Morphing Dungeon/Castle Type Room/Caverns For Poser (and DS...ish)*
3dcheapskate
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*(and DS...ish) - see the preamble for DAZ Studio users just below the image in this post.More discussion in various later posts.
(29 Jan: Separate Caverns prop now uploaded - see this post)
(Release 2 dungeon/castle type room now uploaded - see this post)
This prop was created with the same idea as my worldball - i.e as something that I can add to a scene at the very last moment because I forgot to put any background scenery in ! 
The morphs are mainly so that I can fit the room around the figures and provide a mysterious staircase/passage or two in the background...thus giving the false impression that I'd actually had the environment planned all along! 
*Preamble for DAZ Studio users:
Firstly, this being the DAZ freebies forum, I'll clarify the 'Sort-Of Works With DS Too' bit.
- The room itself loads with no problem, and all the morphs work with no problem.
- However, there are no DAZ Studio textures/materials/shaders provided. In addition the room is not UV-mapped - this is intentional, since the morphs can stretch faces from almost nothing to huge sizes, so any UV-mapping would be badly distorted by certain morphs. If you just load the room, apply some morphs and render (3Delight or Iray) the room will probably render plain white.
- The room was a result of playing with Poser procedural shaders using global coordinates and big displacements and is supplied with a single such shader (a few additional Poser shaders have also been uploaded as freebies). As mentioned above these don't work in DS, and when you lod the room in
- If you use DS with the 3Delight renderer I would suggest applying the 'Flagstones' shader that was bundled with DS4 (you'll find it in your DS4 main content directory under Shader Presets > Shader Mixer ) - it makes a good starting point. You can change lots of stuff on the Surfaces tab. But if you like tinkering under the hood it's easy to edit the ShaderMixer shader itself - ensure the room prop is selected and that you've selected the main material for the room (currently labelled '(null)' - I should correct that!), then from the DS menu bar select Windows > Panes/Tabs > ShaderMixer, on the ShaderMixer window select File > Import From Scene, select Material, Accept, adjust the zoom, window, etc and play (I'd suggest reading the ShaderMixer manual first, but there isn't one. However, there are a few tutorials lying around the web).
- Iray is a different matter. Whereas Poser Firefly and DAZ Studio 3Delight can apply displacements to every point on a surface, Iray only displaces vertices (see my Iray Not Doing Displacement Or Reflection? thread). You could try subdividing the room's mesh, but with most faces being 1 Poser unit (about eight foot) in length, width, and/or height you'll need a ridiculous amount of subdivision to get something reasonable. And since the faces on the edges of the steps are only an inch or so wide such subdivision will give a ridiculously dense mesh in these areas. In addition old ShaderMixer shaders won't work in Iray - newer ShaderMixer shaders that use the MDL root and bricks should work fine... at least that's my best guess now ! :D
Poser Stone Shader And Room Prop:
This dungeon/castle type room came out of some messing around I was doing with procedural textures in Poser 9 (which is why it's only got Poser textures).
The Poser procedural stone texture could possibly pass for either natural caverns or old manual constructions. (It should be quite easy to knock up something similar in ShaderMixer for DAZ Studio 3Delight.)
The room is a very simple (2928 vertices, 1310 faces) square dungeon/castle type room with 12 very basic morphing passages/stairways leading off it. The room itself is also an experiment in using minimal geometry (which seems to be rapidly becoming a lost art) but providing maximum flexibility. I've learnt a fair bit doing this (and also unlearnt a few things I thought I knew... ;o) )
Lots of black shadowy meshline type artefacts when rendered in Poser with ray-traced shadows, AO, and/or IDL due to the large displacement I use (2 inches), but hey!, it's a dungeon/castle type room, and they're usually lit by flaming torches, candles, and lanterns which cast big blurry shadows (and not the diffuse IBL and infinite light that I'm using on the promos). If you use appropriate lighting in the room these artefacts sort-of blend in or disappear, as in my "You Enter My Home Bearing An Axe?" picture. (Also if you know what 'Min Bias' means you can probably get rid of, or at least minimize, most artefacts in the correct way!)
I plan to release updates at various stages. Initially these will be in the form of Morph Targets (MTs), which are simply OBJ files that can be applied to the prop and saved with it from within Poser (and also in DAZ Studio I believe?). But at suitable points I intend to release full updates. I'm pleasantly surprised at how much flexibility a few very simple, but carefully chosen morphs can give the end user.
Download links for Release 1... (Release 2 now uploaded - different download links - see this post)
ShareCG: Poser Stone Shader And Room Prop
Renderosity: Poser Stone Shader And Room Prop I've removed all my freebies from Renderosity.
DeviantArt: Poser Stone Shader And Room Prop
(as usual the ShareCG page contains more information and pictures than the Renderosity page)
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Comments
Three More Poser Procedural Shaders
Obviously of no use for DAZ Studio users, but for Poser users they're quite fun to play with in the material room - I've even included material room screenshots on the ShareCG download page with hints about what things to play with.
