Urban Living is a keeper.

frankrblow

manekiNeko said:

dragonfly_2004 said:

https://www.daz3d.com/urban-living_KindredArts

Urban Living is a keeper! Thanks, KindredArt. Great value for money. There's add ons I could wish for, but that would up the expense; like a single apartment with interior, and opening doors and windows - maybe one day?

As it is, the full set opened in Studio as a huge city block, but, after adding a G8M and a V3 character, it all rendered in about eight minutes (GTX1080, i7-7700, 32Gb RAM) as a 1920 x 1080 image. This is a small fraction of the set.

maybe you could just hide a particular door or window somehow, and add a single rigged window/door prop instead? there are many freebies out there, and also shop items...

You are right, ManekiNeko. My comment was not a complaint, just an observation. After all, there is always room to improve any product, though the creator has to draw the line somewhere.

Deadly Buda

Ok, the problem is reproducable as follows:

1. Load Large building into new scene. Render. Everything is fine.

2. Move the building backwards on Z axis. Spin the perspective view to get a better look. Render. Graffiti alpha mats turn black.

This happens even with Memory Optimization on "Speed".

Deadly Buda

Hi everyone,

I figured out what the problem is. It has nothing to do with the Urban Living prop. What it is is a bug in Daz Studio 4.10 in which transparency maps don't always work correctly when they are far away from the 0xyz axis. To fix this problem I now create 2 nulls. 1 null for the object and one for the camera. I move the nulls to the same spot so that the object and camera are closer to the 0xyz axis and it solves the problem.

xyer0

Deadly Buda said:

Hi everyone,

I figured out what the problem is. It has nothing to do with the Urban Living prop. What it is is a bug in Daz Studio 4.10 in which transparency maps don't always work correctly when they are far away from the 0xyz axis. To fix this problem I now create 2 nulls. 1 null for the object and one for the camera. I move the nulls to the same spot so that the object and camera are closer to the 0xyz axis and it solves the problem.

@DeadlyBuda, Could you elaborate please? I've never used a null. So, I don't know what you're doing. Parenting the nulls to the object and camera?

AllenArt

xyer0 said:

Deadly Buda said:

Hi everyone,

I figured out what the problem is. It has nothing to do with the Urban Living prop. What it is is a bug in Daz Studio 4.10 in which transparency maps don't always work correctly when they are far away from the 0xyz axis. To fix this problem I now create 2 nulls. 1 null for the object and one for the camera. I move the nulls to the same spot so that the object and camera are closer to the 0xyz axis and it solves the problem.

@DeadlyBuda, Could you elaborate please? I've never used a null. So, I don't know what you're doing. Parenting the nulls to the object and camera?

I would like to know this as well ;)

Laurie

Deadly Buda

Hi xyer0, AllenArt,

For some reason, whey an object is too far away from the 0 point of the XYZ axis, DAZ Studio gets weird with transparency maps. I don't know why, it's unpredictable, but it happens enough that this workaround may help sometimes.

1. Create 2 NULLs with the default settings. Create> New Null

2. "Parent in Place" all your objects in the scene to Null 1. Edit>Object>Change Parent.

3. Move Null 1 somewhere so that you get your scene objects close to the 0 xyz point (the middle of the grid in the viewport).

4. "Parent in Place" your camera to Null 2. Edit>Object>Change Parent

5. Copy the XYZ coordinates from Null 1 to Null 2. This will recreate the camera view you had before, but in the new location so you can render the transparencies correctly.

NOTE: I have had mixed results with this technique on animated sequences. I'm not sure why yet.

 

Deadly Buda

Ok, so an update...

The null situation above works sometimes. In fact, sometimes you can just use one null rather than two, and parent both items to the null.

I used the two separate nulls at one point in order to cure this weird problem with DAZ changing coordinates once an item was nulled. For example, a -300 y rotation might be reset to 60, thereby messing up the animation in the scene.

My current workaround involves Graphmate plug in. What I do now is import a copy of the problematic object with its pre-nulled parameters. I copy its parameters in Graphmate and then paste them to the nulled figure. This seems to solve the problem. I then delete the object I imported.