Now Available - dB EnvironKit - Badlands - Commercial
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,583
Here we go again!
Still holding to the EnvironKits tradition of beginning with a base from which you may quickly build a complete, 3d scenic surrounding background with very little time or effort, while also providing a pile of fully realized preset scenes to either start from, or just use those, rather than build your own from the kit.
Like other EnvironKits, Badlands comes with a nice selection of Carrara scene presets, so you never really have to get in and make any scenes of your own. Presets include desert-like, cliff-littered badlands, a full cave/cavern creation system, a river of lava, refreshing lake amidst the ruin, and many others (See Promo images for some examples).
Carrara EnvironKit - Badlands is a complete kit towards making many different types of environment scenes in Carrara. From a bleak, dry, and desolate base, we may create harsh barren wastelands or lush oasis'. Like Woodlands, Badlands includes two new "Panoramic Maker" presets, which are specially designed and laid out for creating your own 360 degree, spherical maps for use in the Backgrounds scene setting - giving you a full global image that renders in nearly no time at all. There is also a set of presets which use the background spherical maps that were made using this kit, to give you some ideas of what can be created.
EnvironKits series scene builders are designed with 'ease-of-use' in mind. Everything revolves around the actual zero point in 3d space so when you load in something new, it loads in directly in front of you for easy placement and rendering. Each kit comes complete with lighting rigs with full explanation of their use within the interface. Clouds, atmosphere, skies, special accent lighting for your main focus group, camera setups, these kits are made to render - straight out of the box!
Badlands presents many new terrain features. Even some of the presets have their own unique formation beyond the base. Also included are new Carrara plants - designed specifically to look as if they are struggling in a harsh location, new terrain blocks, one with plants populated over it, a specially designed lava shader on an ocean primitive for ease in animation, and a whole new terrain shader.
Although the presets are made to be used as they come, EnvironKits really shine in their complete array of assets that can be loaded into any of the presets or your own scenes to create nearly any scene you can imagine. Just taking any one preset from this kit, you can drag in a few new elements from the browser which come with this kit, to make the scene entirely your own! Even more, the shaders from this kit work with those from Woodlands and Underwater Realms, etc., and the other way around. All elements from each kit work nicely within the other kits - so you really get some power towards making truly awe-inspiring scenes with very little time or effort!
I made an example animation of the wonderful Lava Lake and put it up on my YouTube channel, if anyone's interested. Since it's just a short animation, I also added the rest of the promo shots as well:
Badlands Lava Lake Preset - Animated Example
Welcome to the Badlands!
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Note that, aside from the first image a small bit of post work was added because I'm really addicted to the new Howler 9.1 - I'll get the raw shots up soon.
The main integrity of the render is there, though. I didn't do much post.
Now to make some presets for the newly invented Cave Base!
The new plants are pretty neat, I think. I designed them as something that can struggle for months without rain. Sparse, tough leaves with long, sharp thorns to ward off feeders.
The lava lake is an ocean primitive with a special, new shader.
Each of the presets in Badlands has a special difference about it, a unique something or other, from the rest of the bunch. Like the Canyon... ooops, I need to put up my image of the Canyon! LOL has a whole new base terrain with a very cool adventure gorge just behind point zero in the scene. Very sweet. Of course, turn on the water system and you'll now have a lake. The Base scene has it's very own new surrounding terrain structure that can be rotated and moved (it's very large) for all manner of entirely different looks. It came after all of the other presets were already finished with the exception of today's brand new Cave Base, which has a duplicate of this cool sounding terrain system inverted overhead. As it comes in the Base, the ceiling is incredibly high. This is so that it can fulfill its prime objective - to be a fast, easy, high quality 3d surrounding for nearly any subterranean idea for the main focal point.
The primary base terrain is the smaller 100' x 100' so that we can use high definition while we're up close and personal. The surrounding terrain is a single, carefully constructed Carrara terrain which is 10,000' x 10,000' and can handle a good variety of tweaks in the terrain modeler, should one feel so inclined... it's very fun! Anyways, these two work together as a system accompanied by the smaller blocks of terrain that can be scaled and placed in any way imaginable.
