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Archive notice: This article was originally published on November 1, 2018. Links and embedded videos are preserved as part of the historical record.
What are such models actually used for? The most widespread use is in the world of architectural visualisations. On the one hand, people fill the scene or image with life and thus remove sterility. On the other hand, people, who have a certain defined body size, give a concept of the dimensions and make the proportions of the objects and scene clearer. But of course the possible applications are not limited to architectural visualisations.
On the one hand, there are people on offer who remain rigidly in one pose, which is of course perfect for a still. Even in animations, you can distribute such rigid people in the background to populate the scene. After all, not everyone is constantly fidgeting in the real world. Of course, small, subtle tricks are also allowed here, such as adding a soft noise to the geometry to simulate subtle movements. An animated bend or twist modifier would also have an effect on partial areas.
Rigged
To circumvent these efforts, figures with a skeleton of bones, i.e. a so-called rig, are also offered. In the case of the 3ds Max package, prepared scenes are offered with the biped skeleton structure or the Character Animation Tool (CAT). This makes it very easy to place motion capture data on the figures.
The models are equipped with bones right down to the individual finger segments and the eyes. If you would prefer to use the standard bones instead of the biped or CAT system, these can be converted using simple tools. As a brute alternative, you can still export the animated model as .fbx and import it again. This automatically converts the CAT bones or biped bones into native bones. Of course, you could also simply import the supplied .fbx data. However, the materials must first be created and the textures assigned.
As the bones are not hidden in the models that use the CAT system or the biped system, you should make sure that they are hidden before rendering or set to not renderable in their object properties. This is not the default setting. Otherwise, if you send such a scene to a render farm, this can result in a lot of unusable images due to the visible skeleton in the rendering.
Confusing Bones
Another confusing aspect for me is the end bone for the eyes, which doesn’t seem to have any influence. In order to animate the eyes, you have to animate the main bone of the respective eye by rotating it or assign a look-at constraint to it. The situation is similar with the lower jaw. Here too, the jaw end bone does not appear to have any influence on the mesh, although the jaw bone moves with it. You have to animate the rotation of the jaw bone itself in order to open the mouth. In a later phone call, I was told that the end bones, like the fingertips, are more of a guide to help me find the right bones quickly.
In 3ds Max, the Biped version is the most useful for applying motion capture data to the model. Although the Biped module is now clearly getting on in years, it still offers a workflow of very few clicks when adding captured movements to the figure. Especially when adding older or uncleaned motion capture data, I noticed that the skinning should be adjusted a little here and there. Even for positions in which the body is deformed more strongly, the predefined weighting of the skinning, i.e. the respective influence of the bones on the body areas, is not quite sufficient. For example, if you want to place the rigged model on a bench, the legs are bent to a very extreme degree at the hips.
Alternatively, there is also the foot-steps system for Biped. Even a layman could use it to get a person walking. If desired, you can always add further animation levels to add additional secondary movements such as gripping a railing or using constraints to turn and steer the head.
If you have imported the model as a CAT format, you can also use the walk generator from CATMotion-Layer. The whole thing could then also be linked to a path, as walking on the spot has been out of fashion since the 80s.
The finished animated figures then have a walking animation or an idle animation, i.e. simply standing around with small primary and secondary movements. Hierarchically, the bones skeletons are linked to a main object, via which the figures can be placed in the scene or follow a path. Little extras such as the small changes in the direction of the eyes, which happen from time to time, are very nice and add to the realism.
Formats
The figures can be downloaded in a variety of formats. In addition to the native formats for 3ds Max, Cinema 4D, Sketchup, Rhino, ArchiCAD, Artlantis, Blender and Photoshop CC, there are also .obj and .fbx formats for importing the models into programmes for which no native format is offered. The rigged models, i.e. figures that already contain a prepared skeleton for animation, are offered in native format for 3ds Max from version 2013, Cinema 4D, Maya, Unreal Engine 4 and Unity as well as .fbx. Models with a prepared animation are available natively for 3ds Max, Cinema 4D and Maya as well as .fbx. This means that the largest programmes are covered as well as a format that can be imported into almost anything.
The corresponding textures come as 8K .jpg, i.e. in a size of 8,192 x 8,192 pixels. This also allows details to be displayed. If this results in excessively long rendering times or the interactive scene becomes too large, the textures can also be scaled down. In the case of 3ds Max, Renderpeople even offers a free script with which the textures of the Renderpeople figures and other textures can be quickly resized with just a few clicks.
The textures are currently offered for the Specular Gloss rendering method. The Diffuse Map, the Glossiness Map and the Normal Map are also included in the package. For a metallic roughness workflow, you would have to convert the textures yourself. Partly because no subsurface scattering maps are included, some of the people do not look one hundred per cent realistic in close-ups. However, you should leave the church in the village: After all, these are not props produced by Weta Digital for the “Lord of the Rings” films. That would be in an extremely different price league.
Practical test
In my case, I tested the models with 3ds Max. In the corresponding .zip archive I downloaded, I found not only a single 3ds Max scene in .obj or .fbx format, but also various scenes in which the models were prepared for different renderers. This meant I could use the models already prepared with V-Ray, Corona and Octane. There is also a scene in the native 3ds Max render format.
This is the old, but still fast and easy to use Scanline renderer. When using Arnold, you would have to assemble the corresponding shader yourself or give the Scene Converter in 3ds Max a try. The above-mentioned conversion of textures for a metallic roughness workflow would also have to be done by yourself at the moment. As a quick, simple alternative, you could invert the glossiness map and come relatively close to a roughness map.
If you study some of the original prefabricated materials, you can quickly see that the included masks are used to define the gloss behaviour. Of course, we can also use these masks for other purposes. These masks can also be used to colour different areas of the textures differently and thus create more variations in the representation of the figures.
In retrospect, I saw in other models that the material was already set up in such a way that it had its own glossiness map and a prefabricated shader construct to make partial colour changes.
During the subsequent phone call, the reason behind this was explained to me. Because the immobile figures are probably mainly used in still renderings, Renderpeople wanted to keep the material as open as possible and control the gloss behaviour through the various sub-materials, which are separated by the masks provided. The respective user can then fill these sub-materials with their own content. The moving models could also be used in interactive presentations, so their materials are less complex and more straightforward.
The CAT format offers a walk generator to create a procedural walking motionThe prices are moderate – between 40 and 120 euros per figure, depending on the scope and animation. There are also bundles in which you can get figures in bulk. If you think about how long it would take you to model or scan such a figure yourself and then prepare it to give it a skeleton, the price is almost a gift. The post-processing of the models alone, which were created using photogrammetry technology, can take a very long time. With some figures, I realise from my own experience how much work can go into something like this.
Use?
What about the use of renderpeople in interactive applications? The time has finally arrived when game engines are also being used for architectural visualisations. However, this also involves passing on 3D data that resourceful people could extract again. Renderpeople’s licence allows many types of use, but like almost all companies that offer 3D models, the passing on of 3D data from Renderpeople figures is prohibited. So what is allowed in the area of interactive presentation? An enquiry on the phone resulted in the following statement:
The figures may also be used in interactive presentations as long as the result is not sold commercially. There are other licences for this. As the range includes people of all types and ages, use for pornographic and violent acts is prohibited.
All in all, this is a very helpful range for the scene middle ground and background, which is what they are intended for. Some of the figures may even slip a tad towards the foreground. The data is prepared in such a way that it can be used quickly without any further specialised knowledge. The prepared animations run in a clean loop and therefore require no further work by the user. This provides the customer with an easy-to-use range of characters that can be used to bring entire scenes to life.
