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This is the important point, when Will was talking about design decissions. I want the product to fit into a certain price-range; what can I leave out to make it do that, and what must I include?
Different folks will have different requirements.
...which is another reason I grabbed it when it first came out.
Another design decision relates to render size; it's going to be a lot harder to render a scene if all the doors are fully modeled and functional, with corresponding extra stuff behind them.
Because while some people will be fine with nothingness behind an opening door, it makes the product look REALLY TERRIBLE and a lot of other people will hate it.
But if I'm trying to render a sitting room, and there's a desk, and a setee and four characters dressed up, and something viewable through the window... having fully modeled doors might be a bridge too far, particularly if there are rooms beyond them.
Or not, it's ultimately a design decision of how you want to limit scope. And there's not really a singular 'right choice.'
I mean, I totally get WANTING those things. I would love to have every environment have, say, multiple versions depending on what I want to do with the scene, multiple texture groups so I can have high resolution for stuff close up and lower resolution for stuff that's further from the camera I've placed, and extra pieces to flesh out whichever direction my camera is pointing, and I'd like it all for, oh, $10.
But I totally get why the products aren't like that.
I think there is a vast difference, in application, expectations and practicality though, between a multi-building set (street scene, city, etc.) and a single room. A single room without at least a single door is... well, weird. No one expects a city to be full of opening windows, doors, and a real room on the other side of everything - even if we dreamed off it, our computers would probably crash in protest! A single room, however, should be complete within itself. A room without a door is simply non-functional.
Well I guess if the modeller can only work with primitives like cubes cutting a door out is too hard if they don’t know how to tessellate a plane.
though it does indeed then puzzle me how they can cut out a window
I'll give a pass to large scenes - too much work, too much load on a system if all the doors and/or windows are rigged. I've watched far too many TV shows lately, and this sequence of events is fairly common: Long shot, character walking toward door in building; cut to - closeup of door, with hand in frame reaching for knob or equivalent; cut to - character in room, door behind him. And we've moved from a closed set street to a rented building or a sound stage.
But rooms? Rooms need to at least have a visible way in and out that does not require a transporter, magic, or a giant hand lowering someone in from the top.
You only need a door in a room if you want a render of a door in a room. If I'm doing a render of someone sitting at a desk near a window... I don't need a door. If I DO want a render of someone coming in through a door, out through a door, about to open a door, peering through a keyhole... then I need that door.
But it's like vignettes; it really comes down to different needs for a product.
Yeah, and I like to do animations, so I automatically ignore rooms without doors;)
Thinking of TV-shows/movies, how many continuous shots are there moving from outside to inside or one room to the next?
Some, surely, but often the rooms are in a separate location and we simply get a cut. Some bedrooms, for example, have only an open side where the door would be and that's where the cameras are looking in from. Or a door leads to somewhere else, and we just get the actor's hand on the handle, pre-opening.
Personally, I like to make animatable everything that could be animatable. So I'll rig doors even if there's nothing behind them. But I get wanting to keep the poly-count / rigging down and keeping the creation time to a minimum. As a user, if a door won't open, I'll kit-bash it in a way that does (like using a green-screen effect to make a hole in the wall and using a door from elsewhere.
but there needs to be a door somewhere in the first place even if a mockup one
Well, yeah - the sets that forget the existence of doors completely...that boggles the mind, LOL
(Maybe we need a 'doors pack' with a variety of figure-prop doors (with optional green-screen plane after opening) so you can add them to any wall in a scene - I'll add it to the to-do list if it doesn't exist already)
Like these? Windows and doors for Backdrops made easy. Or Room creator version 2? And I think there are several others, but I'm coming up blank right now.
An old product of mine called Bar Italia was built to join onto the Pizzeria. What I did for people who didn't have the Pizzeria was to make a simple box for the area behind the adjoining door and use renders of the Pizzeria on each wall. It wasn't perfect, but it did give a pretty good impression of the space behind the door.
That's the kind of thing I meant in my OP, and the kind of care that sets PAs like you, FirstBastion, Slosh and several others a cut above some PAs I could name.
