Howie Farkes Ultrascenery
dshield
Posts: 51
in The Commons
Hi, Im sorry if this has been answered elsewhere, but Ive just bought Howie Farkes' Ultrascenery Realistic Landscape System, along with some other Ultrascenery packs that I got in the sale, but when I ran the script to use it there are no Features or Ecology or Water showing up to use.
Im just wondering where they were installed to, if at all.
I would be grateful of any help.
Thanks in advance. D
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Betternpost here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/636346/ultrascenery-new-er-territory-commercial#latest
Thank you Felis.
I'll try those ideas. :)
Did you install with DAZ Connect? If you have you need to uninstall using DAZ connect then reinstall using either DIM or manual install.
Connect doesn't use the same folder structure as the other methods so it totally messes up Ultrascenery and some other scripts/plug-ins as well.
Cheers,
Alex.
you'll probably already find the answers in the thread linked above, I just wanted to say that I just got them new as well and installing through dim everything runs smoothly
Thank you all for your suggestions!
All works well now.
And Linwelly, if you havent already, grab the Accelerator for UltraScenery while its on Sale if you can!
I would definitely recommend it, the difference is unbelievable!
Thanks again, D
ha, I did when that bridge came out and all that stuff went on sale, but there is so much more I could buy now ...
Ultrascenery really is a fabulous product.
...doesn't Ultrascenery require a fair bit of "horsepower" to run? I have the base system, and both the Britain and Stone Bridge expansions but haven't tried using it yet.
12 year old system with 24 GB of DDR3 memory running on a 6 core 2.8 GHz Xeon and Titan-X GPU.
the fact that is works with instances makes it rather "light" compared to what you would have if all those plants were as items in the scene, besides that it works with texture sizes on the lower side where possible, that's why DOF is such a neat help there so you don't see the parts real close up in all detail. if you already own it you can just try ang go slowly like don't add a forest in the first experiment and go from there
Yes, it does! I rarely use it because once I add figures, hair, clothing, props, it really taxes my system Don't get me wrong, it is a fantastic product for what it does, but it is resouirce heavy
For new people, no matter the power, make sure you set Instancing Optimization to 'Memory' and do not use Iray Preview. And Canary's Cameras is an incredible tool also with all the cameras at different elevations and locations.
Until last December I ran it on a two core Xeon Win7 machine, 24Gb DDR3 and a 6Gb GTX 1060. The machine dated to 2012, so I got 4 logical cores. With one G8 figure or two V3 figures, it neither ran out of RAM nor VRAM, but did take a number of hours, often 2-3, to render a 1920 x 1080 image to 95% convergence (never had it drop to CPU with US or USXT). [Similar scenes now take 30 mins or so in my 3060 which is almost exactly in line with the GPU performance improvement, the scenes absorb around 7-8Gb of VRAM with US and .] On the old machine, Rendering ran the machine at about 25% CPU load feeding data to the GPU. You should have a bit of CPU headroom compared to mine so your cpu shouldn't hit 100% with the more powerful TitanX GPU requesting data from the CPU.
If you look at the TitanX performance and compare it to the GTX1060, you should get an idea of how fast US would render on hardware that was a little lower in spec than yours. It'll give a rough indicator for how it'd be on your machine.
Regards,
Richard
i rendered the scene above with only 16g of ram on a gtx960
so you have considerably more horse power and should okay
I second the bit about Optimization - I know better but have been doing a lot of product testing lately, which depending on what I'm testing can sometimes make surprise changes to render settings. So while that's going on I have to remind myself consciously to check optimization before using USC.
Speaking in general, there is actually a trick to use Iray Preview with USC, which is important if you're trying to do stuff like arrange placement of shadows or other certain fine-detail operations. I can't make promises on what you can successfully do with various hardware setups, but I am pretty sure that this idea was given to me last year when I was still running my 3060 setup. Expand UltraScene and UltraScene Terrain in Scene and make invisible parts you don't need. In my case, I'm usually doing this to see how shadows fall on my main objects, so I make everything invisible except the trees and then tinker with the rotation and other Render tab settings until I get something that appeals to me. But here's an example of where it comes in handy even if you're not doing that sort of thing.
I posted this in my gallery a couple of days ago from a test of the new bridge feature:
This seems simple enough but I ran into a problem. Initially, the people were (even more) conspicuously floating above the surface when I rendered the final scene. On closer inspection, I found that what I was seeing in Texture Shaded view was not accurately reflecting what was being rendered. This is what this final version looks like in Smooth Shaded (which looks nicer as a screen shot than Texture Shaded):
And this is what it looks like in Iray - with everything but the bridge made invisible, as you can see in the Scene tab at right:
For reasons that I don't currently know, this bridge prop in this scene is not accurately being represented in Smooth Shaded/Texture Shaded /etc view, and it would've been impossible to get the feet even this close to being planted properly on the surface without this trick. (I ended up having to make some compromise with the guy, given the uneven bridge surface and intricate three-figure pose.)
But Iray Preview for the whole USC scene without making some/most of it invisible? Nope, this RTX 3090 system would come to a standstill if I tried that.
You can use ultrascenery in Iray preview mode but it is best to first hide all the groups of plants with more than 1000 instances. This is generally the grass, pebbles and small plants. I just create a group, throw them all into that, and then you can just make the whole lot visible/invisible with one click.
You really need the trees to be visible to check for where the large shadows are cast, but when completing the scene and looking for issues like with the bridge above, the small plants do not need to be seen.
Make the small plants visible again when you are ready to render.
one more trick to reduce render load: set the build settings to camera, which will poulate only the area in your camera view with plants pebbles etc. It requires knowing which part you want to look at beforehand which is a bit tricky, but you can make a rebuilt of the same thing with the camera setting on once you have an idea where you want to look in your scene
...thank you for the suggestions.
With just GTX 1080 or GTX1080Ti computers or my MacBook Pro M1 (CPU anyone?) I use tiny 500 x 500 renders draft quality to check things out.
That floating or embedding issue is one I find regardless of set. And with bi/tri-focals, which shift what I am seeing is disorientating and misleading. (These are my NEW glasses.)
Whatever you do, save constantly. And I also save, close the scene, close DAZ, reboot the computer and start it back up, reload the scene, and do another check, a bit larger, then hopefully go for a bigger, final render. But if another gremlin is found, keep at it.
Unfortunately a very expensive year of mini-disasters used up my saving towards a rebuild or new computer. That is life. We got two cats out of it though. Worth it.
Can I ask, how does the Accelerator for Ultrascenery help with renders?
Accelerator doesn't affect the render at all (as far as I know), it just makes the building of the scene much much faster.
ETA: There are a few user experiences in the old USC forum thread starting here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6281926/#Comment_6281926
As a big USC user, I wouldn't be without it!
Just to add to MelanieL's comment. Ultrascenery is a script, whilst the accelerator is a plug-in (ie developed in C++ using the SDK, not using the scripting language). Plug-ins tend to be much faster in execution than scripts, which is why the script can use it to generate the scene much faster.
Ultrascenery 2, which is what Howie is working on now, will be 100% plug-in, or at least, so we have been told.
Or you can use Ultra Scenery Toolbox Volume One to rebuild the scene. It is also useful removing patches of scenery that gets in the way.
https://www.daz3d.com/ultra-scenery-toolbox--volume-one
Thank you both for the information. Much appreciated.