[Released] Cave Builder [Commercial]
Lantios
Posts: 92
The Cave Builder is here to help you create any tunnel or cave you've dreamed of for your adventurers. Step into these caves and explore to find a variety of vegetation and maybe even some minerals to collect. If it's too dark, turn up the luminescence and allow the vegetation's glow to lead you through the darkness! As you venture deeper into the caves, you might even find some alien plants, whose blue glow could lead you to even greater mysteries yet to be uncovered. What these caves contain is only limited by your imagination; they could be filled with valuable loot or monsters, or likely both!
This pack will allow you to build your own tunnel system or cave you can envision with the 17 included rocks, ranging from small to large. Each rock also has 3 texture variations, allowing a range from bare rocks to almost fully engulfed in moss. To add some greenery, use the included moss rocks and ferns which come in multiple models and can be rotated and scaled to create many variations. Add some fungi while you're at it with the included shelf mushrooms or the honey fungus, armillaria mellea, to create a beautiful contrast to the ferns. Weirder still, tall, blue, stalk-like plants with an almost metallic luminescent orb surrounded by bladed leaves come in several clusters for you use if your caves aren't from our world, or lead to another world altogether!
The shelf mushrooms and honey fungus share UVs and textures and also come with a grayscale version of their BaseColor and Emissive maps so that you can use the color wheel to make them any color possible. They also come with three variations of textures so you can have even more variety when it comes to their emissive patterns and their spots. Included are also options to make the emissive surface two-sided (or not) which allows the emissive light to shine through the top of the mushrooms. Remember to also play with the translucency colors to create even more wonderful effects!
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Comments
A lovely idea and a great set, thank you!
So happy to hear that, I really enjoyed working on this set and am excited to see what people do with it! I already have some ideas for a second one in the same vein as this :D
That fifth image is one of the Cave scene subsets I guess?
Is that cave constructed from the different rocks, or is it also an object on its own? And if it's a seperate object, then how do the other two caves look?
I just hope this question makes some sense, lol.
Oh, and if there's going to be additional sets, then I'd like to suggest a large cavern with a morphable floor. I figure some people would love an underground river or something like that, while others might need something with dirt or mud, while yet others could be interested in a concrete floor for a hidden base.
Caves are awesome, and the components of this set seem to be useful for both the interior and the exterior of a customizable cave, which makes the product as a whole very valuable.
Yes! All the renders are made with subsets using the different rocks in the pack. None are one object or anything like that, you can load the subsets and modify them to give different looks, add holes for more lighting to pass through, or block off or add on passages by kitbashing the different subsets provided!
Large caves and water/muddy situations are where the future pack will lean towards! I have plans for new vegetation as well and doing something like a "cave to secret base entrance" like you described as well! I made sure the set could be used for a cliff face, not just a cave, and I intend on keeping this versatility in future packs in this theme since this one is doing so well.
I really appreciate the thought you have put into making this kit as diverse as it is. Cave + In Cart = YES!
Um, the set is really cool but seriously huge - 2.2 GB zip size. Unfortunately, this is not something that I will have installed very often, because I just don't have the space, and I will probably have to shrink texture sizes. @Lantios, maybe you could consider a more in-between way in terms of file sizes next time, for people like me with more modest rigs? That would be kind. Set is still very nice, regardless.
2.2 GB zipped? Ouch.
I wonder. Are 8K textures needed inside a dark cave? We'll have to see how this goes. It's better to have large textures to shrink down, though, than tiny blurry textures. The promos images look lovely.
Well, you might need the high detail when the dragon exhaled.
I typically end up doing closer and closer close ups (is there a medical condition name for that?) so appreciate the detailed textures. I agree that a small, medium, and large texture set might be a kind option though.
This is something I've heard several times, but I'm of the mindset of bigger textures you can downscale vs being stuck with small textures that aren't that usable for my needs or don't upscale well. This has been a recurring issue with some stuff I've bought which often leads me to work out my own textures for things, and why I tend to include large textures for most of my packs vs something more optimized, since I have no way of knowing what the end user will use my packs for and the versatility of larger textures wins, at least for me.
I don't know if DAZ can allow some files to be downloaded separately so people could choose the size of textures they want, but I will inquire about this. I will also take this feedback for the future sets and either work on optimizing textures further or decreasing file sizes in another way. I often expect people will shrink the textures to whatever use they need. For example, the mushrooms have large textures specifically so if you want to make a giant mushroom forest inside a cave, you'd actually be able to scale the mushrooms to human size and not lose texture quality even for a closeup. But you could probably reduce them to 1k/2k easily to save on space if you're only keeping them as small mushrooms in the background.
For me, I considered a 2GB pack small, but I am running on a higher end machine and I understand that's not everyone's case! I'll work on reducing size for the future in other ways to keep file size low.
Ah. I failed to take that into consideration.
I made a simple cave scene, starting with the double tunnel set and adding rocks, mushrooms, spiky plants, ferns, pyrite, etc. I was surprised by several things:
I added one of the orchid cactus (new release) plant to the scene. I used a 1K HDRI for lighting. Other than that, everything in the scene is from the cave builder. No dragons here, so the cave is very dark. Sorry, Richard.
This is very cool @Barbult. I bet you find a way to integrate it into Ultrascenery
It just so happens, I am adding a cave to a USC2 scene right now.
Richard looks on in horror as a dragonfly lands on the cave, and it collapses, sending mushrooms flying.
Some products simply include more than one texture set. A 2K set will be roughly 1/4 the size of the 4K, and a 1K set 1/4 of that again, so not a real hard hit on the storage. There is the time to make all those maps and presets, though.
bravo
Oh dear, me and my big mouth - err, paws. Still, a rockery is always a nice feature.
The image made me think of Stonehenge when it was done. That must be because of the the big open field with the big stones.