Germany
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Museum or a home for people
I was going through a lot of threads especially in the gallery.
In my own designs I always placed people (the free one from Reallusion) into the rooms. I tried to show that the apartments are for people living there and not a museum.
But all the photos I have seen are without people. It looks for me that I'm a visitor in a museum and nobody is allowed to sit down, cook in the kitchen or doing some other things. And often things are aligned very exact.
What is your opinion about using people or leaving them out?
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MSI GP60, Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy, SH3D 7.2 with Photo-video rendering 2.8
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Re: Museum or a home for people
I would love to add many people to all my projects but it's not that simple. Basically you have only two choices: people that look like a puppet like most models in the Sweet Home 3D furniture library or download "real" models from other sites. The advantage of using the Sweet Home 3D models is that they are mostly small which means that they render fast and easy. On the other hand... they look really fake.
Downloaded "real" models look great but they have the disadvantage that they are huge, which means very long rendering times both in your 3Dview and certainly when creating photos.
And then there is the problem of positioning a model. Sweet Home 3D is home design software, not character modeling. This means there are no real fascilities to create and position characters. Most of the good character modeling software is expensive and still export a static model that you can't change in Sweet Home 3D.
But, there is progress! One of the latest additions is the possibility to create characters in the open source software MakeHuman and import them in Sweet Home 3D. MakeHuman doesn't come close to commercial software like DAZ but you can create really decent people with it. It is often used by designers to set up a base character and export that to Blender to make it a real life like model.
Also one of the more recent additions is a big set of deformations to rig a model. That means you can reposition the model in Sweet Home 3d. The Mannequin* models are examples of characters that you can model into different positions. I haven't had time to experiment with it but I think that you can make the imported MakeHuman models movable.
Of course you could make real life like models also moveable but that means heavy manipulation in for example Blender. I haven't tried it yet but it should be possible to modify rigged models so they are movable in Sweet Home 3D. Rigged means that they have a bone structure and deformation points. Match them to the mannequin deformations and you have a positionable model. I don't know if the clothing textures follow a changed position.
Ah, yes, clothing. There are base models which you can dress with different downloadable clothing specifically made for that base-type but you will probably have to buy everything. That can get really expensive very fast. For just a random character you found it will be difficult to find other clothing that matches the skin textures.
In short: it would be great to add real life like people but the choices are limited for Sweet Home 3D. One character in a room works, maybe two. Try a public place with dozens and you can forget it. (There are "crowd models" but that's something different.)
France
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Re: Museum or a home for people
I agree with you, Waldemar: It's fun to add people and imagine their lifes, as I wrote recently. But Keet is right: it makes quicky very big files and long photo renderings... You may be interested by the interview of Marcus Vinicius: he likes very much to add people to his designs (and publish many great renderings on various Sweet Home 3D Facebook groups)
Germany
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Re: Museum or a home for people
Keet and Veronique, thank you for your responses. I was waiting for some more which is the reason for the delayed answer.
I think I need to give some information why and for what I'm using SH3D.
I, my wive and one of the children are currently living in a house built for a family with 4 children we have. Two of them have their own families and houses and the third was going out for university. At that time we started to think about giving up this house and move to an apartment. Our youngest child will then also move to his own apartment. About two years ago we got the possibility to get together with other families a ground from the community to build a house with 9 apartments. That was the time using SH3D to find a good compromise of the layout taking our needs into account and the architectural structure. Even taking measurements between walls, furniture and so on helped me but was not satisfying. I also placed people into the scene to verify that you can go through that places. It was just for showing it for me and my wife how it would look like.
Today we are searching for 3 additional families we need in our group before we can buy the ground and finish planing. So I started to create the possible apartments. I also started to look what the professional advertisements for new planned houses and apartments are showing. On outside views I have seen that people are placed (going out with the dog, a child coming from school ...) and in inside views are other simple scenes (a mother with a baby on the arm standing at the window watching birds, ...).
When I'm looking at all these pics and when there are people I have the feeling this is a place to live and not only to stay.
Keet I agree with all your arguments. I know some of the technical aspects from a rail road simulation program I used some time ago.
I don't need such perfect renderings like in Apartment project with lighting by invisible ...s. I continue advertising which will also need perfect people. I need more something like a sketch book than a picture for a poster for a cinema film. And I don't want to create a video so I don't need them moveable.
Sweet Home 3D is home design software,
Isn't a home without people a museum? Shouldn't it be called Sweet House 3D without people?
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Re: Museum or a home for people
If you can accept the very long rendering times there's no problem with using realistic characters. Several 3D model sites offer free character models. Look for models that are rigged which means they have a structures to pose the body. The main problem probably is that you can't do the posing in Sweet Home 3D, you will have to do that in Blender. I know it's possible but I haven't tried it myself. Once in the correct pose you can export the model to obj/mtl and import it in Sweet Home 3D. You will have to go back to Blender if you need to change a pose and export it again.
Joined: May 18, 2021
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Re: Museum or a home for people
There will almost certainly be a degradation between what you have in Blender versus what you end up with in SH3D. A lot is done with materials in Blender that is simply not possible to export/import into SH3D.
One of the included woman models in SH3D exported/imported into Blender only has the Base Color texture, and 14K faces. I just d/l'd a reasonable free pose-able woman character from BlenderKit. Her skin has Base Color, Roughness, Normal, and Specular image textures. SH3D (so far as I know) can only handle the Base Color textures natively. She also has 130K faces. She has particle based hair that cannot be exported, so she's bald. I had to manually unpack the Blender textures and move them on disk to get them to import into SH3D with the obj/mtl files. The base mesh was imported all shiny like a T-1000 which had to be removed from all the individual textures. All in all, probably more trouble than it is worth when you look at this comparison. Oh dang! I just realised she has also lost her eyebrows
Notwithstanding the extremely impressive (and very patiently obtained) results of some very talented people, I don't really see SH3D as the tool for realism. Planning, visualising, communicating, iterating, etc. are where SH3D shines. I don't know if the limitation is Sunflow (not developed since about 2007?) or SH3D but, unless you use extreme and lengthy measures like GaudiGalopin3324, your renders will have a distinctive SH3D look. Even Yafaray renders look like SH3D (and this project also looks like it is dying.) Yafaray itself is capable of very realistic renders, so I have to assume that the look is baked into the design of SH3D, and how it drives Sunflow and Yafaray..
As to the original question, I use the furniture library models to gauge scale, space, sloped ceiling comfort, and room flow. I wouldn't leave them in permanently though.
Russia
Joined: Aug 13, 2022
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Re: Museum or a home for people
hi. My previous experience of using people in an apartment project has its negative conclusions. First of all, there is an awkward feeling that there are strangers in YOUR apartment, and even not very nice ones. I.e. some other people who are not associated with the owners of the house. Tomorrow I will try to show my new experience of including cute people in an interior that is a little more tolerant than just angular, uncombed figures on sofas in your living room. Till tomorrow.
Germany
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Re: Museum or a home for people
In my case it is not my apartment but their apartment. They are just neighbours and I'm the visitor.
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MSI GP60, Linux Mint 21.3 Virginia base: Ubuntu 22.04 jammy, SH3D 7.2 with Photo-video rendering 2.8
