Creating Billboards in DAZ Studio with Photoshop (Patreon)

In this episode I'll show you how to create your own custom billboards with Photoshop. Any graphics application will work, as long as you can create a cutout opacity map with it (i.e. black background, and a pure white silhouette). 

The concept of a billboard is that instead of placing a full high-res character in your scene, you use a rendered image that's projected onto a 2D plane. With a bit of thought and practice you can render multiple characters, even large crowds without overloading your GPUs memory. Billboards can dramatically cut down on your render time, as they're so much easier to compute than real geometry with high resolution maps, and they're reusable between scenes.

I'll have another related video coming up, in which I'll show you a tool called Billboard Builder. It simplifies much of the process - stay tuned for that!