Crowd

I have started a major PovRay project, the object of which is to make a series of graphic images describing a novel transport system. (See here for more details ).

I needed a simple means of making a largish (100?) set of individual figures that could be easily defined and placed in the scene in defined poises. They need to look reasonably life-like at less than about 100 pixels high, therefore they need not include any details, such as individual fingers and faces, that would be on a scale of single pixels.

Example scene

The hardware of the transport system will be smoothly animated but the figures will simply jump from one static pose to another, so there is no requirement for animation.

I considered Blobman but it seemed to be far more detailed and capable than I need, so I had a go at creating my own, keeping things as simple as possible. The results can be seen here.

This is a sideline to my major project and I do not want to spend too much effort on refinements. I am putting this work in the public domain at an early stage for pointing out bad practice and suggestions for improvement. In the long run I hope it will develop into a useful addition to the public PovRay repertoire.

I have some ideas fo improvements to Crowd:

Animate walking. This might seem to contradict what I said above about only fully animating the hardware but a single line command that sets a character walking in a fixed direction could be useful. And I have a cunning plan as how to do this.
Improve hair. Currently hair is defined by a single blob which has a well defined edge. I want to try adding another larger blob that can have a partially see-through texture.
Add a positioning macro that will allow a hand to be placed at a particular coordinate, for example on a knee, lap, hip or a handle on some object.

Finally, you may like to leave a comment on the PovRay page of my Blog.