Do people still find these old room builders helpful?
Quasar
Posts: 638
With the PA sale going on, I've been thinking about picking up some old room builder sets. Do people still find these old room builders helpful? I imagine it's not too hard to convert them to Iray, but maybe there are limitations I'm not aware of. I know Iray glass shaders work differently on flat planes than they do on actual closed, 3D objects, for example.
These are some of the ones I mean:
Collective3d
https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-base-set
https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-xpack-2
https://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-create-a-room-xpack-3
maclean
https://www.daz3d.com/room-creator-version-2
https://www.daz3d.com/room-creator-exteriors
https://www.daz3d.com/room-creator-stairs-and-balconies
It looks like the ones by maclean could build actual complete houses if you wanted. Does that work? I don't own Dungeon Builder, but it looks like it could be useful for these room builders. Has anybody tried that?
I've already spent a lot (for me) on this great sale, so I'm hoping for some user feedback before I decide to get any more stuff.
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Comments
Well I'm going to snag maclean's!
A few years back I collected a whole lot of houses by Collective3D ... and while they rendered okay ... trying to work with them I discovered tons of stacked mesh [mesh inside mesh] which does not make for effecient use of computer powers for rendering. Trying to fix them was so labour intensive -- they are gathering dust.
I used Collective 3D to kitbash the interior of a coffee shop; I needed something that looked like a converted Victorian, and there wasn't anything in the store. I wouldn't say it was the easiest thing I've ever done, but it was also my first go at it, so that might've been learning curve. There might be better out there, but I was pleased with the result, and the price was right. I'll likely wind up doing it again for other rooms in the future if there isn't something in the store that matches what I'm after.
Create A Room, definitely. Can be used to build rooms or fill in to change the shape of a room -- I recently used it to build the interior of a house that was essentially an exteriors-only prop -- and XPack2 and XPack 3 are late enough that they have Iray shaders. Lantios' set may wind up being useful -- haven't done anything with Modern Home Essentials builder sets yet -- but it is very strongly styled for mid-century modern houses.
Room Creator Stairs set I've found useful because Create A Room doesn't have stairs, and, again, Lantios' set is fairly specific.The only downside for Room Creator is that it hasn't been updated in donkeys years, so it's both Poser-format and uses 3Delight materials and shaders instead of Iray. Neither of those issues are all that big a deal -- finding things in the Poser runtime isn't that hard, and Iray shaders can replace the outdated materials when needed.
I've also used Room Creator Exteriors to build some types of buildings, and they worked out OK.
I have the same question, I really like some old and exquisite things, especially this "creator type" thing, but most of these are too old, changing materials puts me off.
At the prices that they're currently on sale for, if you see yourself having to do any modification of sets for your work... and it's hard not to have to given how many vendors put in doors that don't open, forget to put in doors at all, put windows on three walls of a room that's supposed to be inside a house, and a zillion other annoying things.... you're going to benefit from having these kits as quick repair kits. As far as the textures go, you'll find that most of them actually look surprisingly good with just the basic automatic conversion to iray.
The last time I tried them, they didn't snap in Studio. Collective3D sets are built using imperial measurements with a grid size of 2'5" but Daz works in metric. Because 2'5" feet doesn't convert into a round centrinetre number (comes out at 76.2 cm), it's impossible to align the Collective3D sets using the snap system I was having a nightmare with seams and gaps which sent me looking for this information and I haven't touched the sets since then, which is a pity as they're otherwise quite nice.
You could probably scale the parts to a metric grid size in Blender, but I thought it seemed too much work. Once I got to that stage, it wasn't much more work to model my own set. As a product that's supposed to be a click together set, if that part doesn't work then it become kind of useless (imo).
I have all of the Collective 3D stuff, and also a bunch of older "Backdrops Made Easy" by Blondie9999 which was a smiliar concept. And to be honest I like working with the older Backdrops Made Easy sets more than the C3D sets. They are very easy to use, render very fast and do what I need to do 90% of the time. And they still look great in iray. If I need something special I use the C3D sets since they have more variety. But you can buy all 6 sets of BME very cheap. They are worth having even if you already own or plan to buy the C3D stuff.