With the new Cave Base, all of this gets duplicated and inverted. Rotate just one of the, now four, major terrain pieces for an entirely different view. But you can also rotate all four, move them around, scale them up or down in any or all axis, and then we have the smaller 'detail' blocks of terrain to further tweak it out. For my own self reasons, I need this stuff to work with content available from the marketplace. Mainly, a spherical background with true 3d depth. The really cool part that I discovered as I made Woodlands, is that these Carrara assets stand up really well as the major part of the scene instead of just being a backdrop. So I'll be working on more presets for the caves to show some fun example of what the kit is capable of. I'm really excited about this one! :)
Oh... right... the Canyon:
You know, the Canyon is also a unique base scene as well. A star-fighter could certainly zing down in there dog-fighting a pterodactyl!
You can see how the foreground in the above shot has more color to it. Further ahead it gets less saturated, just beyond a bit of fog. That space in between there is a large, very cool gorge! I'll take some shots of that, too.
Clouds in this kit are used very individually. I illustrate how within the presets, which each have an entirely different cloud setup.
Each of the above images is a render from the preset, as when you just open the scene and hit Ctrl R (Cmd R), with the exception of the white edge fade and occasional lens flares. It's truly Dogwaffle's fault for that. I just go in to sign the thing and put the faded edge on it, but no... Howler says: "you know, you could add...."
Looks cool! I really like the fallen tree by lake/pond.
Sweet, i use your woodlands set in almost every project i do, the tree groups are great, with this will give even more scene options. Your underwater set is nice too, i just don't do as much underwater scenes,
When I first saw the title I thought (and I'll be honest here) "That sounds OK but I won't have much use for it". However having seen your demo scenes, it looks a lot more versatile than my initial thinking, and looking like a really useful resource. You're tapping into something great with these EnvironKits!
Thanks to all of you!
I'm still in the process of celebrating Valentine's Day with my Beautiful, Wonderful Rose! Wow, the BEST Valentine's Day(s) I've ever had - and we just might not stop - so... sorry for the late reply.
It is my intention through these EnvironKits, to help provide a whole new slew of useful presets for Carrara users. Being in that thought process is why I have been keeping the prices so low - as you really end up getting a lot for the price. It takes me a long time to get these to their final result.
Anyways, thanks for the support.
I played around with the Cave Base today and then went to work and created a new preset "Cave Passage", which was really easy to create using the Cave Base scene - again, part of the main intention of EnvironKits, is to be easy to come up with your own scenery, using the presets as examples or even as starting points.
I have always found myself in need of background elements, which is where Starry Sky and EnvironKits came from in the first place. Not always anything fancy, just 'something' period.
The thing that I really like about the EnvironKits series, is that each of the additional elements that come with one kit will also work nicely in another, or even in a scene of your own creation.
The "Kit" Idea:
Each EnvironKit comes complete with terrain shaders that can be applied to any Carrara terrain.
Each EnvironKit comes with terrain pieces that will work with any of the other kits or all by themselves - some are provided with plants on them. In Woodlands, for example, the Wooded Blocks only come with plants on them, but you could load each, delete the plants, and save them without any plants.
Each EnvironKit comes with light rigs to help generate a great starting point for your thoughts of a scene. These rig are easily tweaked or even removed if you wish to do something different - but they do work great - that's why I put them in. For a lot of my animation work, I'll open the Fake GI replicator and change the minimum distance to 900 or so, until I get only 12 - 14 lights, which speeds up the render times in trade for better shadows. When I do that, I also have to turn the replicated light brighter, as it comes with 88 replicated lights for smooth shadows and subtle GI.
Badlands goes further towards tweaking the individual rigs for each preset, since the presets all vary so much.
The really cool aspect that I love about EnvironKits, is the fact that when you drag in a piece of additional content, it comes into scene at the center of the Filming frame - not some place that you cannot see from the current view. I do this for ease of use.
Phil, your Orc Fantasy village would look great in here!
Hey Dartanbeck,
These are some nice looking scenes and renders. Great job.
yet again I find myself saying "great work Dartanbeck", this is for sure then next purchase I make when I get paid. Knowing the amazing amount of work you put in to the woodlands kit (which I still find amazing each time I open it) I am confident that this will be another of your frequently used assets that I will be proud to own :D
I use both Underwater Realm and Woodlands a lot and am really looking forward to Badlands! GREAT work thanks and I hope you keep it up.:-)
Excellent set!!!
