[Released] Cave Builder [Commercial]

Lantios

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!

tsroemi

A lovely idea and a great set, thank you!

Lantios

tsroemi said:

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

Drip

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.

Lantios

Drip said:

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.

Gogger

I really appreciate the thought you have put into making this kit as diverse as it is.  Cave + In Cart = YES!

tsroemi

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.

barbult

2.2 GB zipped? Ouch.

Textures Include:

• 52 BaseColor, Metallic, Roughness, Normal, Height, Opacity, Translucency, Emissive Maps (8192 x 8192)

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.

Richard Haseltine

Well, you might need the high detail when the dragon exhaled.

Gogger

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.

Lantios

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.

barbult

Richard Haseltine said:

Well, you might need the high detail when the dragon exhaled.

Ah. I failed to take that into consideration.

barbult

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:

1. Some sets are groups and some are objects parented to another object. The difference in set organization caught me off guard when clicking the parent to hide the set. That works great for groups, but not with objects parented to another object. (Yes, I know about the Ctrl-Click eye icon.) Maybe there is a reason for organizing the sets differently, but I couldn't see why they were different. Anyway, it is a trivial issue.
2. No instances are used in the product. Every rock, mushroom, plant, etc. in the sets is a geometry item. After completing my scene, I used Instancify to reduce the polygon count by 81.86%, from over 1.5 million to about 283K (removing almost 1.3 million polygons while retaining all unique textures on similar objects.) How much will that reduce GPU load? I don't know.
3. The instancified cave scene rendered in 2 minutes and 2 seconds on my RTX 3080 GPU. It used a little over 8 or my 10 GB GPU memory. I did not reduce the 8K textures, but I did leave the texture compression settings on default 512 and 1024, so I'm not sure what was left of that 8K detail after compression. They look very good to me, though.

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.

daveso

This is very cool @Barbult. I bet you find a way to integrate it into Ultrascenery 

barbult

daveso said:

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.

barbult

Richard looks on in horror as a dragonfly lands on the cave, and it collapses, sending mushrooms flying.

NorthOf45

Lantios said:

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.

 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.

daveso

barbult said:

Richard looks on in horror as a dragonfly lands on the cave, and it collapses, sending mushrooms flying.

bravo  

Richard Haseltine

barbult said:

Richard looks on in horror as a dragonfly lands on the cave, and it collapses, sending mushrooms flying.

Oh dear, me and my big mouth - err, paws. Still, a rockery is always a nice feature.

barbult

Richard Haseltine said:

barbult said:

Richard looks on in horror as a dragonfly lands on the cave, and it collapses, sending mushrooms flying.

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.

barbult

I am having a problem rendering the rocks at anything near a closeup.

• I am using the MAT Rocks Var2 material preset.
• I am using CB Rock Med C.
• The normal map is causing terrible parallel stripes and crosshatch artifacts in the render. I tried lowering the normal map strength, but the artifacts remained at a lower intensity. Removing the normal map eliminates the artifacts, but leaves the surface flat and dull, because all the details are all in the normal map, not the mesh.
• My render isn't even extremely closeup - much less close than some of the promo images. I added G9 as a scale reference, standing directly behind the rock almost touching it. Looking back at the promo images, I see they make heavy use of DOF and low light. My scene does not.
• I tried to eliminate sources of render artifacts. I set both texture compression thresholds to 8200. I left filtering at the default Gaussian 1.5 to avoid over sharpening. I disabled of Post Denoiser and let the render complete with 98% convergence and render quality 2. I expected good results from the 8K texture maps, but I got very unsatisfactory results.
• I tried both Sun-Sky lighting and HDRI lighting. They looked a little different, based on light angle differences, but both looked equally scarred by the normal map artifacts.
• My camera uses the default 65 mm focal length.
• My render is only 2000 pixels by 1500 pixels. The rock takes up only part of that view. Even though the 8K texture wraps around the rock, shouldn't an 8K texture be adequate to provide good results without artifacts?
• Can this be fixed? What is the point of 8K textures if they look this bad? Am I doing something inherently wrong? Has anyone else produced good results with var2 material preset at this range?

