Quick Question about Depth of Field

DDCreate

I want to shoot a scene in a casino and have people in the background walking around between tables (ya know...like in a casino) and I know there are billboard products including one that lets you build your own which is AWESOME but I wondered if just loading characters and then using depth of field would be faster. But then there's that whole "The more characters, the more stress on the GPU." thing. So my question, does it still stress the GPU if I'm not asking it to really throw it's back into rendering background stuff?

Gordig

I've never used a billboard product, but I imagine they load into a scene pretty quickly, whereas the time it takes to load a character into a scene increases the more morphs you have, so that alone tips the scales toward billboards. Once the character is in the scene, you also have to add hair and clothing, which further increases the time, and then pose it. If your primary concern is time, then billboards are the clear winner, even before getting into the RAM/VRAM required to render it. On that note, a billboard is a single texture file, where a character with clothing and hair can be several dozen textures. 

Richard Haseltine

I don't think depth of field lightens the load - if anything the reverse since it takes more paths to properly resolve each pixel, being an average of mutliple points of contact. However, if you use depth of field you might be able to strip out almost all of the textures from the distant figures and that would help.

cridgit

Redacted