18 hours ago, superspud said:

Yes. Someone could make an animated people library that others could drop in. 

All they'd have to do is place them. 

I'm doing animated people at the moment for a specific project so may look into doing a library.

The method I'm fiddling with, Mixamo, has a limited number of set animations so it may not be good enough.

Often a static library is good enough from a distance. 

As for the subject, the sim won't show a model you can't see on the screen, let alone run an animation, and people disappear pretty rapidly from view. 

I'm still a bit stumped as to where the performance limits are and why some things choke and some don't.

Some airports are total stutter fests despite having LODs, smeary textures and not much detail, others are crisp all over and run perfectly. 

Spud, this would be brilliant if you could do it. It would certainly be willing to spend a good few hours placing humans in airports if you created the library. I've spent a lot of time placing people for other sims, and it really does add a lot to the ambience.

Is it Daves3Dpeople that you use in your scenery? Or do the people come from superspudmodellib?

By the way, I apologise for stating in an earlier post that the best interiors with people were done by Pyreegue, the EBBR guys and Drzewiecki Design, without mentioning you.

Guys, if you don't know who superspud is.,,imagine we're sitting around talking about painting, and Leonardo da Vinci just casually strolls into the thread and starts posting. 😉

Seriously, if you don't have his freeware airports, drop what you're doing and go and download them right now.

Spud, keep up the brilliant work. And if you can create a library of animated people - or even another static person library to further increase the variety - that would be amazing.

 

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

Just a quick reminder:

Hey you. Get off of Avsim and get back to coding. I think we need to lock you in a basement somewhere and bring you bread and water until you get GSX for MSFS working.

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by MDFlier

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

Just a quick reminder:

Really?

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by MDFlier
Multiple post - mods, please delete

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

Just a quick reminder:

Rats!

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by MDFlier
Multiple post - mods, please delete

1 hour ago, virtuali said:

Just a quick reminder:

Oops!

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by MDFlier
Multiple posts - mods, please delete

17 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

Spud, this would be brilliant if you could do it. It would certainly be willing to spend a good few hours placing humans in airports if you created the library. I've spent a lot of time placing people for other sims, and it really does add a lot to the ambience.

Is it Daves3Dpeople that you use in your scenery? Or do the people come from superspudmodellib?

By the way, I apologise for stating in an earlier post that the best interiors with people were done by Pyreegue, the EBBR guys and Drzewiecki Design, without mentioning you.

Oh, stop it, you. 

I could do a lot more with interiors. A few have been neglected as I was usually cross eyed and desperate to finish. I'll return to some and add more and I do fancy doing one big old international airport to the max, but things seem to be taking longer and longer. Not sure whether that's because I'm going senile or being more demanding. 

Dave said he didn't want the library being anything other than his own download so it's models from elsewhere. 

Like I said it's using Mixamo which gives you a huge amount of set animations that are automatically applied to human models. Blender for some reason doesn't export human scaling or animation properly so you have to bypass it completely.

Mixamo is great but all the animations are short and a lot aren't loops so most aren't much use. I'm still not sure whether they'll cut it for a general library. The ones I've done are for aircraft carriers so you only need some waving or fiddling. 

 

 

31 minutes ago, superspud said:

Oh, stop it, you. 

I could do a lot more with interiors. A few have been neglected as I was usually cross eyed and desperate to finish. I'll return to some and add more and I do fancy doing one big old international airport to the max, but things seem to be taking longer and longer. Not sure whether that's because I'm going senile or being more demanding. 

Dave said he didn't want the library being anything other than his own download so it's models from elsewhere. 

Like I said it's using Mixamo which gives you a huge amount of set animations that are automatically applied to human models. Blender for some reason doesn't export human scaling or animation properly so you have to bypass it completely.

Mixamo is great but all the animations are short and a lot aren't loops so most aren't much use. I'm still not sure whether they'll cut it for a general library. The ones I've done are for aircraft carriers so you only need some waving or fiddling. 

 

 

Yeah, I agree it would be worth going back to some of your airports and adding the interiors.

The gold standard is something like your EGHE St Mary's. Flying a GA plane to this destination and then getting out of the plane via the drone, it really does feel like you're visiting an actual location. It's partially the airport-specific details in the interior, and also the static models of people you've placed.

An airport like Aerosoft EBBR theoretically takes it up to the next level by adding animated people, but quality static humans are still a massive leap forward over empty interiors, or airports without any interiors at all. Badly animated humans may not be a step forward at all over static (I note the animations of the people deplaning by the forward airstairs in the linked Bonaire video - their "jumping" movements are pretty jarring and probably decrease immersion rather than increasing it).

Drzewiecki interiors are a big step down from Pyreegue, because their human models aren't quite good enough to achieve the suspension of disbelief that you're aiming for. In contrast, the models you used in EGHE are good enough to achieve the desired goal, at least from my perspective.

A library of animated people would be great, but what about just making a new library of static people that others could add to existing airports? Between this and a Youtube tutorial on how to do it, it should be possible to crowd-source the task of populating MSFS's current post-apocalyptic environment.

Thanks again for everything you've already done for the sim. It's truly outstanding work.  

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by OzWhitey

20 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

A library of animated people would be great, but what about just making a new library of static people that others could add to existing airports? Between this and a Youtube tutorial on how to do it, it should be possible to crowd-source the task of populating MSFS's current post-apocalyptic environment.

Don't think I could dig out the sheer volume of Dave's 3d people. That's a sterling effort.

What is strange is the choice of animated people the sim's own object list provides. No idea why you have 3 versions of the same bored businessman, who's the only civilian. It wouldn't have been that much of a stretch to add some variety. 

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by superspud

Just now, superspud said:

Don't think I could dig out the sheer volume of Dave's 3d people. That's a sterling effort.

