TerraDome3 NOT a rumor anymore! Live in store! Whoot!!!
Knittingmommy
Posts: 8,191
Imagine my surprise when I was surfing the gallery and came across this little gem by @MortemVetus!
Andrew says in the description, "Rendered in DS Iray, with TerraDome3 (Iray Edition) and assorted add-ons. :) "
I'm very excited!!! This is epic. I am so looking forward to seeing this available for DS!
Post edited by Knittingmommy on
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Comments
Hehe...great! :)
Laurie
Well, Traveler did promise back in May that there would be a TerraDome for DS: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1219026/#Comment_1219026
Maybe it won't be too much longer.
Colm announced it as "available within the next few days" on his FB page today :)
Yeah, I remember that, but seeing an actual image tested in TerraDome3 just makes it seem that much more real!
Ah, I haven't been to Colm's FB page. Thanks, for the heads up! So, really soon! :)
It is indeed going to be a reality....and soon! We're not at liberty to say exactly when, but it will DEFINATELY be before Christmas *chuckle*
@MortemVetus I'm excited. I loved all of the images I saw for TerraDome 2 over on RDNA before the move and really wished there was a DS version! Before Christmas, hopefully, means I have some time to save up for it so I can get it on release day! Return to The Silent Planet is a great picture, btw!
Yes it lives! LOL
Colm, Mortem Vetus, and myself have been working on this for months now. It was a huge project wrought with technical challenges, but we did it!
TD3 for DS/IRay is all new! The lighting is powered by HDR skies. We have real water and atmosphere volumes. The mesh density is 4x the weight of TD2... The Bzone is now deeper for more background love! We have a hand built terrain shader that does the normal based blending magic, cameras, fantastic morphs, 10 preset scenes, a huge library of material presets out of the box.... and it weighs in at a whopping 1GB!
@ItsTraveler Oh, wow! Better and better! I love the images! Sweet!
Thanks!
We even included 4 of the scenes from the promo images in the package! All three of those are included (Minus all of the props, etc) But everything else was left as it was for the renders!
I like that! Props I can handle. Getting a backdrop like that, well, that will be amazing! Having the promo scenes still there will also be a big help.
So, for those of us who haven't encountered this before... what?
This is very exciting! :D
For those of us who are newbies, what is TerraDome and why is it so exciting? (Seriously, I want to be excited too! lol) :)
From what I remember of the descriptions for TerraDome2 for Poser, think huge landscape generator where you can do a scene with far off landscapes that look far off and with morphing landscape for close-ups, too. TerraDome2 had a lot of add-on for morphing landscapes and atmosphere and stuff too. I don't know how much of that they were able to get working for DS. I'll Traveler, MortemVetus and Colm Jackson answer specifics. I'm excited, though, because it all looked great only I didn't have Poser. I was very jealous that they had something like that and DS didn't. All of the pictures I've seen have been amazing. And, I loved their whole badlands series that was added on. I'm really hoping it is close, if not better, than the Poser version. I'm really looking forward to seeing this in the store.
Promo for Badlands in TerraDome2 for Poser by RuntimeDNA.
I'm really hoping that TerraDome3 is even better. So far, froms @ItsTraveler's description, it's going to be great! Epic type great!
Deleted! First time I've ever accidentally done a double post!
Oh my word. These promo images rival what can be done in Bryce...
Ok, for those new to the world of TerraDome - it is a massive landscape creation system. Instead of being locked into a pregenerated landscape/set, you can dial your own!.It uses morphing terrain planes, dynamic shaders (It shows one material set on the top facing surfaces, and another on the side facing surfaces) HDR lighing to mimic real world exterior lighing, has realistic atmosphere and water, etc.
No one has ever done what we have done with the Terrain Shader in Iray, I can proudly say from all of the hair I have torn out over it, LOL.
Is it better then TD2?
YES.... HECK YES! :P
Why?
-4x the mesh all of the original swagger!
-Deeper B zone
-You are no longer trapped inside of a dome.... the scene can truly be infinite (well...... within reason of your GPU)
-Instancing extends the depth incredibly
-Real HDR lighting
-PBR shaders!
-Iray!
Thank you for creating this, it really does look amazing.
I'm fascinated... Is this something which works within Daz Studio, itself? Or a seperate thing which exports your eventual creations into it?
You never have to leave Studio! (I havn't for months, LOL)
Getting a little wiffy ;)
Traveller, how large are TD3 scenes typically when loaded into VRAM for Iray? I'm wondering if I need to upgrade my current video card since it has 4GB...
Excellent!!!
I've been munging together simple elevation masking in Daz and would really like something... Bryce-y rather than what I've been doing. YAAY
Depends on how much you have in the scene besides TD3, but 4GB should do you just fine. On an average scene I think we were running 2-2.5 GB
MV has 4, I have 6, Colm has 12 (Titan having nerd), and none of us have hit a GPU limit.
Infact we just retuned the base terrain shader and it's much faster to render now.
I have used sub-D displacement up to 4 subs and that is 8 million pollys on one Terrainform (Just to be abusive to my machine)
Honestly, with Iray, the big problem is usually texture maps, not model complexity.
Yeah we found out in the course of this that Iray has a limit of 32 texture instances per shader (and blend nodes count as 2-3!) So we have streamlined the heck out of the Terrainshader. Because we use tiles for everything all of the textures in the pack are 2048x2048 - so not rediculious, but not lo-rez either. The sweet middleground, LOL
This Christmas? Oooh I want!
@ItsTraveler Okay, so the big question for me is, do I need GPU because I'm still, currently, an Iray CPU only girl here and will be for quite awhile. I don't see getting even a lower end nVidia card anytime soon. So, will I still be able to use this while rendering in CPU mode? and how much is it going to extend my Iray rendering time? Rough estimate! I know you probably can't give exact times.
I am in the same or similar situation. My graphics card is so old it is stupid.
CPU is fine too! I can run a test later on like the dino scene for you guys, but I honestly don't see a reason why it would take longer then any other render. I will say however that the Atmosphere and Refractive water..... will slow any render down (because..... volumetrics) But just the terrain shader renders quickly - There is no real need for things like SSS, top coat, translucency, etc all of the things that slow down renders - It's two sets of Diffuse, Spec, Spec Roughness, Bump or Normals, a Global Normal, and optional displacement. The mesh is well.... heavy, but DS is extremly good on resource management. Instancing helps alot, and we have huge sections in the userguide (Just added 4 pages to it today, LOL) about how to get the most out of TD3 without hogging all of your resources.
My own machine is not top of the line by any means - I do have a 980Gti, and a fairly good processor, but it is 3 years old. She hasn't complained to me yet for rendering TD, LOLs