UltraScenery [Commercial]
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Finally had some success putting a paved road into Ultrascenery. I started with a terrain and road with its cut and fill. I created a height map of it using AoA's Distance camera. I created a no feature Ultrascenery scene using the height map then used a mask of the road/cut/fill to keep most of the vegetation off. Took a little tuning to get my terrain to match up with the Ultrascenery base which I then turned off after copying it's default texture to my terrain. I've tried this a few times and this is the first time I am reasonably happy with the results. It was enabled by having the masking feature available, some tips from Barbult's experiment thread, and tips from this thread. So helpful to have a community sharing what they learn.
Added a more distant view:
Thanks! I applied the Iray Uber base to all of it, but I did replace the glass bits with an Iray glass shader. This lost the etched glass design, but I thought the windows looked a little strange otherwise.
Thanks for that help! If you have any of the stained glass or Deco Iray shaders by ForbiddenWhispers, you could use them to get a nice pattern on the windows. Then play with the vertical/horizontal tiling to get the size you want.
Almost here!
I reached page 62; Excellent product, excellent thread, thanks to you all
Now I know what masks are and how to use them as well as inverted height effects but all theoretically as my machine was finishing my first experiment
And here it is the final result
Sedor's Outdoor pool https://www.daz3d.com/outdoor-pool-and-poses-for-victoria-8-and-michael-8, 2 ultascenery one with the pond tweaked to have a swimming pool, other one in the background, sun and sky in July at 11:30 at 40ºN,
6 GF8, lots of duplicated UltraTrees in pots or in a hedge (I don't know how to work creating instances, I duplicate nodes instead; can anybody point me where to learn the instances basics?) and bunchs of carnations scaled to big dhalias from Xfrog plants. A day and two nights rendering (I was afk) and a couple of partial renders to correct some things of the final render
And of course following the advice of this great Australian man from Carrara forums whose name I can't remember who always spoke about levels, levels, levels in postrender done in this case with The Gimp
Thanks again to you all for every tips and pieces of advice
Great images everyone!
@Gogger Thank you! I had planned to come back and expand but the family had other ideas!
@RGcincy Looks great! I have this in my to attempt list also!
I went back and forth with this. I had a heck of a time getting it to not look miniaturized. There are squirrels on the roof but they are so small you cant really see them. Used masks to control the trees. This is also 2 US the 2nd one uses one of the black/white gradient masks I made to not have the foliage on the back of the scene.
Full size render is 4000x2000 you can view by checking out my Deviant Art or Flickr site.
Nice! Although I think I'd add some staris or somthing so there's an obvious way to get down to the pond. That or a sidewalk coming around the building - and stairs would be a lot si,pler.
I don't know of any tutorials for instances, but if you want to just play with it they're under Create -> New Node Instance. The main difference between new nodes and instances is that a new node is a copletely independant iteration of whatever it is, whilst the instance will copy textures (and I think, but am not certain of, poses) applied to the main node.
Aplying the masks first and doing the hole in the mesh afterwards allowed me to create terrain with less height (3.5) rendering the stairs unnecessary as my building went from +3 to -230 in the Y axis
An can I move them manually?
This render taxed my system. I think its the most G8's in one scene I have done. US x2. See the image in gallery for a list of all items used.
Assuming that "them" is referring to Instances, yes. (I specify just because I'm not great at parsing text and I'm worried I missed you referring to something else, not because I'm trying to pick on you or anything.) They have translation and rotation dials, like anything else.
All but one of the fighter in each group of four in the lower left of the attached is an instance, moved into position. (Then all four fighters were parented to a null, and that null duplicated for each flight.)
I'm leaving the pic as a thumbnail since it's off-topic for this thread; if you've any further questions I'd suggest starting a thread in the DAZ|Studio Discussions forum. :)
My first impression when I saw it was 'Daventaki is into model railways'. The even grass, gently rolling scene and path free lead up to the house looks very much like someone has simply scattered flock all over a sculpted base board. Don't get me wrong, I love model railways, and as a child I bought model house kits, the eventually a model train to make the houses have more interest, and given the time and space I'd love to have one again. The problem is, I don't think you were aiming for that look. Would an edge to the curtilage make a difference - hedge/fence/flower bed, that sort of thing? Not sure if it'd be appropriate, because not every country is as keen as we are in the UK to delineate boundaries between 'what is mine and what is yours'. Some other sign of human interaction with the environment may instead be better. At the moment it looks like a model railway enthusiast has started the process of populating the environment and this is a snapshot taken during the process as this part of the layout is worked on.
Don't want this to sound like I'm saying it's horrible, because it isn't, it's really nice and shows a lot of promise. Just trying to mull over idea how to make it even better.
I wonder if we are all going to run into a serious problem: US has improved the quality of the landscape so much that we're going to have to raise our game in imagining the rest of the scene.
Regards
Richard.
This is a great scene!
Thrilled with the new mask capability. I needed a gravel road that wasn't in the center and a flat area for the house. I has a happy now.
I think this is a beautiful scene. While other renders of yours are closer up, you did a great job of making this appear to be a distant image.
this is a big wow.
I still dont get how to use a mask. what are the steps. how you get gravel there, etc etc
I love this! Is this all in one pass, just using masks? Really nice work.
I think a tut on the usage of masks would be a good idea.
Back here in this post, I attached a screenshot of how I used the layer masks to achieve the image. That might spark some ideas. I also explained that the gravel was added with UltraScatterPro in that image.
Layers are also discussed in the updated User Guide that comes with UltraScenery 1.2.
@RGcincy I especially like the top down view that you added. I didn't understand why you created a separate terrain and deleted the UltraScenery terrain, though. Was that because the road was part of your terrain?