I have already enough of those modern or American style architecture elements.
If anyone comes up with some really accurate mediterranian, french, gothic or neo-classicistic architecture elements, I'd be back on board.
I have a great fondness for C3D's stuff. Too bad they stopped creating stuff. Country Kitchen is still my favorite.
Most of my promos for my Vintage Home Decor shaders were done using Collective3d's houses...I tend to use the whole-house sets more than the room sets but they are all fantastic. In general, when evaluating an older architecture set, I look at the level of detail in the modeling. If it has trims around doors and windows and a reasonable amount of hardware (doorknobs, vents, etc) it should work just fine with new shaders, or by applying the Uber Iray base shader to the existing textures, if they are a decent resolution.
My shader set is deliberately garish, being based on 1950s wallpaper & flooring, but you can find a lot of good contemporary shader sets in the store that are more subtle. If you search for "house shaders" you'll find a heap of stuff. I'm in the plat club so I frequently use shaders from JGreenlees, ForbiddenWhispers, and DigitalDelirium when I'm rendering a house or furniture, but there are many other great choices.
Back at the turn of the Millennium, my grandparents passed away. When my mom and uncle inherited their property, they couldn't unload their ranch-style home fast enough (which was built in 1954), and barely gave any of the 4 grandchildren a chance at bidding for it. I had spent the most time with our grandparents while growing up, so I could vividly recall how the house was laid out. Since then, my sister, mom, and uncle all passed away, leaving my brother, our cousin, and I with only memories of that home--and except the little time that the others spent there, they mostly couldn't recall what it was like.
One thing I could never figure out about the place was where the attic entrance was. My grandfather often mentioned about doing some work up there on the AC system, and when I asked him, he would only vaguely say “it was in a closet”, but there was none in the ones I knew about, so he most likely was talking about one of the 2 closets in the main (SW) bedroom. It was especially disappointing, since just before my uncle died, I tried asking him about the house, but some long term resentment he had for his dad was so strong, he instead chose to take whatever he knew with him to the grave rather than share it with his daughter, my brother, or me.
Since I had DAZ and the products mentioned in the OP, I looked up the construction standards used back then (fortunately, little has changed for recommended standard practices over the decades up to today), as well as a few old photos of the house. I did have to manually create the cinderblocks for the basement walls, but I was able to make use of those products listed in the OP (with a few minimal adjustments) to recreate the (unfurnished) look of the rest of the house and got it fairly close to how it appeared. I think I was able to do a decent job of a virtually recreating the house and sent the model to them. I know my memory isn't perfect--it's been more than 20yrs since I was last there. Even so, the renders very closely match the photos of the place.
Above is the basement floorplan. Orientation: North is Left. Aside from the storage under the South Porch, and a few rooms for laundry, waterheater, and a shower/restroom, the basement is mostly one open large space. The brown horizontal line is actually the large center support beam in the ceiling with 5 pillers holding up the house, with dozens of trusses running from the center beam to the E/W walls.
Main level floorplan.
Render of the SE view (minus ground layer)
Render of the view from the driveway approach from the North (minus ground layer).
Render of the Kitchen, viewed from SW corner
Thanks for the feedback everyone. If the golden ticket sale gets fixed today, I'll probably get the sets for that low price. My only question now is if they work well with dungeon builder. That seems like it would be an easy way to build rooms. If anyone is able to test it, that would be really appreciated.
@Canary3d I have those shaders, so I'll be sure to try them out with these sets. Thanks for the reminder.
@Ryuu@AMcCF It's cool you were able to recreate that house in 3D at least. That's nice work. Sorry you weren't able to keep the real one in the family, though.
Thank you.
Yeah, it was a VERY nice house with a lot of fun and weird features to it: that dogleg passageway from the Kitchen to the join of the two main hallways, a laundry chute in that passageway, a milkbox that was commonly built into the homes of that era, rugs that could generated enough static that when you walked over them in the winter the sparks were nearly an inch long (can't exactly duplicate that bit in 3D though
). Plus, my grandfather was 6'4" (it was his own cousin who custom built the place for him) so the ceilings were 8' high & the doors were all made at 7' so he wouldn't bash his head in!
