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Yes, the primary use in serial art would be "establishing" shots, but by the same token, you then zoom in on the characters, and unless you need the resources, you don't have to worry about consistancy in the background, either.
I, personally, almost never use 2D background images. In part because I have a certain stylization that I can't rely on the backgrounds using, and in part to get better coordination in lighting between the two images. I use the old (ancient, by 3D standards) MicroCosm that was more or less the precursor to TerraDome a fair amount, even in images where I'm closer in on the action, just to have hills or mountains behind my characters, and I'd imagine that once I get TerraDome 3 (unfortunately I have to wait for the catch up sale. Sniff.) I'll use it in much the same way.
heh, equal blame shares on that one. :)
I thought that I could post a render with TD3 and a dragon too :P. This one took me 35 minutes in a i5 laptop with 8GB RAM on CPU only.
The Badland Plants looks just the ones from Terradome2, which I already own. Since they're basically just flat planes with images attached to the diffuse, what's different between the TD2 version and TD3? Besides the ultrascatter presets? Will the TD2 plants work in TD3?
Pretty happy with this 3DL render, and I feel more confident saying that this is a product 3DL users would probably get a lot of use out of, assuming you have an interest in terrain (small or large scale) and have a good grasp of 3DL, and a reasonable list of shaders.
This render makes use of Atmosphere camera (for haze) and Grass shader. For the distant mesas, I used two copies and adjusted one so that it protruded from the other.
Some more questions after playing a bit:
1. When I try to move the A-Zone, it looks like it's moving the camera. But the B-zone moves independently. What's going on there?
2. Do we have atmosphere with TD3? Never mind I just found it....
3. If I decide to go for broke and turn on Depth of Field, what should I set the focal distance to so the b-zone is blurry?
4. Why is the water so deep? It makes it harder to position the camera. I scaled the Y axis so it's not quite as deep (since it's just a little lake, not the ocean) but it moved the top surface down and then I had reposition it. Kind of weird behavior but I guess all things considered, it worked.
5. Will there be a Aquarium pack?
6. Dang... there was something else....important....
Trick with the water (from doing similar stuff with cubes): flip it 180 degrees. The hotpoint is set, with cubes, to the bottom. If you rotate it and make the bottom the top, you can set the water level and scale to your heart's content.
Edit: Just checked, yes, this works. The 'grid level' is then at Y 26440.0
Damn, Will, your 3DL renders look better than a lot of IRay renders (generally speaking, not referring to those in this thread). Nice work! I'm thinking that "good grasp of 3DL" is a bit of an understatement, lol.
pds, the most important things I've done for good 3DL renders:
Bought AoA lights. (They run faster than anything else)
Use AoA distant or spotlight, AoA ambient (and set 'light radius' to 0 so it affects the entire scene).
Never ever ever ever use UE2 (it's slow as spit)
Avoid AoA Subsurface shaders if you can help it (also slow as spit)
And... that's about it. Most of my scenes use one AoA distant light at 100%, one AoA ambient light at 25 or 50%. Distant light shadow softness based on the kind of light -- for a bright savanna thing like above, leave it at 0. For a lot of other scenes you'll want 100%, and sometimes I even go 400% for a more diffuse look.
I also like to render at twice normal size and then reduce, to improve detail. I'm not entirely sure it's necessary, but hey.
Wow! This thread really exploded! lol I woke up to 250+ notifications and most of them are from this thread. Time to unsub. lol Still on the fence about whether to get TerraDome 3 though, so I'm sure I'll be checking back in fairly frequently. I'm enjoying seeing the renders - keep 'em coming! :D
timmins.william, thanks so much for the info and renders! Copying and pasting that info to my DAZ info file. And love, love, love the render.
But as a person who's still learning DAZ slowly but surely, I probably wouldn't buy this until it works with 3DL right out of the box. That said, this is a product that I *really, really* want. I don't think I can justify the time spent tweaking it and learning more shader stuff, when I'm trying to get a huge project - video game (demo minimum) - out the door within a couple of months. That said, if I manage to make good progress and the 3DL version isn't out, I might come back and re-visit it and learn more about 3DL/shaders. (Sadly, I probably own enough shaders to redo TD3, just not the time unless something changes.)
Well, what do you need it to do out of the box?
If you have an existing rock/grass/sand shader, you can add the terrain, tweak it, then slap the shader on. Done.
If you want to use the existing textures, make a copy of the terrain, change the first terrain to Daz Default shader. Set the diffuse color to one of the maps, set the bump to one of the bump maps, set tiling to 30x30 (or so, that seems to be what most of it is), or 'until it looks right.' Make sure the bump magnitude is about -1 to 1 (again, adjust to taste).
For dark rock, Glossiness 20%, Specular Strength 20%, specular color ... oh, Value 64 or so dark gray.