This is great!
Hey guys!
I used Ultrascenery and Ultrascatter Pro.
For those interested, here’s how I did it (see attached examples):
Set up your house and yard.
Create a 64 x 64meter primitive plane (same size as the UltraScenery landscape). This will be your road as well as your guide to positioning the Ultrascenery build.
Change from perspective view to top view. Position the plane where you need it to be based on what you need (road, path, etc.) and click view frame or zoom out until the plane and the top of your buildings are fully in view. Take a screen shot.
In Photoshop, click File, New, Clipboard, Edit, Paste the screenshot. Using the Rectangular Marquee tool, carefully select/separate the primitive plane from the rest of the screenshot. Click Image, Crop. Ctrl + d to deselect.
Using the Rectangle tool with a pure black fill and no stroke, draw over the roofs of your buildings and anything else in your scene where you don’t want foliage to appear at all. Make as many as you need and then select the layers and then choose Layer, Merge Shapes. (This is the only time you will be merging layers.)
Create a new layer and use the Paint Bucket tool to fill it with pure white. Drag the layer behind your Shapes and save as a .png file. This will be the mask for leaflitter, so call it something similar.
Create a new layer and draw your road/path in pure black. Save the Shapes, Road, and white background as a .png file. This will be the mask for the short grass.
Create a new layer and change the Rectangle tool to the Ellipse tool. Draw a pure black circle over your buildings and any areas where you want to have only short grass. Leave your Road visible. As before, save as .png. This will be the long grass/tuft mask, as well as the mask for smaller trees.
Create a new layer and draw another, larger circle for the bigger trees (you can also just paint these areas if you don’t want a perfect circle). Save as before.
For the height map, create a new layer, choose Paint Bucket, and open the Color Picker. You want mid-grey, so drag the picker to the far left of the color pallet, and then under the B% change the number to 50. Fill the layer and drag it to the top, covering the other layers. Now you have a mid-grey height map that will be completely flat. I painted two slightly lighter grey colors around the perimeter to bring the landscape up to help hide the grey horizon from sun/sky and HDRIs (see example).
Your final layer will be for Ultrascatter. Right-click the layer with the road on it and choose Duplicate Layer. Use Paint Bucket to fill the black road with grey, and then click Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur to soften the edges. If you like, draw lighter areas to delineate tire marks, etc. (see example). Create a new layer just behind it and use Paint Bucket to fill with pure black. Save this grey road/black background as a .png.
In DAZ Studio, launch Ultrascenery. As Barbult advised in her experiments thread, under the Scene tab, Noise tab, drag the brightness to -100 to disable noise. Under the Height Map tab, click Choose Map and navigate to the grey height map you created. Under the Features tab, it’s important to choose the blank ecology because the included roads/water features will alter the flatness you need under your buildings (at least that’s been my experience). Under the Ecology tab, choose your foliage (if the thumbnails show a road or water, don’t worry, they won’t appear as long as you’ve picked a blank ecology). I chose Oaks 11. Under the Build tab, click on each of the blank masks and navigate to the black and white masks you created for each area. Click Build Scene.
Once it’s complete, hide it for the time being, and select the 64 x 64meter primitive plane you created. Be careful not to move this plane. Apply a Dirt Shader to it (I used E3D Surface Scans) and make sure the horizontal and vertical tiling is set to 1.00. Under the Surfaces tab, go to Cutout Opacity, click on the thumbnail, choose Browse, and choose your road/black background .png. To tile the dirt surface independently of the Cutout Opacity, click on the Base Color thumbnail and choose Image Editor. Choose the Instance Tiling tab and change the horizonal and vertical tiling. You will need to also adjust any bump/normal/etc. maps in this way.
Add a pebble prop to your scene (I used one from Mossy Hollow Creek). Select the pebble prop and launch Ultrascatter. Run the scatter as you normally would, including the following: in the Settings tab under Target Object, choose the 64 x 64meter primitive plane, in the Distribution tab under Image Map, go to Choose Map and navigate to the road/black background .png.
Now that you have your road, you’ll want to move the Ultrascenery build into place under your scene. Match the roads up, with the road itself slightly higher than the Ultrascenery.
I think that’s it. Hope this is helpful. Let me know if I left any steps out or if anything is confusing.
@barbult I've been writing a road building program that creates a road, curb, shoulder, and cut and fill merged into a base terrain. The distance map of all that is a close match but not perfect so the Ultrascenery terrain penetrates in and out of the road elements. Just easiest to hide the Ultrascenery terrain after it's gotten the plants into a position that works well with my terrain. After I get more familiar with working with both, I may learn to do it differently.
@dawnblade Thanks!
Thanks Melissa
thanks..i hadn't looked at the guide ... obviously.
You're welcome.
Stand Your Ground
I originally used Mossy Hollow, but when no vegetation rendered, I realized that I own Mossy Hollow CREEK, not Mossy Hollow Botanica. I'll need to rectify that soon. Anyway, I should probably reframe this a little bit so that they're not standing directly on the tall grass.
Thanks very much for creating such a comprehensive write-up, Melissa. Very helpful and very much appreciated.
Took another try at adding a road into Ultrascenery. This is a different terrain mesh than I used before. It uses a higher resolution height map which worked better than my first attempt I posted a couple of days ago. I used Mossy Hollow 3 vegetation and a separate alpha mask I had generated to keep the vegetation away from the road, shoulder, and adjacent terrain. I also took more care to match up the terrains this time. Unlike my first attempt, this one shows the UltraScene terrain with the road portion of my terrain overlayed on top. I think it turned out better.