There is some CD floating around our studio. No idea where it came from. I also use Corbis sometimes. It can be useful.

i like the grey silouettes, no real people!
if you know someone that works in an office, most places have a library of people, cars, trees and stuff for montages, get them to make you a cd

and many more, but they aren't free or necessarily cheap.


Those CDs floating around your office are no doubt from one of those sources, burned/copied, passed on, etc., etc.

I prefer the silhouettes too, you don't have to worry about cleanly extracting the image, so you expand your source options. An example I did in school about 5 years ago...

in the downloads section on the sketchup website they have free people you can open In sketcup and then export out as a jpg.

Whatever you do, please don't use the dad in shorts holding hands with his skipping daughter. We call them "Russ & Matty."

(I tried to find an image with them in it, but just when I'm looking, they disappear.)

Got3D is also pretty decent.

But the shadow peeps are always a good way to go, the photo real people tend to distract from what we want people to pay attention to.

And man, I better not see any super models hanging out in your living room! Improbable people in improbably places doing improbable things is another thing that bugs me.

And don't have anybody walking straight into a table or walking briskly towards a wall!
(I've been Mr. Entourage for the past month, can you tell?)

agree.

and if you're making a huge entourage of people, you can reuse shadow people (oooooh scary!) more often w/o having blatent repeats.

lol fog lite. i know russ and matty well.

a shame there isn't an actual resource to download this stuff for free, the only items i ever find belong in the 1980's, so i'm forced to use kate moss.

suuuuure. you're "forced" to use kate moss. just photoshop the white from under her nose.

I found this little skateboard guy somewhere when I was in school, and from then on, there were skateboarders in ALL of my drawings. Even indoors sometimes, just to see if anybody would notice.

Improbable!

not a single professor EVER commented on it. = )

I want to put ridiculous Japanese popstars in my renderings.

I love how DS+R has no continuity. They've got color, balck and white, old new, clean, pixelated. Weird.

Go for it! I did an all anime entourage once. No one commented on that either.

But now that I've gone pro, people have a lot more to say about peeps in their scenes, not as much fun to be had. (I mean what developer wouldn't want to see some hoochies walking by their building?)

OK, classmates and prof thought it was awesome, but come crit time not a word was said about Akira hanging out in my project.

2 thoughts:

1. Has anyone ever used scale figures in their construction documents? I just saw some today and thought, "that's pretty clever."

2. I've had good luck with finding scale figures at bananarepublic.com; they are well-dressed and usually on solid backgrounds.

i used to get them from CORBIS or GETTY IMAGES...but now i found them in better quality from FLICKR ;-), anything u can imagine, cars, trees, ppl...etc (TAGS TAGS!!!)

Go outside, step on the sidewalk and take pictures of people

I would recommend this site:

http://www.imagecels.com/index.html

The alpha channel masks are already done for you so there's no need to fuss about cleaning up the edges and all that other unnecessary time consuming stuff. I particularly recommended this site because when I attended an AIA CAD Multimedia lecture/tutorial in San Francisco, they also specifically recommended this site. Now, of course there are free samples, but I would suggest buying their cds if you have the money or if you want to build your library at work.

i will usually extract people from my own digital pictures - and whenever possible i use pictures of people that are within / around the actual site.

simply take your site pics, crop the people, paint can them solid, then change the transparancy to get the grey silhouettes.

this method adds a certain authenticity that usually only i can appreciate (because i am the only one who knows that the people came from site pics) but it makes me happy

i hate the grey sillouettes. the only impass to this i can think of is using black and white images of real people, possibly making them transparent. but the grey things look really, really third year to me. no offense.

a bit cartoonish, but it works