Metropoly People Reviewed

Metropoly Review
by Josh Presseisen, Art Director (Neoscape, Inc.)




Metropoly by Axyz-Design offers multiple sets of 3d people that are low to medium poly (3-6k). These sets contain mostly casually dressed people with high quality textures and well laid out texture maps (for ease of editing).

On the positive side, the geometry looks good compared to some of the other low poly people sets out there. There are multiple poses for the models, which are nice to have, and the t-pose is great for animation. They also provide multiple texture resolutions which comes in handy if you need to decrease memory usage on render time. This product seems like it would be suited well for populating game environments. I was able to skin up a model with character studio's physique and biped, and load in some Mocap. The models deform nicely.



There are a few areas that Metropoly could stand to improve. Perhaps a next step would be to include some motion capture files as well to speed up the workflow of adding animated 3d characters to scenes.

The demographic of people may not suitable for certain industries. From our experience architectural visualization typically requires stylish attire and racial diversity. In the future it would be nice for Metropoly to offer more sets - business people, fashionable people, culturally diverse people, etc.


Some models I found need minor tweaking to remove a few errors. For instance, the maps for "cman0009-st.layer01" were stretched - and looked strange when rendered. I imagine this is an easy fix and will most likely be done before this review is released.

A few improvements could be made to the models themselves to check the accuracy of the proportions, since the heads of a few seem a little large, and couple of the women's faces appeared a little overly masculine and perhaps even scary upon close inspection.



In closing, I was very impressed with the texture mapping layout. It would make changing the individual appearances of the models very easy, and with a bit of improvement this product could certainly be a must-have If you would like to post comments or questions about this review, please visit our forum