What is geographic North in Daz Studio?

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

I am in the middle of creating an outdoor scene location, which is part of a larger group of locations for a story, basically some hang-out places out in the woods.  I have the broad strokes of particular location for this scene mostly finished, and I was about to sit down with a 3x5 card and map out a general layout of the rest of the locations out there in the woods...  but, then stopped in my tracks...  "Hang on a minute, which way is North?!?"  :D :D

I mean, I know compass directions in DS are probably purely arbitrary, as long as one stays consistent with what direction is what when crafting the other standing sets, but at the same time I know that HDRIs typically have a goegraphical orientation wrt where the sun is in the scene, and there are scripted products where you can, for instance, plug in a time of day, the day of the year, and what part of the world the scene is meant to be in, and it adjusts the sun angle and stuff accordingly.

So, if I'm in Viewport, and I'm looking at the Vantage cube thingy.... and I click the face of it that says Z/Front to set my viewport to be facing that direction... am I now looking North, or am I looking South? :)

Sevrin

You don't need any scripts.  If you change your rendering environment to Sun-Sky Only, you can set the date to the first day of spring, time of day to noon and locate yourself in the southern hemisphere.  Wherever the sun is, that's North-ish.  You can google for the exact time of day to set your clock, as noon isn't going to be 100% precise.

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

Bah.  I'm mainly just wanting to know what the current convention/standard is for when someone, say, makes an outdoors HDRI or the like for Daz... presumably there's an agreed upon standardization as to what the sky orientation is.  I,e, they presumably all have "west" and "east" oriented the same direction, wrt what's in the HDRI, right?  I.e. if I loaded any arbitrary sunrise HDRI, all the sunrise HDRIs would have the sun coming in from more or less the same direction wrt my rezzed scene, right?  Or is that also completely at random?

I'm asking because I figure somewhere along the line I MIGHT, say, decide to load one of those sunrise HDRIs around my set, and I want things oriented correctly.

fastbike1

@nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

Domes can be rotated. North is wherever you want it to be. Sunrise is wherever you want it to be.

Chohole

not  DS I know,  but in Bryce North is the furthest edge of the ground plane, South is the nearest edge, West is left as you look at the screen and East is right.

These are the cordinates that we use if we tile terrains to make a larger, more detailed. ground plane. 

mluhman1953

Hey you north is north south is south what in the hell is north when the dome is at zero!

mluhman1953

Your answer gives no referance points are we in the 1400th centry?

mluhman1953

Further reasearch I found out that true North occures in Salt Lake on June 21 any years occures around 1:37 PM that when the "dome" should be a zero degrees.  Instead DAZ it a 354.69, Magnetic north is  at that time is 12.75 degrees.  Why it not right on is beyone me.  In the real world it not enough to get you lost but why does DAZ not publish what is the referance point for 0 rotation? Even f the states somewhere they state zero is northish  for the northern hemisphere would be helpful. Nope nauda zilch.

barbult

Every person who creates an HDRI could create it with a different orientation. I don't think there is one answer to your question.

richardandtracy

@mluhman1953, please be aware that the thread started in 2019, and unfortunately contributer Chohole is both no longer with us and much missed.

From the point of view of DS 'north', the default direction with default environmental dome rotation is in the direction of the -Z axis. With it being a cartesian rectangular space, the longitude lines do not taper together. When you rotate the dome, you are effectively rotating the world co-ordinates relative to the origin. To get the right angle of sun, put in the correct longitude, lattitude, time & date, then with dome rotation at 0, this will all largely marry up with where things would be in reality having North in the -Z direction. It won't be correct with enough precision for astronomical calculations.

Regards,

Richard.

 

nomad-ads_8ecd56922e

Well, the arbitrary way I finally settled on to determine what is "North" in my story-location layouts is based on the Orbit Cube viewport rotation control.  When I'm looking at the side of that cube which says Front on it, and I have clicked on that face of the Orbit cube such that the view snaps into facing that direction.... that direction for me is North for in-story layout purposes, at least for the ones where I NEED to figure out which part of what "soundstage set" alligns with which part of another "soundstage set" that's meant, story-wise, to be adjacent to the one I'm rending in now.  I.e. where I place the hills in THIS constructed scene, and that my characters are looking towards might be North in relation to the scene.  And when I create another "soundstage set" that has (a copy of) those same hills in it, that those charqacters have now walked over and past, those hills are now to the South of that other place, with that copy of those hills now positioned accordingly.