixels says it is 72 different pics per every character allowing every character to be viewed from 72 different angles (including from behind in 30 degrees, above in 45 degrees etc).
Every single pic is not that big but if you multiply 72 different angles = different high res pics with 10, 15 , 20 different characters...that will equal a lot of GB...!
It is a really useful and good product, but, yeah it's a lot of GB on the hard drive, but it's MUCH better than populate your render with additional G2 or G8 - your GPU just simply won't take it!
Well John a funny thing happened on that day when i posted this topic. Over at another site I had started a download for each product just too see how big the files sizes were but then cancelled each one. Later some how Google Chrome had restarted a download and I ended up finding the 12 gig "Party time" Billboards product in my downloads the next day. Boy was i pissed because I wouldn't have even chosen that one to download. I installed it to see how it worked and i wasn't really impressed with how it looked in a render. It will suit others needs for sure but for me, my way of adding people to fill a scene is to just turn a few figures into a prop. They don't take up the same amount of resources if they were full figures. I have made about 20 different character props all posed and dressed.
How do you turn a figure into a prop? Sounds interesting...!
Are they fixed or can they have new poses? Are they still 3D?
Yeah mate.
They are 3d fully dressed figures and no you cant repose them. They are like, frozen, you can move them around your scene and you can rotate them on the spot to face any directions but cant change their pose.
You can turn a figure into a prop by loading up a figure, select a pose, then choose edit, figure, rigging, convert figure to prop. I save them as scene subset.Amazing! You learn something new every day!
I'm not home again in a few days but I will test that ASAP!
Do you have any clue how much they are (weigh)
compared to regular figures?They weight next to nothing. They aren't figures, just planes with 2D pictures on them. They work well in some situations, you can move them and rotate them as you wish (with the provided script) but since you can't pose them their use is limited.
@littlepleasures Before I posted my answer to @chonakz I added 3 billboards to a scene and checked and double-checked my VRAM and the difference was minimal. A few Mb. That's why I said "next to nothing" (and not "nothing"). 😉
That being said, you are right that you can easily minimize the weight of figures in the background, as an alternative to billboards. I personally use a script to compress textures when needed. Easily done with a few clicks.
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