Urban Sprawl 3 In Carrara?
Steve K
Posts: 3,234
After problems with DUF files in Carrara 8.5, I've been avoiding formats other than Poser and Carrara. I have the Urban Sprawl 1 & 2 from Stonemason, very nice products in Poser format. but V.3 comes as "1 DSON Core Installer". I don't recall having used that format, will it work in Carrara? If adjustments are necessary, are they substantial?
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I loaded it up last night to see how it went.
I didnt render it but it loaded no problem.
I am expecting lots of U's to untick in UV wrap if I get it, FBX export often goes better or D3D DSON loader import into to Poser and save a pz3 for Carrara.
So far I held of buying as I want Octane 3 and short of cash.
It loads and renders well in Carrara. I brought all 5 blocks in and it didn't lag. I did find some textures that are wrong, stretched or inverted. I haven't tried to fix them yet. The obj' s should be better. Still a great purchase! Here's a render with a lightdome. I used the 3Delight version and ran Fenric's Shader Doctor before rendering. Otherwise no changes.
Thanks for all the comments. BrianP's render looks very good. I'll have to decide if its enough of a step up from V.2, which I like a lot.
It looks like a superb set, like all of Stonemason; but, at $60, I have to decide if I can incorporate in one of my movies before I lay out some cash. I have to control my appetites.
Here is a quick test render in Carrara After using Fenrics Shader Doctor to tweak the shaders.
Took 15 Mins to render.
Looks good, except the street doesn't look like the product page demo renders. They show light gray concrete with white lane marks, etc. Or were you trying for a black asphalt look?
Also, just to mention it to Argus, its on sale for $42 currently. Still not cheap, but probably worth it if you need it for a project.
I know so i will look at the shaders again for the road.
I just noticed that BrianP's render above has the same black streets. Is that a problem with DSON Importer and Carrara?
Or the Shaders not matching up with Carrara shaders
try opening in vertex room, select all under UV tab untick the U wrap, This is a common duf issue and was pointed out to me on Streets of Asia
I've been avoiding DUF files and DSON Core Installers, so I'm not sure of the difference. Does the "DSON Core Installer" install a DUF file, rather than a conventional Poser Runtime?
Yes "DSON Core Installer" installs DUF files. This is the DS native installer. You can access them directly from Carrara via the Content and Smart Content tabs in the browser tray (or you can go to the Open menu and navigate to the Daz content library and open the files that way.) There are still a few features of DS that Carrara doesn't support. Mostly Carrara's loader just ignores them.
"DSON Importer for Poser" is a Poser script that allows Poser 9+ to read the DUF files, and consequently it's of no use to Carrara.
"Poser Core Installer" installs Poser CR2 etc. files. You can access them directly in Carrara via the Content tab in the browser tray, or through the Open menu and browsing to the appropriate runtime folder.
Sad,
That helped clean up a lot of the sader issues I was having. Thanks very much.
I haven't figured out how to fix the streets yet. I'm still having fun with it though.
I still have an issue with the streets and was looking in Studio and he is using layers.
When I look at the one shader for the street is has nothing in it. I was going to try to replicate the shader structure If i can.
Here is a post from the commons thread.
I had the same problem trying to open the DAZ file in Carrara. I looked deeper into the road surface in DAZ Studio and it looks like Stonemason is doing some next level stuff (as usual). I couldn't figure out how he layered everything. So I took a break and did a quick animation with the results I could achieve.
This animation is the five blocks exported from DAZ Studio as OBJ files and Texture Maps. Then I imported them into After Effects using the Element 3D v2 plugin. In Element 3D I made a 5X5 grid of the five blocks. Then I animated an After Effects camera moving. Finally, rendered everything with Fog, Motion Blur and Depth of Field settings turned on. This experiment rendered in 20 minutes at 1920x1080 @ 30fps.
QUOTE
Post edited by Joepingleton on 7:07PM
Many thanks. I had not paid attention to the two types of DSON installers, so I learned something. So far, I've been sticking with Poser Core Installer products, which means I don't buy much here at DAZ anymore. But happily, there is no shortage of new Poser format products at other sites. And since I'm still living in a Gen4 era, the ~2,000 DAZ products I own pretty much fill my needs for short animations (along with roughly as many products from other sites).
One more clarification, please. Most of the newer products just say "DAZ Studio X.x", then show that DUF files are provided. Is that different from "DSON Core Installer"?
