Roman Bath Doors?
OK, what's up with the doors on the Roman Bath??? I can't find an "Open" morph and they seem to be hinged 50 feet out of the scene and fly off into the darkness if you try to rotate them! :ohh:
Other than that it's a VERY nice stage setup. I love the fact that the statue is removable and you can replace it with whatever person or thing or creature you want to! But I'm not into rigging and I just sort of expected at a minimum that the doors would open especially since the product is priced at nearly $30 costs as much as a half a tank of gas or a week's groceries, or a really nice steak meal at a good restaurant. If I've missed the "Open" morph then I appologize but it doesn't seem to be in the copy I have. (*sad*).
I also thought that there would be water in the pool. I haven't found any yet. Must be the Bath is closed for cleaning! Or possibly this is a "BYOW" establishment ("Bring Your Own Water") :ohh:
Comments
According to the product page there should certainly be two water props, whether you are using the Poser or DS version. I did buy this but haven't had time to install it yet so I can't comment on the door issue, though the product page does list it as a prop rather than a figure: still, if they are separate mesh items I'm surpried they don't pivot but you can fix that by placing a null at the hinge position for each door and parenting the door to that.
Ah, a null at the hinge. Clever! :-) And I did find the water eventually. (*sigh*) My ancient brain just doesn't run at full speed anymore. However, I still can still add with a calculator and still remember to use toilet paper when necessary, but if I ever forget one of those...
As long as I'm playing with this RomanBath, I have to load the Poser (.pp2) version because I've noticed that the ".daz" version of the main prop won't install under Studio3. It gives me an error saying that it was created with a newer version and tells me to upgrade. Well, pooh on that idea. (*grrr*) I have not yet learned to like Studio4. And just what is it in a prop that won't work on Studio3??? Come on!! :( Studio4 ain't all it was promised to be and Studio3 ain't dead yet.
In stall or load? If it was saved from DS 4 then the scene will be tagged with the version and won't open in older versions. However, if you have DS4 installed you could open the scene in that, save materials presets - in ASCII .dsa format, not compressed .dsb - and use those in DS3 (at least if they use standard shaders, I'm not sure how well Shader Mixer-based presets will go back).
"load".
I guess I'll have to re-incarnate my Studio4 again and see if the materials are any better and worth the effort of me converting them. :shut:
Can't DAZ formated props, cameras, lights and material files be distributed as ".ds" instead of ".daz"? Wouldn't that resolve the issue? This is so frustrating. (*sad*)
Well, the switch to .dsa isntead of .ds for scripts was forced by Trolltech's switching the scripting engine in Qt, but .dsa presets will usually work in older versions that use the new script format - even 4 to 3, as I said above. The new .duf format should be backward compatible, going forward (couldn't resist) - but that won't, of course, reach back past 4.5.
Oh! :ohh: More new formats!??? Ghaaa, oh my aching ancient brain. What's with all these changes and "improvements". I was very happy with charcoal and spitting paint on the cave walls. ;-P
Well, I got around to creating 10 new "null" hinges for the 10 doors. Works like a dream! Cool!
I've also found that the water that comes in has very little color to it. I tried making the "Diffuse" color bluer but I guess the transparency negates the effect. So I added some blue in the "Ambience" channel and it worked like a dream. Now if I can add some marbleing to the walls and columns and some displacement to the engravings it will add a lot to the realism.
I'd like to have some ripples around bathers in the pool. Isn't there a product that can do that? If not, there should be. Something that adds formula generated ripple shaders or displacement at specific spots on a plane?
I don't know about ripple shaders/displacement, but I've had some decent effects using the ripple props from this freebie liquid kit. No textures, and they're obj, but if you have a decent water shader, they work pretty well.
It is not exactly a product and you will have to use a fine mesh for the water plane but ripples that can be moved it kind of is...
It is also possible, but a bit more tricky, to do it with a wave-brick in shader mixer, IIRC you can make a shader that follow an object.
Cheers! Oom
It is not exactly a product and you will have to use a fine mesh for the water plane but ripples that can be moved it kind of is...
It is also possible, but a bit more tricky, to do it with a wave-brick in shader mixer, IIRC you can make a shader that follow an object.
Cheers! Oom
Oh Cool!!! Thank you.
I'm still playing with this set but now I've discovered that the ".pp2" props (benches & vases) in this set appear to be in the wrong scale. You load the props and they are the right size for the set but appear to be placed in a building about twice the footprint. I guess that would work if you had some gardens around the buiding. Sure I can move the props to where I want them inside the building but this doesn't seem right somehow. :ohh:
If they were designed this way then OK, but seems to me that nobody at DAZ really checked this model before releasing it. But considering all the fires they're putting out now it's to be expected.
Um... wasn't the new website and catalog supposed to make their lives easier? :roll:
The image below shows the default prop placements. I'm using Studio3 so maybe there's an issue with that (but there shouldn't be!).
I've noticed that the prop origins are not centered on their respective props. Some are WAY off! There are some props inside the building but none of the props seem to have an origin centered on the prop itself. And the location of the origins doesn't seem to make any sort of logical sense in relation to the whole scene.
So the question now is, "how can I modify the origins to be on the respective props so that they can be manipulated easily without having to use a camera 1000 feet in the air?" :ohh:
The more and more I use this product the more disappointed I get. (*sad*)
Edited to correct the mis-labeling of firepots as vases in my image. :red:
Edited again to add: After looking from a high top view I examined all the orgins for all the props & building pieces in the set. Most of the building (RomanBathGrp) itself has an origin at the center of the building. That's logical. However, the "Gates" and "Doors" within that group have origins outside the building which explains their weird behavior and lack of a reasonable "open" morph.
Unfortunately almost everything in the "RB_InteriorGrp" has origins that don't center in any one place and make no rhyme nor reason about why or where the origin is in relation to the corresponding prop. Somebody dropped the ball. :ohh:
OK, after an hour or so of mind numbing manual editing I've fixed all the problems with the Roman Bath props. Each prop appears to have proper X,Y,Z offsets within the scene to place it at the correct spot but the "Origin" of each prop also had the same values, when in fact the origin should have really been (0,0,0). That essentially created a double offset of the prop. I went through the props ".pp2" file and manually changed the X and Z origin values to 0. I didn't change the Y values because they were already either very small or zero, and didn't seem to affect the placement too much.
I would very much like to see a "fix" released for this product to correct the oversights I've pointed out so far.
I'm very much over the "fun" of being a beta tester. >:-(