And since they're totally procedural (and using global coordinates) you can apply them to anything.
ShareCG: Three More Poser Procedural Shaders
Renderosity: Three More Poser Procedural Shaders I've removed all my freebies from Renderosity.
(as usual the ShareCG page contains more information and pictures than the Renderosity page)
Extra Morph Targets For The Dungeon Room
'DoubleLength' and 'DoubleWidth' to expand the room, and 'Duodecagonal' to make it into a twelve sided circular thingy. Brief notes on how to apply morph targets in Poser on the ShareCG download page. Milos said he'd a managed to apply them in DS, but I haven't got instructions.
These MTs are only relevant to Release 1 (the morphs are incorporated into Release 2 - see this post)
ShareCG: Extra Morph Targets For The Dungeon Room
Renderosity: Extra Morph Targets For The Dungeon Room I've removed all my freebies from Renderosity.
(as usual the ShareCG page contains more information and pictures than the Renderosity page)
Another Four Morph Targets For The Dungeon Room
After applying the duodecagonal morph above I realized that there was no way to make the passages/steps radiate outward in a manner consistent with the circular shape - they still extend in only the four cardinal directions. So I made a few test morphs (for Wall01 only) to see if I could get round that, and they seem successful. I'm adding similar morphs to the other 11 walls now - tedious, repetitive work, so it may take some time. In the meantime I'm releasing these wall01 MTs so people can play and let me know of any problems.
These MTs are only relevant to Release 1 (the morphs are incorporated into Release 2 - see this post)
ShareCG: Another Four Morph Targets For The Dungeon Room
Renderosity: Another Four Morph Targets For The Dungeon Room I've removed all my freebies from Renderosity.
(as usual the ShareCG page contains more information and pictures than the Renderosity page)
And just as a teaser for the next update, here's the sort of thing I can do once I 've created equivalents of the wall01 morphs mentioned in the previous post for the other 11 walls...
Displacement affects only vertices in Iray, oooooooooooh, so THAT'S why. I didn't realize!
I'm hopefully going to have a procedural Iray shader out sometime, though it won't be useful for stuff like brick.
Although Iray Decals offer options for projection mapping onto surfaces -- I've had pretty good luck with unusual surfaces that way, and you can have more control over proportions. The one downside is that Decals don't do displacement.
This is great, everything works and it is fantastic thing. I am just missing ceiling :D
Just set the the DropRoofBelowFloor morph back to zero - by default it's 100% so the roof is hidden below the floor.
Three other morphs in the Wall01 group are set by default (1-StepsExtend, 1-StepsUp, and 1-DropWall) - mainly so that you can see which wall is Wall01. The rest of the walls are numbered in a clockwise direction (from above).
Unfortunately there's hardly anything I can do with the roof or columns as far as morphs are concerned except for moving them up, down and sideways. That's because they're very simple meshes - the main part of the roof/ceiling is 16 vertices/9 faces (a 3x3 grid) and each column is 16 vertices/8 faces (a ring of 8 vertices at the bottom and another at the top).
But I'm also playing separately with morphing columns and a more suitable dungeon/cavern style ceiling (renders below). Hopefully all of this will eventually come together...
Amazing, keep up the good work :) I have been playing with it today, and will continue tomorrow. Amazingly useful thing for me. Thank You so much. I am hoping that I might learn to do things like that one day. Not yet in that stage though :/ but I have learned to load morphs thanks to this, now to only learn to make and transfer them.
Poser Stone Shader And Room Prop (Release 2):
I've completed the wall 2-12 equivalents of that second batch of morph targets, and I've just uploaded a new version of the room prop with these new morphs and the ones that I've already uploaded as separate morph targets.
ShareCG: Release 2 Poser Stone Shader And Room Prop
Renderosity: not uploaded yet... I've removed all my freebies from Renderosity.
(check the ShareCG page for a couple of additional helpful images)
Looks good, but can't get materials/shaders to work on it in DS. I went in to the shader mixer menu as mentioned above and tried messing around with it but with no results. Does anyone out there know what alterations to make? I really haven't a clue about this more technical stuff, and it would be great to use this groovy prop.
I'd guess you're rendering in Iray ?
I'm fairly sure that ShaderMixer shaders simply don't work in Iray. (Where I said in the OP here "...If you use DS with the 3Delight renderer I would suggest applying the 'Flagstones' shader..." I should probably have added "... (ShaderMixer shaders don't appear to work with Iray)..." just to be absolutely clear
I''ve just done a test with the Flagstones shader, and it seems to confirm my thoughts - results attached.
I can't really help with Iray - don't use it enough. But there must be some reasonable free rock/stone Iray shaders around that don't use displacement? Or you could just use a completely different material - which reminds me: it should be easy to do a version of the PP2 with different material zones - possibly floor, walls, columns, and steps - if anybody's interested...