Regarding the room creator stuff, I was even able to recreate the arched connection that existed between the Kitchen to Dining/Living Room--I used Blender to make that from a wall prop. Aside from that bit of manual deformation and creating the cinderblocks, the products were quite often invaluable and very helpful for doing that project.
Oh, I looked again at your OP--to address one of your concerns, as I recall, the room creator stuff is all the older 3DLight surfaces. I did my renders all in IRAY, and I have the habbit of making very liberal use of RSSY's Converters for going back & forth between IRAY and 3DLigtht textures. You'll probably want to invest in those products, too, when you can.
Now you have me inspired to remake MY grandparents' house! It was a similar vintage, and for what it's worth, their attic access was a panel in the ceiling in the master bedroom closet, IIRC. You had to get a ladder and shove the panel out of the way before you could get in, and it was made to blend in, so unless you knew it was there and to look for it, you probably wouldn't notice it.
I've been trying to get around to doing a model of my house too, fully textured etc, starting with the outside and then adding rooms.
So far, have only done the SolidWorks model of the outside. Did enable me to find that the porch is offset from the centreline of the house by 4", which came as a surprise. Can't really take photos of the bricks for texturing the house, as not many are visible through the vegetation. My 'Rigged Wall and Door Prop' was done to the size of the dining room, and is a little bit of a start on the interior. There have been nearly 2000 downloads of that prop at rendo since Jan 2021, so I suspect room props are useful.
Regards,
Richard
HA! I'm glad I could inspire others to do more like this!
When you say similiar vintage, does that mean similar floorplan? If so, then that would be so cool! It meant my Grandfather's cousin likely used a set of preexisting blueprints, just tweaking it to accomodate for his height--then that would accound for WHY there was yet another weird feature in that house: the stairwell going to the basement, which has its upper landing exiting out to the Kitchen, has a REALLY HIGH ceiling that clearly extends into the attic space all the way up to the roof, yet has a flat ceiling insde! Lighting for the stairwell was from a single bulb way up there that could only be changed by using broomhandle with a rubber cup--it was way too dangerous to ever try setting a ladder up to try reaching it!
As a result of recreating the house, I reasoned there HAD to be something like an enclosed second sub-attic just above that ceiling. From Google maps, I could see 5 vents on the roof, where 2 of the vents toward the south side are in close proximity to each other, and one of those lines up perfectly above the stairwell.
As for the attic access, I have my suspicions it was in the walkin closet nearest the long hallway (which was used by my Grandmother). My Grandfather used the other (L-shaped) walkin closet.
The floorplan isn't exact, but it's quite close. Their house was built in 1954 as part of a new development that was going in on some farm land. I'm not sure how much input they got into it, but maybe a decent amount. Mom talks about how they were living in a hotel while it was being finished, and Grandpa had a tidy income from his job as a chemist (they'd had to move because he was fired from his previous job due to a lack of whistleblower protection laws back then; his employer wanted him to say that unsafe milk had passed inspection and he both refused to do it and alerted the authorities... thankfully the new place thought integrity was a desirable trait). They were the only ones who lived there until 2010 when they passed within 3 months of each other.
I don't use the C3D kits to build an ENTIRE house, but they're useful for kitbashing; I often need to combine domestic sets in odd ways to make one contiguous "walkthrough" (that is, the doorway between Kit A Living Room and Kit B Bedroom must actually join and work properly), and I depend on C3D's kits to patch in bits of walls where rooms don't quite meet, or you need to build a short hall, and so forth.
They do always have to be resurfaced, but big deal. That's a two-minute job.
(Alas, I can't use C3Ds kit with GESCON to make holes for doorways and windows because IIRC the C3D wall segments are zero-thickness planes, like most set walls and plane primitives, and GESCON won't work on those--I think it tries to divide by zero somewhere in there and silently nopes out. Fortunately, I have FSL Architectural Elements, whose walls have thickness ...) (EDIT TO ADD BEFORE SOMEONE, POSSIBLY BEMAR, MENTIONS IT: I also have Thickener, but I only learned about it recently and haven't tried it much yet.)