For sand, Glossiness 20%, Specular Strength 80%, specular color Value 180 or so light gray.
For grass, Glossiness 50%, Specular Strength 80%, specular color Value 180 or so light gray. (Just spitballing)
So, it's a LITTLE bit of work if you aren't using an existing rock/grass/ground shader, but... it's not a HUGE amount.
And no, I don't have a financial connection to the TerraDome3 folks... ;) I just hate to see people who might have fun with something being intimidated out of it. And remember, you have 30 days to return stuff here, so after a week or two it still seems obnoxious, well... return away.
I purchased TerraDome 3 and installed it; but I have a small problem which is probably related to my lack of knowledge about Iray. When I click on any of the sets (even the promo ones) I can't see the scene in my viewport. I know it is there and it shows up yellow with mouse over but otherwise the viewport is black. It seems to not have any light; but how do I turn it on and get a good preview image I can work with?
Thanks
timmins.william, that's awesome how you make what feels intimidating look so easy and logical. :) Another cut-and-paste to my info file. My problem, I guess, is just feeling overwhelmed at times. Every time I turn around I have to learn a new program or plugin it seems... However, you've inspired me to to take a better look at TD3 this evening. If it worked, it might save me a lot of time in the long run.
I have the Xtreme Worldbase sets and tons of other sets, but I really would like something larger, more flexible, and less intensive to render for many of the scenes. (I have a good machine, but as I'm doing non-photoealistic work, I prefer 3DL.) And sometimes all I need is just a base to set a existing environment into, such as the Viking Village, Space Station Living Quarters, Utopia Cityscape, etc. At times I need the environment for characters to walk through, sometimes I just want it as a background where using a billboard texture, imo, just doesn't look as nice or hold up to multiple perspectives from within the set.
Check your camera. If it's set to Default, then you're probably inside a hill or under water. Try loading one of the TD3 camera presets and see if that helps.
Something is going wrong here. I've got a GTX 590 and only 12GB RAM in the computer but I rendered the Phone Home scene OK. It took about three quarters of an hour but it was looking very good after about 15 minutes, I let it finish to see how long it would take.
I had my GTX 590 enabled in settings but I don't think Iray was using it, I've got a program that can monitor the graphics card and it was reporting 0% GPU load. I think the card hasn't got enough memory to load the entire scene so Iray couldn't use it. The CPU rendering was done on 5 cores of an i7 at 3.47 GHz (it's a 6 core CPU but I only let Studio use 5 so the computer doesn't get completly unresponsive during rendering). Have you tried switching off your graphics card in render settings and using just the CPU?
The problem occurs using the TD3 camera that loads with the set.
If you are in a camera, you can go to Window>Preview Lights and it should show your scene and no longer be black.
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This might because the demo scenes use HDRI lighting from the sky and this doesn't show up in the preview. One method you can try is change the preview mode to Hidden Line which doesn't use the scene lighing. Alternatively there is a preview light included with the set. If you load this it will let you see things in the preview, but switch it off before rendering.
Could someone Post a Render of the Archipelago Morph in http://www.daz3d.com/pro-morphs-vol1-for-terradome-3?
I don't think it is shown in the Promos
Thanks but tried that and it didn't help
My word, it works with the randomizer? This is getting so bought now :D
Go to the scene tab and hide the Atmosphere if it has one loaded.
I did, after I posted about the crashing. I was able to get a couple of test renders before it crashed again and again, but after 2 hours of trying different combos I could never get to a point where it didn't. I have a new 64 bit system with a Skylake i7 6700K, 16 gig 2800 DR4, a GTX 970 4 gig and win 10 pro, so my system is up for it. It loads fine in the viewpoint and there is no sluggishness when panning and on the test renders I was about to stop then rather fast unlike some other scenes with heavier mesh in them, so I am at a loss.
Thanks to everybody who made suggestions. I knew it was probably something simple and I think I have solved the problem. I needed to change the draw style from "texture shaded" to "Nvidia Preview" and now I can see the scene. That really does slow things down though and I thought I had a fairly reasonable computer setup -- I7, 32 GB RAM & GTX 970 video card.
I'm also using DS 4.8, but win 7 pro, no crashing at all. Super stable as far as I can tell. Loaded all the promo scenes, played around with it for 6 hours or so last night. Did some render as well.
Thanks Dvora, guess it's something on my end, will keep trying to figure out what it is, I have some time before I have to get a refund, even though I don't want to.
@FSMCDesigns
I had the same thing last night with a PC of similar specs to yours but only with the Beta 4.9 - On normal 4.9 the scene renders on GPU no crashing
This morning my GTX 1080 was installed which put me back to CPU rendering for now - 4.9 Beta version now works & renders the Terradome scenes so the problem must be related to GPU rendering
Have you ever had Reality installed? - I did in the Beta version & that has caused aa few odd crashes that have affected Beta Versions of DAZ only
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