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If we are going for honestly here, I admit that I am a collecter, and honestly, I'm not really ashamed of that. There are so many other things out there that I could be hooked on and this one, is by far a lesser evil. And at some point I really would like to start making money at this, even if its just hobby money. I've wanted to make book covers since I was a teenager (and we are not discussing how long ago that was lol) and now I feel like I might actually have the tools to do it. Now I'm just working on my skill level lol. I will say that I do something in daz studio every single day (even when we go camping in the summer, which drives my husband crazy lol) so I do use a lot of my stuff, I just happen to have so much of it that the percentages of use are still very low. But I'm working on it. I am rendering all of my characters one by one so I know what each one looks like rendered, and I try and use a different hair and clothing item on each. So that will take care of rendering my character library, clothing and hair, although it will probably take me a rather extended time to finish. I plan on doing the same with my other content. Simply going down the list of my environments and scenes and doing at least one render with them, in order til I know what they all look like rendered. Most of these don't see the light of day though.
The same could be said for many here, I think - though few would admit it. lol :) I've only been buying 3D content for a year but with what I have bought and what freebies I've accumulated, I think I could create a new render every day for a year or more and still not run out of stuff to render. lol
Well, here's hoping I live to the ripe old age of 800 then since I've been buying Poser/Daz stuff for the better part of 20 years. LMAO
Laurie
You and me both!
I used to look at my old Gen 4 runtimes with a bit of a sigh as well, but these days I've worked out a system that keeps all those V4/M4 in constant use - I use original Genesis figures for a large percentage of my background characters, so I try to use the older products on them since they immediately Autofit, and updating all the textures to Iray to the level needed for a non-main character is as easy as a couple of button pushes. NGS Anagenesis 2 and/or Sickleyield's Beautiful Skins make skins look fantastic, UHT 2 or OOT's hair shaders do the same for the hair and for the clothes my quick fix is a shader pack from Vyktohria from Rendo called Convert it! that keeps the original textures, but applies various cloth, metal, and plastic looks to the existing textures (though I could do the same thing with some of the other clothing shaders in my arsenal.) And then, once I've made the conversion once, I save the whole thing, including the figure, as a Preset. That way I can pull it up whenever I need it, convert the character to male, female, etc, just by swaping shapes and skins, and tweak whatever else I want in the future, so it's like having a little stock company to pull from. The only old items that aren't getting used are the dang shoes, and it also helps keep the foreground characters from wearing items that are too similar to thase worn by the incidental players. .
I definitely have done way more renders than I will ever share with the world. I also have tons of "in progress" scenes I work on when inspiration strikes or when I figure out how to do the thing that was keeping me from finishing them in the first place. I am also guilty of purchasing content I may not use for a while just because it looks really awesome or is part of a bundle or is even just part of a really great sale and I think I might find a use for it eventually. None of this bothers me one bit.
this is my hobby. It helps me express my creativity. It also helps me manage the stress that comes with a stressful career and a very full life. It has also been beneficial to my physical health by keeping my mind and hands busy so that I have successfully quit smoking which has in turn also lowered my blood pressure.
So, to DAZ3D and to all the artists who create wonderful content, I say to you, "Bring it on".
Oooh, that's an idea I hadn't thought of for background characters. A lot of the renders I have in mind to do really need a large background group, but my system tops out around 11 genesis 3 characters (and starts getting hard to work with on far fewer than that, but 11 is the point that it flat dies). Do the older characters have less impact on system resources? I would love to find something specifically designed for making crowds, but I haven't been able to find anything yet.
lol!
If I counted loading and test rendering in the equation, I would definitely have used well over 90% of everything I've got, probably over 95% if I didn't count freebies.
V3 characters have less impact on memory (someone did a test of putting V3 skins on G3F characters to prove it). Also, there are products designed to add dozens of background characters:
Awesome thanks! I'll take a look at both of those
I thought that was what the Art Studio/RRRR Contest threads were for? i.e. use stuff in renders that you haven't otherwise used.