Here I have outlined the worst artifacts with red. Even at this much reduced forum scaling of the image, you can see the lines and crosshatch, but clicking the image to view at full size will show them even clearer.

Here's a 1:1 detail of one of the worst artifact areas.

Other renders are attached for HDRI lighting and no normal map render.

Lantios

I'll take a look at this soon and see how it looks on my end. These artifacts didn't come up in my renders making the product, though I did not do really close up shots like the one's you're showing as I intended these as mid/background assets with the vegetation serving as focal points more than the rocks. I can push a fix for the normal map artifacts so that they don't show up once they're updated

barbult

Lantios said:

I'll take a look at this soon and see how it looks on my end. These artifacts didn't come up in my renders making the product, though I did not do really close up shots like the one's you're showing as I intended these as mid/background assets with the vegetation serving as focal points more than the rocks. I can push a fix for the normal map artifacts so that they don't show up once they're updated

Thank you.

Why are 8K rock textures provided? Isn't that wasteful overkill for mid/background assets? Won't that just make it harder for users to fit their scenes into GPU and provide no value at mid/background range?

barbult

I have another question. The rock textures look like they were made for one particular rock structure (UV) and don't really fit on the other rock structures in the package. The textures maps are not uniform like a shader preset texture would be. The texture maps all have sections throughout that look like "striped border area" that are not part of the real rock surface. The rocks do not all have the same UV. How can they all use the same texture maps with what appear to be UV specific areas?

See below, please.

barbult

Oh, looking closer at those texture maps and UVs, it looks like each rock uses a different small part of the whole 8K texture map. So it appears to be more of a Texture Atlas kind of thing for all rocks crammed into a single 8K texture space. So no individual rock really has 8K detail. Is that what is going on?
That doesn't explain the artifacts in the UV, though, so I appreciate you looking into that.

barbult

This is the UV template for CB Rock Med C that I used in my render. This explains why my render result did not appear to have 8K resolution. The rock uses only a very small part of the whole 8K space. The rock I chose gets only about 1/64 of the whole texture space (about 1K resolution). I am getting a better understanding of the construction of the product now, and I'm adjusting my expectations. I now understand the statement about mid/background assets.

yuyu.atem

Hi! Could you give a demontration video, Please I I have difficulties to figure out how it works... Is it the same principle as the UltraSenary 2?

Thank you in advance!

barbult

yuyu.atem said:

Hi! Could you give a demontration video, Please I I have difficulties to figure out how it works... Is it the same principle as the UltraSenary 2?

Thank you in advance!

It is nothing like UltraScenery2. There is no "builder" script or plugin included. It is a bunch of rock and plant props along with some material presets for them. There are a few preset rock arrangements that form open ended tunnels, and you can modify them. If you want to build a unique cave, you have to position each individual rock prop yourself.  You could also combine the preset tunnels together, I guess, to build a longer tunnel. To be a "cave", I guess you could close off the back end with rocks, so it isn't just a tunnel.

yuyu.atem

Ah, ok, tank you very much! By the way (maybe it is not a good topic for asking that... ), do you know if it is possible to create cave with UltraScenary? I am searching for a way to create a big cave with tunnels leading to the cave, and a bing water pool inside the cave.. I started it with Blender, but perhaps there would be a simple way to do that.

Artini

It is an interesting topic also for me.

UltraScenery can use a height maps, which are just a top view of the terrain.

You would need some digger program add on to make holes and tunnels inside

the terrain created by UltraScenery and its second version.

yuyu.atem

Thank you very much! Do you know such a digger program add on to do that? Or may be should I continue with Blender? (I don't know if the landscape created with UltraScenary can be exported to other program like Blender...)