I regret passing on the blueprints and plans of my parents house to the new buyer, over 20 yeats ago had no idea I would be doing 3D, I lived there almost 40 years before and after selling my first house and buying my brothers half of it after my Mum's passing. I have the plans for the house I owned inbetween and my current one.
But my childhood home is the one I want to model, it no longer exists.
Blueprints for all buildings 'might' be available from the city or town building permit dept, or archives or some dept. Would likely cost a little to acquire a copy but they had to filed in order to be built.
Yeah, those C3D kits have a LOT of extraneous stuff to the wall segments (evidently to make it as versitle as possible to mimic so many housing variations). For much of that, it was a little painful setting all that I didn't want to be transparent, then I STILL had to hunt down all the glossy-ghosty shit for those surfaces. But once you'd done your first wall segment the way you want, Duplicating it to your heart's content means you don't have to repeat THAT process.
The few times I needed to change the geometries, I found it was just easier to export to Blender, strip off the stuff I didn't need, make the changes to the geometry, create new UVs for them, reimport to DAZ, then reapply the texture maps. I've done enough of those sorts of things with many, many products doing other projects, I've got the muscle memory down pat--it's almost as easy for me doing some of that as using GESCON (really, this IS a great tool for creating fantastic effects!) for other stuff.
I've used the 3DC components. It's trickier than it ought to be unless you are being fairly generic. But the results are reasonably satisfying. I did finf it simplest to just go at the segements with the geometry editor and create seperate chunks of moulding or paneling to apply later if the wall sections didn't slot in as I wanted them to. Have also used random generated primitives at need.
I was fairly pleased with this kitbash kitchen. The Ironing board was from a old Poser set of historic kitchen items from Ockham's 1910 Kitchen set and the cabinets were from one of the PICK collections. I did some modification to make them more in line with the 1930s. Out of the box they're more modern than that.
When I was a kid, my grandparents lived in an odd, three story house that was built in 1917. It seemed like they only used the main floor mostly. The kitchen had two separate staircases. One went up to a second floor, but they had it blocked off by a curtain. I think there was a bathroom and a bedroom or two up there because I have a faint memory of sneaking up there once. The other one was a spiral staircase that lead to the basement. I don't remember ever seeing the basement, though. The house was always a bit of a mystery to me, and since I become a quadriplegic at an early age, I never got the chance to explore the house more when I got older. I still wonder about the house sometimes and who lives there now. It's interesting how certain things leave a lasting imprint on our memories like that.
Anyway, I got the sets I linked to above. The prices were great, and they seem useful in certain situations. I'll have some fun and/or aggravation tinkering with them at least
.
@richardandtracy That looks like a nice home. It would be cool to see it once you get all the parts done.
@JOdel Those are nice renders. It really has the look of an old kitchen. I feel like it needs to be remodeled to bring in a more contemporary style.
Kitchen stairs up to a room or two and facilities sounds like those would have been servant quarters. We have a few such houses here in Ontario too.
Yeah, I had a similar experiemce with having to remove a bunch of geometry-bits that were hidden away in some of those outside-walls build kits. The various hidden pieces integrated into the wall piece had simply been made invisible by dialing the opacity down to 0, or something of the sort, but when rendered in Iray they produced voids and stuff in the walls wherever the geometries of the hidden parts matched exactly up with the position and location of non-hidden parts of the geometry. I had constructed an ENTIRE house exterior largely out of those modules, and had to go into Geometry Editor to actually find them and click the eyeball-symbol to hide those surfaces completely from the render engine. And then they'd all UNhide again when I loaded the subsequently-saved scene back in to do more render tests.
Eventually I found out I could invoke another command from inside Daz Studio to actually DELETE all the surfaces I'd turned off the Eyeball symbol for in geometry editor, when performed on each of those wall modules. I forget exactly which right-click menu that was in (something in viewport view, I think), but after I did that systematically to all the parts of the house, I saved the entire house scene back out again, and when I loaded the scene back in the next time, all those removed bits stayed gone.
But yeah, I've used those old build kits extensively, more often the inside-walls ones than the outside-walls ones. They're a God-send.
I use elements from Collective3d`s Create a Room packs pretty much every day.
It`s a must have for me as I can design interiors just the way I need them vs premade houses and apartments which I have lots of but don`t use much.