I bet your collection is AWESOME!
And I'll admit I've only rendered a fraction of what I own. I feel like I'm building the "Great Library of Alexandria" in 3D content.
Yes, I collect, Yes, I hoard. All at rock bottom prices. I love every minute of it. Totally addicted and enjoy finding ways to afford it. I don't have a lot of other hobbies. I am a writer and can "justify" a lot of what I spend because I do use some of it to render book covers and promo art. Since I do multiple genres, I end up picking up a little of everything. That justifies a ton of it, but not the sci fi. I don't write that (YET!) but have plenty of ideas and more than enough 3D stuff to render whatever tickles my fancy.
Yeah, they're my 3D Barbies and Kens. Yeah, I love them. Yeah, I don't get around to using as many as I have. I won't pay $400 for a purse, or even $100, but I'll pay that for a video card! I'd rather buy V3 some purses, LOL. To hell with the real ones!
I probably need help.
I'm loving V3 lately. There are some great skins out there for her, and she herself renders very fast and suprisingly well in Iray. See my art thread and my gallery for examples.
And don't forget- she has some AWESOME clothes! Some have never been made again for any other generation.
Lorenzo and Loretta are really nice and in between those and MOM there's also a product by Greenpots at Rendo called Bleacher People. They're pretty crude, but they're only 1100 vertices, and unlike MOM they're poseable, interact with your lighting and their clothing/gender/skin color/haircolors and styles can all be swapped out... plus they'll preload in batchs of up to 45 at once.
V3 and SP3 got lost in all the V4 vs. Gensis kerfluffle, but there are some amazing characters for those figures, likeBlackhearted's Girl Next Door and Irina, and until recently there were a lot of typed of outfits that you had to go back to M3 to find. If you have Poser, Posette and the Dork from Poser 4 and the Don and Judy series of figures from Poser 5 and up are quite low as well and work fine in DS, and then there are Reduced Resolution versions of MIke 2, V2 and Stephanie...
Lorenzo and Loretta are 5K polys each, so fairly light weight, but G3F at base resolution is only 3-4 times more polys, she bends far better, is more morphable, and has a vast wardrobe to put on her, none of which is true with Lorenzo and Loretta. As far as saving VRAM is concerned, texture sizes are more important than numbers of polys, which is why the trick of putting low res skins on the newer figures like G3F works quite well when she is a background figure.
I have seen both Bleachers People and the MOM generator, but for me the quality is pretty low. Unless you use them as far background figures (ie height no more than 5-10% of the height of the render) they look fairly bad.
Keep in mind however Lorenzo/Loretta are loaded CLOTHED. With G3M/G3F you still have the added geometry of clothing and hair that has to be taken into account raising her poly count much higher.
I also cannot vouch for Bleacher People either. Even for myself that does primarily toon renders, the quality is so low, its very hard to consider using them as other than in a bleacher setting, they dont look usable at all. MOM isnt all that great either, but I use that over Bleacher People. But for myself, i stick with Lorenzo/Loretta as background characters and my typical toon figures for foreground.
-MJ
People see what they expect to see. To this day, one of the standard tricks for bulking out crowd scenes in Hollywood has been to use cardboard cutouts mixed in with live extras, which is pretty much exactly what MOM is, and prior to the digital age big crowds were often simulated in miniature with nothing more than bits of colored cork floating in trays of water in the model sets. You'd think people would catch on to these things but they don't because it never occurs to them to look for a trick in the first place. My personal take is that Bleacher people work okay if they're slightly out of focus or in the far background of a big shot, and you dull down the more "dayglow" clothing choices, while you can bring the Lorezs a bit closer, but for everything else you're best off building a crowd by doing multiple renders assembling everything in post. Billboards, like MOM, would work fine IF the figures were lit in a manner that matches the lighting of the finished scene, but then you'd have to create your own billboards to begin with. Probably not worth the trouble unless you're talking about epically large scenes.
