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Crowd with LED wristbands


hbeach

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Attempting to represent an arena-sized crowd with LED wristbands and not sure how to approach this. I'm curious if any of you have done something similar in the past.

I'd rather not use an image masked to some kind of object because I'd like to have control over the wristbands - color, intensity, variety. 

 

Taking any and all suggestions. 

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Sounds like a challenge. 

 

With a spotlight lighting device, I use the Spotlight preferences to adjust the color of the lens in Spotlight preferences, bu class and use the color field. I would think I could manipulate another type of symbol in the same way. The figures would have to be converted to lighting devices.

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You can combine image props for the crowd with symbols for the wrist

bands. You would need a separate symbol for each color, and you could either place a point source in the symbol or use a glow texture. Doing something like a pixel map might push the limits of VW and be best done by a visualizer. 

 

There is one way to simplify a photoshop compost. For each wrist band, apply a glow texture that does not emit light. Set the texture’s color to something close to a chromakey green (magentas can work well too). Once exported to PS, use the magic wand to select all the chromakey pixels and create a mask (either use a layer mask, or just delete). You can then lay in an image or just paint underneath that will color the wrist bands. 

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You could place a ton of simple extrusions (square) around the arena, assign each a glow texture that has been set up receive it’s color from “class”, create several classes for wristbands, assign sections of the extrusions to those classes and there you go. Change class colors to change colors of the various selections. Adjust to colors or even use black to adjust intensity.

 

 The most time consuming part would be making them look fairly random. 

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I have had to do this a lot and I always come back to doing it in post (photoshop or aftereffects). I can't imagine doing it in VW. I found in Cinema 4D it to be much easier, but still a bit lacking in flexibility for updating "content" or density revisions. I've made some scatter brushes in photoshop that address this pretty well. 

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  • 2 weeks later...

Those look great and I am not trying to slag on your product or company here - I too don't work for Adobe, but it seems to me that the bracelet part is easy - it's the distribution for a render in VW that is the challenge.

 

In VW, how would you distribute 25,000 of them onto a crowd through a stadium - with random placement and rotation, but still following the seating layout (voms, rows, etc)....?  To me, this is why I do it in post.

 

Again - no disrespect intended.

Edited by EAlexander
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@EAlexander It would certainly be a challenge. My goal was to provide a user with a workflow to accomplish a task that they wished to complete in Vectorworks. Honestly, I'm sure there is a better way to do this with or without using Vectorworks and this is simply what I came up with this morning. To answer your question, it might be possible to create a marionette that does what you are requesting. Simplifying the geometry and tweaking rendering settings would be the first step. Then, you would have to create the marionette in such a way that it would insert various symbol instances based on a set of criteria and you could change those through edit fields. Not my cup of tea and it would certainly take some time to create the marionette, but I'd still be curious to see what a savvy user might come up with. 

 

PS: just refreshed page and noticed @Kevin Allens post

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Thanks - I'll look into it more - haven't dived into Marionette at all yet.

 

I asked, not as a challenge to you, but because I really want to know.  I have a fair amount of randomization I need to do within VW and I always find it a challenge.  It's so easy in Cinema4D and lots of times I do it there, then combine everything and bring a mesh back in VW, but I would like a more elegant solution within VW.  I'll check out Marionette.

 

Thanks!

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A couple of thoughts come to mind for trying to do this in VW -

  1. Consider reducing the ring to a single surface NURBS ring. The extrudes have a lot of extra geometry that will add up when you have thousands of them.
  2. If this is strictly for rendering, I would actually consider removing 1/4 to 1/3 of the ring. You'll never see a full ring if someone's wearing it and the gaps will help to sell the illusion.
  3. If the stadium is symmetrical use that to your advantage.
  4. If you happen to have a stadium model that has seats as symbols, use those as a way to approach getting 3D loci to distribute the rings on. If you have to fake it, I would use a surface array (or a couple of surface arrays) instead.
  5. I think it would be fairly simple to randomize the distribution of the rings if you have a set of loci.
  6. I would distribute too many and delete some rather than trying to work around every area that may not have any.

I'm curious to see if someone tries it.

 

Kevin

 

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This thread could be helpful in creating your random looks...

 

 

You could create a wristband for every seat, then use random selection to remove a percentage. Then random selection again for color. And again for intensity. Should help with your varied look.

 

Edited by LJ TMS
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I am going to check out Pat Stanford’s script as that could be really useful for a lot of things. Assuming that would work, I would create a handful of symbols, all with differing insertion points so that they could all be placed in seating locations but have adjusted X, Y, Z coordinates. I would keep the geometry really extremely simple (extrudes rectangle) as bracelets really tend to look like a point of light in photos regardless. The only exception might be if you had a floor camera position with people in the foreground, but at that point, you would be much better served with a modeling program. Also, rendering the effect of bracelets is not well served in close-ups anyway. 

 

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1 hour ago, Jim Wilson said:

Off Topic for this thread but just wanted to note: I've requested the Foliage tool be added to all Design series if not all flavors of Vectorworks, not just Landmark. It's more of a visualization/rendering tool than it is a Plant-centric one.

 

Tools like this are one of the main reasons I run Designer instead of Spotlight. There are a fair number of tools that have industry specific names that can be applied to tasks outside their intended purpose or industry. Definitely a missed marketing opportunity on NV part.

Kevin

 

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