Some questions regarding building a town

notretsam

Although I do have some questions, this thread is more attended as a discussion thread on how people would create there own town or how they already created a town.

As you can see from the attached files, I already built a large house and even furnished it, It's important to remember that this town am building is for a screenplay I've written and is set in a post-apocalyptic world, so resources are limited in the story.

I built this house with "Room Creator 2.0 and Room Creator Exteriors",  I might not be perfect but my first time doing this, and am very happy with it. Also, today I bought Streets and plan to build the west side of town which is a residential area with that.

Here are my questions though

1. I now have a decent PC to handle Daz Studio but I was wondering about how best to organize the save files for the town, I presume adding everything into 1 save file is most likely not the best idea due to load time, I was thinking I have multiple save files with different parts of town, something like west side, east side, north side, south side and a park which everything surrounds. Am curious what others would do or is it fine to have the full town in one file in your opinion.
2. In future, I will need to add stores, shopping malls, schools, so curious about any advice on what products people recommend to help with this, room creator would allow me to build any building really.
3. I have created more "Primitive Planes" which I presume will allow me to expand the size of the scene, certainly appears that way but is there a way to add the grid to them, like the default grid size
4. I would also love to know how to change the default spot where assets appear when you first load them into the scene. 
5. Also, I really am looking for any advice or thoughts on building a town, basically anything you think could be helpful, hence a discussion on "what would you do if building a town", sure some good information will come out off it.

 thanks in advance :)

NorthOf45

You might want to check out this thread: Creating Big City Scenes in DAZ Studio. Lots of tips, trick and suggestions. Many productrs featured, so you will probably find everything you need.

notretsam

NorthOf45 said:

You might want to check out this thread: Creating Big City Scenes in DAZ Studio. Lots of tips, trick and suggestions. Many productrs featured, so you will probably find everything you need.

thank you, did do a google search and came across this link but seems to be outdated, as the Movie Sets: River Front link no longer works and appears most posts related to that product. shame it doesn't exist now, thread certainly looked great.

 

notretsam

Never noticed the images I tried to attach, didn't attach. Guess the 4 images was too big, this is front and back of the house. 

notretsam

An here is the layout of downstairs and upstairs. 

alan bard newcomer

lay it out so you just render that which you need would be a start
And plan ahead .. I've been doing these buildings for several years and creating the blocks which are now down to single objects each with all the lights on the block as a single surface. 
The buildings are scene subsets I can push around. currently working on controling the lights in each building to avoid repetition of patterns 
---
one is the basic street layout 
two is a shot of a group of buildings 2000x1000 47 minutes to render but as noted on the image it used 11000m of space on the card 
so that would be a limitation to the amount of your city in a render what the card can hold 
I have 64g of ram so holding the scene in the ram for the program isn't a problem.
three is a close up of one of the buildings  the titanx was at 5g and the 980ti was at 4g 36m53s just visible stuff 2kx1kw --- all light either the street lights or lights in the buildings 

alan bard newcomer

lay it out so you just render that which you need would be a start
And plan ahead .. I've been doing these buildings for several years and creating the blocks which are now down to single objects each with all the lights on the block as a single surface. 
The buildings are scene subsets I can push around. currently working on controling the lights in each building to avoid repetition of patterns 
---
one is the basic street layout 
two is a shot of a group of buildings 2000x1000 47 minutes to render but as noted on the image it used 11000m of space on the card 
so that would be a limitation to the amount of your city in a render what the card can hold 
I have 64g of ram so holding the scene in the ram for the program isn't a problem.
three is a close up of one of the buildings  the titanx was at 5g and the 980ti was at 4g 36m53s just visible stuff 2kx1kw --- all light either the street lights or lights in the buildings 

Kerya

notretsam said:

NorthOf45 said:

You might want to check out this thread: Creating Big City Scenes in DAZ Studio. Lots of tips, trick and suggestions. Many productrs featured, so you will probably find everything you need.

thank you, did do a google search and came across this link but seems to be outdated, as the Movie Sets: River Front link no longer works and appears most posts related to that product. shame it doesn't exist now, thread certainly looked great.

 

Movie Sets: River Front is at Renderosity nowadays ...

notretsam

Kerya said:

notretsam said:

NorthOf45 said:

You might want to check out this thread: Creating Big City Scenes in DAZ Studio. Lots of tips, trick and suggestions. Many productrs featured, so you will probably find everything you need.

thank you, did do a google search and came across this link but seems to be outdated, as the Movie Sets: River Front link no longer works and appears most posts related to that product. shame it doesn't exist now, thread certainly looked great.

