What are you using for medieval streets?
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,641
I've probably got every set of medieval buildings in this store and a bunch for UE as well, but the one thing I don't have - and the one thing that's preventing me from putting all of these buildings to good use - are streets and curbs to put them on. I don't want to just put them on a flat ground plane, I want streets with stone details, curbs and pathways to walk on in front of shops, curved intersection corners, and all of the other little but important elements that you'll find in products like Stonemason's city sets or some of the Faveral town blocks.
Does anyone have any recommendations for products that can help with this? I see curbs on this promo for the Medieval Village Houses Construction Set (https://gcdn.daz3d.com/p/84202/i/medievalvillagehousesconstructionset02daz3d.jpg), but what are they from?
Thanks in advance for any suggestions. Also if any PAs think about making a set like I'm describing, know that I would buy it without even looking at the price. ;)
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Personally, i don't have curbs for my medieval streets, Everything is all flat surfaces and with the scenes ive done, or movies ive watched, I dont think i recall ever seeing "sidewalks" in that setting., and im wondering what would be the purpose for them for that time period.
Intriguing concept. Good Luck on your inquiry. Im interested in seeing what comes of it.
-MJ
If i need 'streets' for a medieval scene, mud and dirt are best.
Good point, I should clarify before the purists with sci-fi space battles and dragons in their galleries come in to inform me that there weren't really sidewalks in medieval times that I meant 'typical fantasy depiction' of streets and towns. Using flat surfaces requires using *extremely* detailed ground textures and meshes, the sort of thing that needs the likes of Substance Designer and Zbrush to pull off well. I like the idea of curbs and sidewalks to make a larger town look more civilized and wealthy, especially when the buildings are more complex. I wouldn't think of using them for a Viking village or a more tribal settlement.
How about plane primitives with cobblestone shaders for streets?A few of them have displacement maps, so would add a bit more detail at the expense of more VRAM used and longer render time.
Could apply those to a cube/cylinder primitive to make the curbs.
Scale down a premade wall from another set to make the curbs?
Can use a stone and make instances of it and positioning them accordingly.This can be time consuming, but the "Align" tool helps alot.
Iray or 3Delight? Stonemason's Streets of London has some nice roads that would do, but they were made for 3Delight and rely on displacement on a low-resolution mesh.
You'll get obvious tiling if there's any interesting features on the texture, then you need to either subdivide the plane and add more surfaces or create multiple planes...all of which can work, but it's not like having a mesh.
Walls can work as sidewalks and curbs, but you're out of luck when you get to a corner.
Richard: I looked at a few Stonemason sets, but since they're custom made to fit a specific building setup (length, depth, etc), it would be very limiting to try and cut up the geometry and use them where needed.
I don't even see any sets like what I'm talking about in the Epic Marketplace, which either makes me think that they sculpt everything with the landscape tool or make their own meshes. This doesn't sound like a particularly difficult thing to make for someone with some modeling experience, which is why I'm wondering aloud what others are using.
If I understand then , you are looking for a "medieval street and road" construction set?
Something with curved, straight, and intersection pieces?
Maybe you can use a more modern version and chang3e the shaders.Yes, it would be using a rather uniform and tiled looking shader.
Like this?
https://www.cgtrader.com/3d-models/architectural/architectural-street/damaged-road-pack-low-poly
Couple others on that site.None are in Studio format so would take a little work.
These have modular street pieces.
https://www.daz3d.com/sw-french-quarter--seraphims-corner
https://www.daz3d.com/sw-french-quarter--lindys-corner
and a low poly one
https://www.daz3d.com/le-village-road-pack
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Other than a custom mesh and textures/materials, I really don't how to get around the uniform tiled shader look, sorry.
ooohh,almost forget,,,
https://www.daz3d.com/city-roads
It's a Poser(.pp2) but works in current version Studio just fine, so should also work in older versions.
The curbs and sidewalk/street are seperate suface areas already so won't need to fix that.
Again, not the aesthetic you were wanting, but workable with shaders.
Strange, I have the City Roads set but I remember trying it a long time ago and thinking it wouldn't work. Not sure why, I'll check it out again.
Do you have either of those French Quarter sets? I'm curious to know what the individual road sections look like (the straight, curved, and X ones mentioned on the product pages). Thank you very much for those examples.
Yes, I have all 3 Daz Store sets I linked.
Here's a quick render of the Poser City Roads.
The curved piece has a good UV, so the tiled shader followed well.\
I replaced the shaders on the curved one, straight piece is default that I let DS auto-convert.
Default G8.1F for scale perspective.
I'll be back in a bit if you would like to see the FQ sets quick rendered.Storm coming have to put the trash and recycle cans in the garage :)
Thank you very much. Be careful, hope the storm isn't too much trouble.
Yeah I just tested the City Roads a bit and they're pretty good. I think my original problem may have been that they automatically tile everything, so it's a bit tricky to use a single detailed texture without it repeating, and Substance Painter may have had trouble with them (I will try to confirm that later).
Most shader presets will have some level of tiling dialed in to start with.
I very rarely leave it at default.
Whilst kit bashing I'm not against slopping paint on the walls and digging up the yard to plant flowers to make a scene "mine" :)
I spend as much , if not more on shader packs as I do anything else from the Daz Store.
The free sites(rendo, shareCG) have a few good ones.
devaintart is an absolute goldmine for kit bashing stuff.You'll need to do some searching to find them though.It's not the easiest site to hunt for things.