Thanks for your reply.
No, I'm rendering in 3Delight.
I think the problem is that it turns out I'm an idiot.
The flagstones shader does work, but I didn't realise it would only show up when rendered. I expected it to turn up as soon as it was applied in the viewport, as the normal jpg materials I usually use do, but it doesn't, it shows up as a grey colour until it's rendered. So it works as you said, and now I feel silly. But also very glad it works.
A version with different zones would be great, it'd add even more variety to what is already a superb prop.
Thanks for your work, I shall get a lot of use out of it I'm sure.
Nothing idiotic there - unless you know that ShaderMixer shaders often don't show anything in the preview (and I forgot to mention that) it's logical to assume something's wrong.
I'll sort out another PP2 with different material zones sometime in the next day or two
Actualy I am having problems with shaders, they do apply but only colours and textures are not shown in 3delight render. That is for all my free shaders except this one that actualy works normaly http://www.daz3d.com/dld-stone-shaders-for-daz-studio I even tried if those shaders work on other items but they do. Not sure what is the problem.
I'd guess that the shaders you're having problems with use image maps? Remember that the room's not UV mapped, so there's nothing to tell the shader how to map an image to the surfaces - not quite sure what effect you'll see, but it won't look correct.
Those DLD stone shaders are procedural ShaderMixer shaders (i.e. they don't use image maps) so they should work fine.
Oh I see. Thanks for the explanation. Ok I am having fun there, You might see result soon I am hoping.
Ah! That'd be what the new (not sure when they appeared) 'Roots > MDL Surface' and 'Bricks > MDL' in ShaderMixer are for then. I didn't test, just deduced that from the fact that DS4.8 has 'Shader Presets > Iray >Nvidia MDL Examples'.
I should probably have said that I'm fairly sure that old ShaderMixer shaders simply don't work in Iray... ;o)
P.S. Any idea what MDL stands for?
http://www.nvidia.com/object/material-definition-language.html
It's... basically a different language? I guess?
I've had fun with it -- I've made some procedural Iray shaders I hope to be selling in the nearish future.
Obvious now you've suggested it! RSL= Renderman Shader Language, MDL = Material Definition Language
The "...more suitable dungeon/cavern style ceiling..." that I was playing with is now turning into a separate morphing cavern. I've successfully tested morphs to make the columns thicker, the floor flatter, and to move the columns around a bit (but not too much). I've now started putting these morphs into each of the 16 columns - here's a test render with just the thickness morphs (Poser 9, a point light and a diffuse IBL, black atmospheric depth cue, and a black backdrop. Same stone material as in the OP):
Wow, that looks amazing :)
Caverns
Somewhere for your goblins to play chicken.
ShareCG: Caverns
Renderosity: awaiting approval I've removed all my freebies from Renderosity.
(note: I like the "warts'n'all" approach to promo images. You'll notice black lines running down the columns in this Poser 9 render - these are artefacts caused when you use ray-traced lights with displacement and/or rendertime smoothing. I've included notes in the readme on how to reduce them - they don't really bother me though... ;o) )
ShareCG seems to be having a problem with extra images today (they were fine yesterday), so I've attached those extra images here too.
With the extra morphs for the Dungeon, where do we put those obj files?
Ok, here's an Iray test of Caverns. Since it isn't UV mapped I made use of my free Iray shaders (Specifically, WTP Stone). Another option would be to use Iray Decals, which projection map and also ignore UV maps. The downside to either approach is that neither has displacement, so the surfaces look a bit too smooth.
(I plan on getting the Shades of Life shader for 3DL soonish, which should also work and DOES have displacement -- I will post when I do so)
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Caverns-slug-587259526
The instructions for loading morph targets in Poser are in the description on ShareCG download page, where it says "...Unzip them to any covenient location, e.g. your desktop..." - I guess it'll be the same for DAZ Studio ? (I've never needed to load morph targets in DAZ Studio, so I just tried using Morph Loader Advanced (see screenshot). Although it seemed to work (i.e. the morph appeared on the parameters tab) the morph didn't work as expected when applied.
Can anybody point out what I missed ? Got it - "Preset" should be set to "Poser (I unit = 8ft)" and not "Custom (1 unit = 1cm)" as it is on the screenshot
P.S.with release 2 of the dungeon room you don't need to use the MTs as they're already in the prop.
To me the lack of displacement really stands out - but then I've always been a displacement fiend ! However, unlike the dungeon room prop I'd say that using subd (as patiently explained by Szark on that Iray Not Doing Displacement Or Reflection? thread) is definitely an option for the caverns mesh.
The specular highlights in the bottom left of your image definitely give a better impression of bumpy walls than the more brightly lit areas, so I'd probably play with the lighting to get more specular and more shadow...
When all else fails, stuff that doesn't require UV mapping!
Heh.
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Slime-caverns-587365344