Well, I believe my computer and all my files will be waiting for me in Heaven. I mean I will get around to using it all as the soul is eternal and all. It seems like too much to get around to using now of course but in 500 hundred years or so, I might feel like I should have gotten more files to last me into forever......
Actually, I am getting picky. But When I switched to using G3F, I wanted a ton of morph options and eyes and makeup to create characters and it took awhile to get it all. Now I am trying to figure out what to use as sets for scenes. Still outfits and hair come out that I want. Still I plan to do PC again and go on a spree once I've managed to save up for it. If I manage to stick with G3F for a bit, then more will get used. I just get ready to sit back and work and a new modle comes out and outfitting it with morphs and eye textures and skins starts again. But I am happy with G3F so I'm going to go play with her.
The quality of the models has me very concerned about using them, I render everything at 3840×6827, I'm afraid they'll show really badly at that resolution. And all of my shots I want to use crowds with, the crowds are going to be very close to the action, so pushing them out to the distance won't really work either. Things to think about.
Bleacher people is on prime flash right now too looks like. Thanks for the tip!
That's worrisome, I need my crowds to be right up close on the action in the main shot. Plus I run everything at a huge resolution, so that won't help their image quality either
That's not what lo-rez figures do well. Sounds like your best option is to go with layers and render as many characters as you can in each pass. A trick I've been playing with lately is to use iray section planes mounted out of view over the set to clear out everything except the exact area that I want to add new detail in. SnowSUltun has a good basic tutorial on Section planes, as well as some free ones, here
if you want to experiment with that approach.
Awesome, I'll give that a look tonight. I haven't tried using multiple renders and layering them in yet, hadn't even really thought about it, that could help me immensely
I don't think I can guess anywhere close to the percentage of my content that I have actually rendered. It would be very small I am sure. I have been asking myself, especially over the last year, what the heck I am doing buying all this content. And yet, practically everyday I tune in to see what fantastic deal might be available. I finally let my PC club membership go in an attempt to curb the buying. So far I am really craving the discounts I had. Buying content is definitely addictive.
In pondering the question of why I spend so much money on content I rarely use (and beating myself up for it), I have realized a few interesting things. My 3D purchases serve multiple purposes, not necessarily requiring rendering to be of value. 1) I am a collector (some might say hoarder, but I am not quite that bad). I do have a NEED to collect things. My house is full of dragons for instance. I collect coins, stamps, fairies, art supplies... I discovered that collecting digital content satisfies that need without taking up more physical space. Very valuable! 2) Commercial use. One of my main justifications has been to use the content for commercial projects. And I have, just not nearly as many as I should be to justify the purchases for that reason alone. 3) I may not render everything I purchase, but I do install it (most of it) and everything I install these days is organized with meta-data. I find it is in many ways a stress reducer to organize this stuff. I can't tell you how many times over the years I have organized my runtimes, and re-organized them. I love content management in DAZ Studio now, and adding metadata is something I really like to do. If you need metadata for anything, I probably have it done. At least in the Fantasy genre. 4) Inspiration. I buy content that I inspires my creativity. Or at least I hope will inspire me to get some art done, or learn a technique.
Of course my goal is to render more. To that end, I had my husband make me a nifty little script that will randomly choose products from several different categories, which I then "have to use" in combination for a "challenge" render. So far I have had a lot of fun with it.
I remember seeing a travelling exhibition of props and miniatrures from the first Star Wars prequel. One of the things that struck me was the grandstand model from the speeder race: the crowd was made from line after line of crudely painted clothes pegs strung on wires. Looked really fake in close up, but with the motion blur from tracking the racing vehicles in the final film, you'd never know.