Luckily they have a "Similar items" type widget on the "divination" pages.So you can "get on a trail".That's how I do it.
Oh you don't have to tell me about kitbashing, it's pretty much all I do. :) I bought Substance Painter specifically to retexture DAZ products that I purchase.
...which leads me to why I never used the City Roads; they will not open in Substance Painter due to issues with the UV mapping. I think many Faveral products have this issue, they will accept any tiling textures, but don't like any attempts to actually paint on the meshes in other software.
Thank you very much for the help so far, but...still not sure what I'm going to do about this. I might test out texturing primitives (like planes and rectangles) in Substance Painter and seeing if they can be layered over ground planes and items like these roads back in Studio.
to be honest, sculpting the terrain is what I also do, what DAZ studio lacks is a procedural sculpting on the fly terrain app but Bryce has a bridge so one possibility.
Ultrascenery I gather can use greyscale maps which Bryce, Carrara and many other apps also export so maybe would suit you too if wanting a more DAZ based solution.
Roadmaker comes in handy too for editing roads into greyscale maps and you can use it for templates in Photoshop etc to hand texture your road in a non tiling more random way.
if you make brushes of the footprint of your buildings with a gradual falloff blur you can also stamp those in your image editing app on the greyscale image to create flat foundations with a slope up to (or negative down to) it.
I would actually photobash or try painting the street into a render in Photoshop before I'd go back to using Bryce or Carrara. ;)
I did say many other apps
I understand many like the shiny new tools and Bryce or Carrara is inadequate
(even though some PAs even use Hexagon to successfully model stuff}
if you want to buy one of the pricey modern ones the USXT crowd like such as World Bulder, Terragan or Gaia I believe they export greyscale maps too.
I know you have Zbrush too, you can do terrains in that too
Dresden Circle
https://www.daz3d.com/dresden-circle
Seems like it has the whole street thing covered.
I checked most castle-related items and all those areas probably have floors as separate props that could be saved-out in parts and Merged into your scene to make paths.
This looks like it
https://www.daz3d.com/castle-gravestone-the-dungeon-cells_The Management'
and this looks like a fit
https://www.daz3d.com/castle-gravestone-halls
Maclean's Streets is often my go to road set, currently on sale at $5.08, you need to retexture for the medieval look, but see below for a quick render using a selection of shaders, no post work. The infill below the house is a 16m square plane with a shader applied.
Each road section has three surfaces, curb, sidewalk, street, you need to pick the right shaders to allow for rotated sections or use shader rotator to get the right look on corners etc. I.E. square cobbles rather than rectangular as they can look odd, or a muddy wet street might work as shown in the second image.
It's Iray so I haven't tried to cnvert it yet, but this has various street system textures and layouts available in the system.
https://www.daz3d.com/multi-layer-landscape-system
I know Wendy, and thanks. :)
Griffin: None of those would really work, they're just floors that can't be shaped or assembled in any real way outside of the product that they're designed for. Thanks though.
Kinich: That actually seems pretty good, might try it for that price and hope it works in Substance Painter. If not, I'll just have to make tiling textures there without seeing the live preview. Thanks too.
JOdel: I remember seeing that a while back, will wishlist it for now. Thanks.
Brickworx has some pretty good shaders for medieval streets
Or you put another noise texture layer on it, a dirt shader layer and a couple of decals on prominent points.
Most of Faveral's sets have streets where you could probably remove the buildings and just use the streets.
This set has some heavily modeled streets, though I'm not sure if you could break everything up easily to do a kitbash - https://www.daz3d.com/medieval-fantasy-village
There is also some gorgeous stuff in the Unreal marketplace...if you know how to convert Unreal stuff (which I don't and would love to know how to do).
I wish I knew how to export their spline streets etc as objects, that's the ideal way to create roads and I doubt anyone could make something like it for D|S4 maybe 5
I of course just use Unreal
totally derailing but Carrara also has splines but sadly one cannot model with them in the assembly room so you don't get the interactivity of Unreal Engine.
Blender has something called geometry nodes that could do this too
Modular Ruins has bits that could work for sidewalks. Would need to use node instances, of course.
Hapsburg has cobblestone streets with sidewalks. So does Old Victorian Street. I'm pretty sure the houses are removable. And you could use geometry editor to cut the road into pieces to fit your needs.
Now I think of it, Dreamland Models over on Rendo has a number of sets of things like paths thrugh the woods and such like. His stuff depends heavily on incidences and I gather is not for the faint of computer. But some of those terains may not be too lumpy to use for village/city streets with the plants and asdditional rocks removed. Especially if flattend a bit in the Y axis.
For that matter you could probably do the same with other such sets. A lot would depend on whether you are using it for stills or animation, since it might not work from all angles.
Yeah that might work well if I put in the work because different individual pieces could be rotated and placed by hand to eliminate repeating. Thanks for reminding me about that set, I've had it a while and not really used it much.
You all have given me some good ideas, thank you very much. Hopefully they might be handy for others as well.
Maclean's Roads work pretty well; there's no 'curb-only' prop included, but you can just copy the texture from the sidewalk to a plane primitive and put that where you need extra empty space, like I did in this example. For a lot of scenes, this set might do the job. On sale now, thanks Kinich. :)
Your welcome, glad it looks like it's going to work out for you, it's a great street set, I've had it since the 3DL only days, the fact we got a free IRay update for free just made it even better and with the US & UK road materials it's great for contemporary renders set either side of the pond.