Most human models out there are very polygon heavy which is understandable as it's not a simple shape. 

What is strange is the choice of animated people the sim's own object list provides. No idea why you have 3 versions of the same bored businessman, who's the only civilian. It wouldn't have been that much of a stretch to add some variety. 

Variety is critical. You do notice pretty quickly when the same models are repeated over and over. Whilst some repetition is inevitable, you need enough models that it's not immersion-breaking. For example, not using the same model more than once in a given room.

For those wanting to place people in existing airports: You'd recommend we stick to Dave's library? My memory is that it's an X-Plane port, and I wasn't sure if that affects performance. With the Aerosoft EBBR models, it's very clear that LOD varies with distance, presumably because they've worked hard to optimise the models for MSFS. Also, are there any other person-model libraries out there we should be looking at? (you mentioned that you didn't use Dave's library yourself).

As for polygons - it's a fine line. The models you used in EGHE are just detailed enough that, for me, they don't break immersion. Drzewiecki KDCA has some great interior features, but their human models are just a little too low-poly for my brain to believe that they're real.

On a final note, I absolutely agree that Sarah is a word not allowed. 😉

 

 

10 minutes ago, OzWhitey said:

For those wanting to place people in existing airports: You'd recommend we stick to Dave's library? My memory is that it's an X-Plane port, and I wasn't sure if that affects performance. With the Aerosoft EBBR models, it's very clear that LOD varies with distance, presumably because they've worked hard to optimise the models for MSFS. Also, are there any other person-model libraries out there we should be looking at? (you mentioned that you didn't use Dave's library yourself).

I won't be using Dave's library for anything animated. I wouldn't be able to untangle the poses. You need to start off with a symmetrical pose before getting Mixamo to animate the model.

As far as I know Dave's models are still the only game in town for human models. No one else has come out with one. And looking at the models they look like they're undemanding. 

It's the process of getting animation into the sim that seems to be the reason there isn't very much of it. 

You have cool free stuff like this available - populate models - Download Free 3D model by vicente betoret ferrero (@deathcow) [f93c7b4] (sketchfab.com)  but getting it into MSFS is where it fails. 

There's a thread here about it for those who are interested - https://www.fsdeveloper.com/forum/threads/quest-for-animated-people-distorted-animation-in-msfs.452304/

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by superspud

2 hours ago, OzWhitey said:

An airport like Aerosoft EBBR theoretically takes it up to the next level by adding animated people

Now, before urban legends will be spread, it's best to clarify Aerosoft already used the same people in a previous scenery and, of the about 50-60 passengers models that will be included in total with GSX,  exactly 18 of them will be the SAME as the "Aerosoft" models.

That's because they are not obviously Aerosoft models, they can be purchased by anyone on Turbosquid, with a fairly low price all considering:

https://www.turbosquid.com/3d-models/3d-rigged-photorealistic-rendering-model-1413846

This is one pack of 6, there are 3 packs available from the same developer, for a total of 18 different characters, and those are exactly the ones Aerosoft used in their sceneries, so I'll anticipate by saying you will see these 18 guys in GSX as well, because of course we bought them too, almost a year ago...

And that's why we haven't shown a video with the new GSX passengers *yet*, because we haven't finished adding the remaining ones, so in the end those 18 guys will blend with the other 50 or so we are still working on, but if we released a video today, I can only imagine the "GSX took the models from EBBR..." uninformed comments, same as when we had the in-famous "OMSI granny", which was in fact licensed by OMSI ( and by us as well ) from a company in Italy named AXYZ, makers of a very good people animation software named "Anima".

In fact, I even toyed with the idea of purposely including again the OMSI granny, this time proudly walking outside the airplane with a boxed copy of "OMSI Bus Simulator" in her hands, as an inside joke.

But in general, we improved the animations a lot, compared to P3D. That's because passengers in P3D were made using FSX compatibility, so they had a very limited skeleton with only 22 bones (the most FSX could do), which is not enough to do a smooth human animation, but for MSFS we are doing everything native, with 60-70 bones per character. Also, we improved our walking animation software to add some variations, meaning the walking cycles have multiple variations randomly selected, so every guy moves differently, with a different stride, and it alternates between different walking cycles, sometimes they look straight, sometimes they look around, their hands/fingers move (not possible before with just 22 bones), sometimes they answer the phone, and each time it's different, because the animation is procedural, because we need to adapt them to every possible airport. We also improved the overall forming of the crowd, so now the passenger will walk in different lanes depending on their speed, from right to left, slower to faster, which will reduce the chance of collisions between themselves. Overall, all these changes results in the whole crowd looking way more realistic, more like a real crowd.

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by virtuali

3 hours ago, MDFlier said:

I think we need to lock you in a basement somewhere and bring you bread and water until you get GSX for MSFS working.

That's basically what I've being doing for the past months, I'm only using some of my self-allowed "Air-time" ( or Out-of-cell time ), because it's Saturday..

Just noticed that SU9 makes the drone camera and developer camera react to collisions. 

This means if your friendly developer has made the terminal collidable, which any self respecting pro would have, your camera will now bounce off the walls and you won't be able to enter. 

Nice one...

Importing 3d peds into MSFS now.( FOR MY OWN PRIVATE USE)

The Instant Scenery 3 addon from FSX/P3D conveniently compiled all of my 3D model assets from every addon in my FSX build. 

Some MDL/GLTF convert/import work and waa laa....

 

Forgive me if this has been covered elsewhere. But is there a frame hit if the animated people are not onscreen? I too love to visit inside the terminal buildings either before or after a flight. But let's say I'm rolling down the runway past a terminal building where people are moving around inside -- but I can't see them because they're inside the building -- does this still affect FPS? Thanks!

Edited April 30, 20224 yr by David Mills