I probably only use a small percentage of what I actually buy, and not completely knowing what's acceptable here I don't post some images, I know no nudity or violence is allowed but not sure about gore, and what gore is considered violent so I think i avoid a lot of those type of renders I'll make a scene and sometimes render. I tend to buy things that look good at the time even if I know it may never get used I'm addicted too though lol
Exactly. It's amazing how often a visual cheat reads as completely natural to the human brain. Acclaimed matte painter Albert Whitlock's paintings often bordered on being abstracts, yet when seen on film his work is so convincing that his it's almost impossible to detect.
...I try to keep my purchases to items I know I would use, partly due to being on a limited budget. As I'm not into high fantasy or horror, I tend to not purchase content that fits those genre, nor am I much into skimpwear. However, I am never one to turn down a freebie (crikey on my budget, free, even if it is something I may rarely use, is still a very good price unless it is a texture set for content I do not have nor will purchase).
Granted, some fantasy content can actually can work well in Sci Fi settings (look at the film Avatar or the television series Stargate for example) but for the most part sword & sorcery stuff just doesn't gab me (though I confess I do have an odd weakness for winged fae). In the story I am working on, Leela's somewhat eccentric adoptive mother Lady Grande is a historian, so yes, suits of armour have their place in hallways as do old swords/shields on the walls. I have also collected a fair amount Egyptian themed content as Lady Grande's natural daughter Margo is an archaeologist with a special interest in Egyptology. Oh, and winged fae, yeah they exist, just mind your peripheral vision when walking about the estate or even in the heart of the "Smoke" (London) and ignore the "British racing green" classic BAE Harrier you thought you saw parked on the front lawn of the manor.
There is a fair amount of content I purchased while designing characters for my stories, some that didn't work out the way I hoped, or was superseded by newer better versions later. For example in the Gen4 days I used a combination of V4, Thorne's Tommi, Jamminwolfe's Tindra Thompson (who actually had several age preset morphs), and Steph 4 along with the Natural Petite Morphs to create Leela and her friend Tracey. When Teen Julie 5 came out, I had a perfect petite teen base so I no longer needed to "kitbash" the characters from several different models as well as being limited to just V4 clothing. When Growing Up for G2 came out, that pretty much settled things as I could use a single base of each character for different stages of their life, so K4/Genesis Kid was no longer needed. For my namesake KK, I must have collected at least a half dozen or more different ponytail hairstyles again some that worked OK and some that didn't, which will see little use as I now have OOTs Rochelle Ponytail for G3F, which perfectly matches the hairstyle that I depicted in drawings of the character over two decades ago, lengthens and poses without distortion, and looks very real.
I also have a bit of older content that is no longer compatible with the latest version of Daz, like Dreamlight's LDP and Mood Master or Poseworks' PW Surface.
So in a sense there is a decent amount of content in my runtime which I purchased that basically no longer sees much if any use (unless I draw something for an RRRR challenge), such is the life when dealing with anything in the digital world.
The older product not working anymore is a legitimate gripe, though as of late I'm finding that less and less of it is actually obsolete. My mothballed Poser Dynamic clothing has become viable again now that there are finally two different ways to use it in DS, and thanks to Cayman Studios' Legacy UV sets and GenX2 my old characters back through Gen 3 are all usable again. And I'm slowly going through my huge library of 3DL shaders to discover that many of them do still work in Iray with a little tweaking, and for those that don't, I can still use 3DL. In the end, the vast majority of money I spent on products prior to DS4 that has turned out to be a complete waste all came from a single vendor, Dreamlight, which wouldn't bother me so much except for the many false promises that were made in the ensuing period about eventually fixing the issues or offering upgrades. So now I just don't buy from that vendor except when there's a ridiculous glitch sale. Where I DO have a bit of a problem is that I keep "upgrading" to newer version of smiilar products, so I think I now have around ten schoolroom sets, three subways, four doctor's offices, six hotels, seven different police uniforms, eight jails, ten maid outfits, a dozen swimming pools, at least twenty residential neighborhoods, probably double that number of downtown city sets, and I literally have no idea how many small apartments... and, yet, I figured out the other day that while I have seven or eight gym and spa sets, only one of them actually had a treadmill model... go figure. :p