As for products like Streets of Marrakesh (to use Oso3D's example), no one in his or her right mind would expect them to have functioning doors. But where it makes sense to have a door or doors, I think it's reasonable to expect them. They can be useful whether you're into animation or not.
Groovy, looks like this is covered - are those doors able to be separated? (The walls won't fit every room) - I guess Geometry editor would cover this if it's not a separate bone/mat-zone.
In Room Creator, the door and wall are separate body parts which can be switched off/on. In fact, most of the doors have over 20 body parts to make them easily configurable.
For the record adding doors it not a big deal. This 70's Motel has 60 operating doors with a room beyond each.
Whether a door opens or not, is a design choice. BUT A room with no evidence of a door (be it functional or not) is absolutely a design mistake.
This is why I love your products:) Totally agree!
Thank you. For sequential art involving multiple camera angles, such as I do, doors are essential.
My readers would certainly call me out on it.
What I really hate are rooms where walls, furniture and the like are all one unit, so I can't use geometry editor to easily remove a wall and replace it with one with a door. I have a couple like that, and they're useless.
I just don't buy from artists who pull those stunts. Burn me once...
Ugh! Tell me about it. There are a few artists who I've stopped buying from and I've hidden most of their products with Daz Deals.
Now, at a bare minimum, I look for open doors in the promo images or "doors open" in the product description. The 2nd thing I look for is that they show all 4 (or however many) walls in the promo. I can't understand why someone would try to sell a room and only show 2 and a half walls, but many do it. I don't know what they're trying to hide and I don't plan to find out. Lastly, I avoid products that only have 4 or 5 promo images. If the artist doesn't have enough enthusiasm to do more renders than that, I probably won't either.
If it's got more than one polygon, the geometry editor can select and remove it. So a room where all 4 walls are one figure bone (or static prop) can still have individual walls selected and removed with the geometry editor (though it may be a pita to do so depending on how many polys there are in the wall).
For convenience, I make separate bones or props for individual walls/parts since removing one to get a good camera angle is a common need.
When the wall, bookshelves, paintings, fireplace and windows are all one prop it isn't that easy.
That's what I was referring to.
I have other rooms that I can make do.
Of course, in a situation where you have a large set with doors leading to other rooms, the way to solve the issue of it being too heavy a load for some machines to render is to simply make each of those other rooms, and entire walls in each, readily removable/hidable as needed. That way, if your machine groans under the strain of all that stuff, even just moving the view in the viewport, then you can simply remove all the parts of the set that fall outside where your rendered scene is going to see, i.e. everything past that closed door over there and everything past that wall over there.
I've noitced there are actually products sold seperately that when bought as a group and are then rezzed, fit together already formed into a larger set. TangoAlpha's Fleet Ops stuff comes to mind.
https://www.daz3d.com/fg-closet
you can go into the closet and hopefully to Narnia at least because the adjoining room is a trap!
before you say, yes at least there is a room but honestly a wall would be better!
Very useful product if you need to render a person...umh...standing in a closet. Or on his way in or out of the closet. Very versatile indeed.
Actually, I'd have gone for this - if the bottom wall wasn't there at all, or the right wall had a door.
Ok, to be fair, it comes with a bunch of useful props, and textures seem to be well made, but once again a "design decision" that doesn't make much sense to me.
I wouldn't expect a beginning modeler to be in the position to be selling anything I'd buy. Rigging doors was one of the first things I learned how to do, and as FirstBastion says, it's not difficult. If the only reason someone is not rigging the doors in the product they're selling is because they don't know how, then the decision is not about design, it's about being too idle to learn. I always include opening doors etc in the products I sell (not here, Rendo). I always put something on the other side too, even if it's only a basic space with it's own material zone(s) so that the user can hide it if they want to put something else there instead. From the point of view of a user though, I'd still rather see a door that opens on to nothing than a door that doesn't open at all. It's a sight easier to stick a couple of planes behind the opening door than it is to get the non-rigged door to open.
One of workarounds i know is when you dont make additional room, but there is a picture that imitates environment behind. Like that fake landscape which is texture behind window.
Or even just do a small box with some reused textures. It doesn't have to be a detailed room, just something that gives a hint of depth. If they want more, they can add a proper room.