 

Movie Sets: River Front is at Renderosity nowadays ...

thank you for letting me know that :)

notretsam

Has been a while since I posted this and since then have learned more about Daz studio and learned about scene subsets and also learned about node instances as well.

I have a scene subset for houses I built in room creator and have 3 versions (fully furnished, basic furnished, empty), each house in the street has its own scene subset file.

I even have separate scene subsets saves for roads, paths, grass, the trees and streetlamps.

So I just load/merge the main house am focusing on and a neighbours house, then make node instances of the neighbour's house or main house depending on what am doing.

My town is all mapped out via scene subsets, so it all loads where I placed it, so once I set up the location, I then move it into a new temp group and then drag to 0,0 and then add models.

I render location and models separate as not enough memory to render them together, but I can layer the models on top of location in photoshop, in testing it went well but still building my town, so how to render still in theory.

Products I used are;

• Room Creator Version 2.0 
• Room Creator Exteriors
• Streets
• Orestes Tree Vol 1
• Haven Park (I made my own park)

Right now I have the park and most of the west side of town done, have built apartment house for the east side of town, just to build a street, then add the beach to the south and decide what goes in north area of town.

Need to learn about adding deformers to a plane, which I been told could help me make hill and mountain ranges. 

So that is where am at with this building a town, still happy to get advice and any other tips, as its a big project :)

 

maclean

One thing you could do - if you have an entire part of the set which isn't going to change (like the house or garage in your pics) - is to export it as a single .obj file from DAZ Studio, then re-import it and save it as a single prop. The main difference is that it would no longer be posable, so doors/windows wouldn't open, etc, but it would use a lot less in scene resources.

It might not be convenient to do this with some pieces, but at some point, you might find it useful. And of course, if you have the original part of the set saved, you could always load it in i

Re planes and Dformers - Yes, that's a very good way to create a terrain. Just make sure you have enough divisions on the plane to give smooth curves. If you use Wire Texture Shaded mode in the viewport (CTRL+8) you'll be able to see the divisions. I do have a morphing terrain in my Morphing Primitives pack, but you might be better off making your own. The way I do it is to export each satisfactorily Dformed plane as an .obj file, then either reset the Dformer and do another one, or use a new Dformer, until I've built up a good variety. Then I delete all the Dformers, select the plane and import all the .obj files as morphs. Save it as a Figure/Prop asset and all your morphs will be saved with it. Then you can load it up any time, and if neccessary, make more morphs later on with other Dformers. There's really no limit to what you can do once you get the hang of it, but the choice of divisions is absolutely crucial. You don't want to have to go back and do it all again because the terrain looks jagged and rough. And watch out for size. If you're adding a texture, a plane that's really large will also need a huge texture.

Catherine3678ab

... or a decent but small retiling texture ;-)

notretsam

maclean said:

One thing you could do - if you have an entire part of the set which isn't going to change (like the house or garage in your pics) - is to export it as a single .obj file from DAZ Studio, then re-import it and save it as a single prop. The main difference is that it would no longer be posable, so doors/windows wouldn't open, etc, but it would use a lot less in scene resources.

It might not be convenient to do this with some pieces, but at some point, you might find it useful. And of course, if you have the original part of the set saved, you could always load it in i

Re planes and Dformers - Yes, that's a very good way to create a terrain. Just make sure you have enough divisions on the plane to give smooth curves. If you use Wire Texture Shaded mode in the viewport (CTRL+8) you'll be able to see the divisions. I do have a morphing terrain in my Morphing Primitives pack, but you might be better off making your own. The way I do it is to export each satisfactorily Dformed plane as an .obj file, then either reset the Dformer and do another one, or use a new Dformer, until I've built up a good variety. Then I delete all the Dformers, select the plane and import all the .obj files as morphs. Save it as a Figure/Prop asset and all your morphs will be saved with it. Then you can load it up any time, and if neccessary, make more morphs later on with other Dformers. There's really no limit to what you can do once you get the hang of it, but the choice of divisions is absolutely crucial. You don't want to have to go back and do it all again because the terrain looks jagged and rough. And watch out for size. If you're adding a texture, a plane that's really large will also need a huge texture.

thanks, I have seen video tutorials on youtube for deformers, just not had a chance to watch them and teach myself deformers yet. 

Actually did buy that hilly surround today, on a quick look, it not quite what am looking for but going test it out more.

nicstt

Catherine3678ab said:

... or a decent but small retiling texture ;-)

It's almost impossible to prevent it looking tiled.