Many interesting city scenes are available at Renderosity and Daz3D. To add life to your city scene, you need to fill it with a large number of characters and vehicles. Filling such a scene with only a few characters makes your scene looks post-apocalipstic; unless this is what you want to illustrate, if so, that city would be dirty and filled with debris. However, filling a clean city with a large number of characters is time-consuming and cpu-memory-consuming. The use of low-poly rigged figures, of static figure-like objects and of figure Billboards, are great solutions for reducing the cpu-memory requirement, but it takes lots of time. The low poly rigged figures, are however much more versatile than billboards and static figures, and their memory footprint are not much larger. There are low poly crowd figures, like the Loretta Lorez and the Lorenzo Lorez, by Predatron, at Daz3d, but they are from an older generation of rigging system and their available poses libraries are not that varied. I have used these figures for creating scenes with crowds in my comic series "Ionivka, Big-Feet Mutant," that you can view in my Comics album at Renderosity. There are also the Crowd Figures from biala, at Renderosity, they are based from a more modern Genesis 8 rigging system and are compatible with any poses libraries for G8. I will concentrate on the use of the latter figures with my freebies related to them. Observe how busy, realistic, and even lively, that otherwise ordinary city scene is, at the bottom, compared to the spooky-like one above it. You might want to add more diversify in the crowd, like in skin tones, in hair styles, in body shapes or face shapes. However, ask yourself the question : do you want the viewer to focus on your main character(s) or on the crowd? In a somewhat not too diversified crowd, you character will stand out better. However, if everybody in the crowd is wearing the same color or the same outfit, the scene will looks weird, even scary, unless your main character is wearing the same outfit, like in a communist country. Do you mean that the main character is in a multi-ethnic city, like in New York, or in a mono-ethnic city like in Seoul, South Corea, and in Johannesburg, South Africa. You have to figure that out first, before creating your crowded scene. A Basic Workflow One thing need to be recognised right away; in a realistic city environment, we are SURROUNDED by MANY, MANY strangers, the crowd. Some are even within the arm lenght from us, especially in many Asian cities. It is then challenging to build such s dense crowd. Without preparations, building such a scene can be very laborious; for EACH crowd figure that appears in a scene, an actor, needs to : 1- be loaded in 2- be set the proper material (skin tone with texture, either "naked" or with painted* chothes) 3- get hair 4- be clothed with many cloth components (shirt, vest, skirt, pants, shoes, etc.) 5- be positioned within the scene 6- be properly oriented 7- be posed distinctively from other figures 8- express common crowd interactions that are usually observed in a city crowd. Other crowd adjustments might be required for a more specific ambiance (touristic, festive, consumerist, familial, disruptive, etc.) Note*: For such a figure, clothes and/or hair are optional; step 3 and/or 4 could be skipped. There is a better way to do it with the help of my freebies. An Efficient Workflow Let's define what an artist want to express with a city scene - It is usually part of a story, either as a series or as a snapshot - On that scene, there is usually a center of attention and a view zone, expressed by a specific location in that scene and, the position and parameters of the rendering camera. - A lighting environment ( day or night, cloudy/clear sky, rainy or dry, artificial lights like street lights, vehicle lights) - Usually, there are the main actor(s) who is(are) positioned at the center of attention - A social environment, that is visible within that view zone, with crowd actors, trafic/parked vehicles, crowd props and city props. For the above picture, the center of attention is at and near the main actor; the view zone is what is seen everywhere else in the picture generated by the rendering camera. Usually, you start with an empty environment scene, ex. a city, with proper lighting, having your main actor(s) already positioned at the center of attention and already posed. You will build a lively crowd around the main posed actors that will fill the view zone of the rendering camera. You would then add vehicles and other props later, after evaluating your crowd effect. You would build a crowd, starting from the crowd actors, the extras, nearest to the main actors then adding the other extras from the nearest towards the most distant ones. Working that way, you avoid adding extras that would have been hidden by the main actors, by other extras and by props. I will concentrate the tutorial on how to build such a lively crowd of extras in a BUSINESS zone of a city; this is the easiest crowd to build. I will divide the workflow into the following phases. - The Preparation phase : Prepare your team of actors (equivalent of having your background actors to be ready to act just before their performance; being costumed, with proper makeup and wigs.) - The Layout phase : Position your actors within the camera view in your city scene - The Acting phase : Made each actor do his/her act (pose your actors) - The Adjustment phase : Evaluate the resulting picture and adjust the actors for improving the crowd effect; it is equivalent to the re-shoot phase during a film production.