Groups, Gaggles, and Crowds Tutorial for Daz Studio

You want to create a scene/animation with a multitude of distinct objects in the background. In this tutorial, we will demonstrate the techniques that will allow you to create a large collective of people like the hundreds of fans you may see at a sports event. These techniques can be applied to many other large collections of things for backdrops in your scene or animation. Some commonly seen examples are:

- crowds of people walking on city sidewalks
- schools of fish swimming in a body of water
- flocks of birds flying across the sky
- fleets of ships sailing the open seas
- squadrons of aircraft flying in battle formation
- heavily wooded forests full of trees
and the list goes on

When you are creating a scene that will be packed with an enormous number of figures, it is possible that DAZ Studio will require more resources than are available on your system. Or perhaps the render time required for the scene may be much longer than anticipated (which is even worse if you find that you need to make adjustments and render the scene again). To achieve this, we will create low resolution 3D objects that will display 2D representations of the desired props or characters using user customizable images pre-rendered in DAZ Studio to populate the background. Props/characters that will be located in the foreground (close up) should be designed normally. This fully illustrated colorful 64-page PDF covers the following topics:

* DAZ Studio Setup
- Style/Layout
- Viewport/Render Settings
- Transparent Backgrounds
* Duplicating 3D Objects
- Duplication Modes
- Planning Your Scene
- Example Prison Yard
* Cloning Scripts for DAZ Studio
* Creating 2D Replicas
- Preparing Objects
- Creating Diffuse Image
- Creating Opacity Image
- Putting It All Together
- Create Base Plane
- Apply Diffuse/Opacity Images
- Saving 2D Replica
- Using 2D Replicas
- Load & Position Members
- Preview vs. Render
- Other Considerations
- Halo Effect
* Technical Insights
- Tips and Tricks for DAZ Studio
- Possible Solutions to Common Problems

Please note that this training was developed with Daz Studio 4.6 and may differ from future releases/versions of Daz Studio.