Thanks again, you all.
I'm glad you like the EnvironKits concept.
It originated from what I have been doing as I create and optimize scenes for my own use, and then store them to my Browser, except that these kits are much more beyond the stuff I was doing - and now I use my kits as well!
That said I do have a quite a bit of them on the work bench, so they will keep coming - as I can complete them. It's really quite amazing how much can be done with this concept. Like the original idea, it is often my own needs that drives the ideas forth. Then I put my stuff on hold so I can build a kit that will fulfill my needs - along with a bunch of extra possibilities that I imagine along the way.
So I shot this render, since I was talking earlier about landing a star ship in the canyon. This star ship is vastly too large to actually land in the gorge, so I pulled it up into the clouds, did some rearranging, and hid all of the central terrain features and, instead, duplicated the outer surrounding terrain a few times. It's a huge ship ;)
Looks very impressive - and colourful!
I added two lights that only affect the clouds :)
A bit of saturation enhancing in post
I like it!
I like it!Cool. Thanks!
I really enjoy playing with the Realistic Sky Editor. It's really neat how you can change the color of the sky and the lighting simply by positioning the sun differently. Also, I know that it seems to have picked up a bad rap towards making great looking skies, while using the cloud domes. But those cloud domes have some major tweaking that can be going on to make those clouds look pretty darn nice. Sure they're not volumetric, but they do serve to change the background effect in a really fast-rendering and highly adjustable system.
Sorry... that's how I got the sky color going on - setting the sun close to the horizon. It automatically changes the color of the moon, too.
It's looking awesome,. What's your projected release date?
I'm building the Panoramic Maker preset as we speak. I'm rendering out a 16,000 x 8,000 spherical png. Right now I'm seeing most of the equatorial scene that looks amazing! We'll see how it looks.
When that's done I need to set up the background image-using scene presets, which have to be handled differently, which is why I like to include them. Fun.
Some shots made using the first background spherical surround map instead of an Carrara atmosphere:
Hi,
looks very nice - apocalyptic.
rk.
Good ol' Shanty Town, by The AntFarm! Love this product for run down post-apocalyptic style villages. Works great in Badlands.
Oh... by the way, it should be on sale any day now :)
Main Promos for the store:
..and the rest of them:
Just one more...
This is looking like another "must buy" product, Dart!
Thank you Phil :)
It's certainly versatile - each variant can mix elements with the other, and I've yet to show how interchangeable it is with other EnvironKits. I better get on the ball with that! ;)
Here's something I tossed together since my last post.
It begins with the new Canyon Base, from the upcoming Badlands. Then I brought in some terrain features from Underwater Realms EnvironKit, each of the wooded terrain blocks from Woodland E-Kit, and finally used the Forest shader from Woodlands on all terrain pieces, which is easier than one might think.
When I do this, and I want all terrain from different kits to be the same shader, I open the shader I want to use, copy it, then paste it into the others. Since these kits share shaders designed to work in each of the other kits, it's as easy as that.
Also, since these are all made up from Carrara native modeling features and shaders, they load and duplicate immediately. So when I added that large wooded hill from Woodlands, after I swapped the shader for the terrain, I duplicated it and sent one into the background with a slight rotation. Same thing with the other elements...
It's all very fast, and can make a really full scene and still maintain great render times - which for me also makes it incredibly fun to do.
I didn't add any post work to this, just so you can see how nicely this turns out.
Since the last post, I've saved the above scene in my KitBash folder before making this scene. Again, being all Carrara-made stuff, a save is only seconds. This is why I like to save these scenes first, and then add characters, only when I'm ready for them - and then save that one separately.
Anyways for this one, even though the kit comes with wonderful terrain to use for this Cave System, I'm kit bashing now, so I grabbed a couple from Underwater Realms, gave them each the new Badlands Shader, scaled and placed them about, flipped some upside down and duplicated, rotated... you know... I was having fun. This is what very quickly came to be from it.
The second image is the same, but I just turned on the Cloud Fog.
Something about this Cave System that comes with Badlands, is that it is really big.
So you can actually get by never adding anything but your heroes and monsters. A little twist and slide here and there of any of the terrain elements, ground or ceiling or both, you can have a whole new part of the cave - so you can actually render an entire subterranean adventure with nothing more than the Cave System Base!