Thanks again for the explanations.
Do you have an example? I don't recall seeing any products that didn't say DSON Core Installer (assuming they were for DS...)
Here is an exceret from the Commons thread by Joe Pingleton.
I was able to find a very easy workaround for not being able to export the road texture with the OBJ files. The trick was to simply render each block's street from a top view at 5000x5000 and then apply that render to a plane's material. Then I just needed to give it a little bump map. That's the nice thing about the way Stonemason set up these blocks, they are flat and made to tile, so it makes things so much easier. I could also put in a car model and animate it by a simple expression on the z positon. I originally rendered it at 15 sec of animation, but decided that half that time was better. Both versions are included in the sample below.
Here is the quick test animation of the conversion results. It's a 5x5 grid of the 5 blocks animated in After effects via the Element 3D v2 Plug-in. This 15 sec of animation rendered in 7 minutes at 1920x1080 @ 30fps with Fog, Motion Blur and Depth of Field settings turned on. .
Now that everything is working, it's time to animate a chase scene. :)
I see now that I just didn't look down far enough. Here is an example, showing Daz Studio 4.9 in "Compatible Software" at the upper right, and a long list of DUF files under "What's Included". That's when I stop reading, so I miss the "Notes", which show the DSON Core Installer. Thanks for the response.
http://www.daz3d.com/millionaire-private-office
Yes, my brain often condenses it to the TL;DR version: "Contains lots of stuff."
I finally got back to trying Urban Sprawl 3 in Carrara and after incorporating most of what has been posted here I think I've got it all working. Here's a bunch of pictures and screen shots showing what I did.
First I loaded the 3Delight version of Block 1. That's the first render. I used Frnric's Shader Doctor to clean up the shaders. It does a good job, but additional tweaking is necessary. That's the second render. You'll notice that some of the textures don't look right. That's because the uv's need to be fixed. Double click a building (or click on the wrench) to go into the modeling room. Select the whole building. I use command-A on a Mac. Select the UV editing mode by clicking on the icon in the top right hand corner. Untick Wrap U values. There's a screen shot showing this and the fourth rende is the result. The road still doesn't look right. A couple of things are needed to fix that. Edit the Roadtile textile. The screen shot shows what it looks like in the texture editor. The problem is that the U3Road3 image needs to be tiled. I used a 100x100. I haven't tried a close up render. You may have to play with the tiling to get it to look correct. It looked better, but the road was a little too light for me so I added multiply to the texture image and added a dark grey. The grey can be changed to get the road the right color. That's the fourth render. Now to get the white lines and the cross walks onto the road go to the RoadTile shader again. Go the Top Shader, use the drop down menu (showing Multi Channel) and change that to Complex Shader-> Multi Channel Mixer. The road texture should be in Source 1. I used a whate plastic for Source 2. Just drag it from the Shaders window at the bottom onto Source 2. Now for the Blender at the bottom choose Texture Map. Select u3RoadMask1A3dl for the teture. This worked for Block 1. You might need to try another one for other blocks. I haven't tried yet. I've included a screen shot of the entire shader tree. and the fifth render shows the lines in the correct places. For the Sixth render I added a second light, turned soft shadows on for the first light and also used ambient occlusion. It looks pretty good. I tried the same process starting with the Iray Block 1 and I think that looks a little better than the 3Delight one. Normally I use 3Delight versions in Carrara, but after doing this I'm going to have to do more experimenting. I'm also going to go back and adjust some shaders. Adding reflections to the windows make things look a bit more realistic. Hope this helps.
I just added a close up higher resolution render. Still looks good.
thanks for that explanation
yeah a lot of work, until the Aussie dollar improves too much work to tempt me I am afraid.
Thanks now I can Attempt to fix mine.
ditto that...
a lot of products are just to expensive to buy at the present currency rate.
As someone who spent a fair bit of time converting models from one format to another, I can tell you from personal experiance that no model converts perfectly and you should never expect it to. Surface shaders and UV maps are handled differently from one application to another. The surface shaders for US3 are made for use in Daz Studio using either 3Delight or Iray. All the textures and UVs for the product work as they should in Daz Studio. Since Carrara does not support 3Delight or Iray at this time, no one should expect the settings for either to translate properly.
It is expected that we have to manipulate the textures It is just figuring out how we need to do it to still make the excelent scenes or items look the way they should or as close to it as we can in Carrara