Why So Few Moving Parts on Huge Sets?
Fauvist
Posts: 2,219
I'm so frustrated with some of these huge scenes of streets and buildings. Most of the doors and windows don't open. If you're doing a picture of a street at 4am, then it's understandable that people will not be going in or out. Is it so hard to make doors and windows that open? Walk through Chinatown and all the doors are open, day and night. Evening in Paris, people are constantly moving from inside to outside. When you are telling a story visually, it necessary sometimes to show a person entering or exiting a building, so that people know where they are going - instead of showing them on the sidewalk, and then suddenly inside a building.
Doors that open are important. Think of the last scene of Gone With the Wind in the doorway, or when Judy Garland opens the door in her black & white world to reveal a Technicolor Oz.
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There are potentially hundreds of doors on some of the larger sets, so it's unrealistic to try and add a door to every single building. In those few instances you want a door to open, it's often a close-up which is where smaller sets have the advantage (since they're more designed to be viewed up close).
Furthermore, adding a door means adding an interior. That's a mammoth amount of extra work per building, and also greatly increases the overheads needed to load it into memory. It just seems like an unnecessarily large amount of work for what amounts to a small throwaway detail. There are dozens of workarounds if you really need doors opened in a scene, so it's better to work scene by scene rather than trying to put everything into one solution.
that's basically why you don't see opening doors in my bigger sets,for the tiny amount of people who would use such a feature i'm just adding extra overhead to people who wouldn't use it,
and where do you stop?..if I do something behind the door do i need to add extra rooms connecting off it?.and do those rooms need to be furnished?
I should add that my next set(streets of london...) does at least have rooms behind all the windows,so when your looking in you'll actualy see 4 walls,a floor and ceiling, but probably no opening doors
that's basically why you don't see opening doors in my bigger sets,for the tiny amount of people who would use such a feature i'm just adding extra overhead to people who wouldn't use it,
and where do you stop?..if I do something behind the door do i need to add extra rooms connecting off it?.and do those rooms need to be furnished?
I should add that my next set(streets of london...) does at least have rooms behind all the windows,so when your looking in you'll actualy see 4 walls,a floor and ceiling, but probably no opening doors
Your sets are really magnificent. Personally, for the way I tell stories visually, I need a set that can be animated a little with opening doors, otherwise they are nothing but a background. I have in fact started to just license stock photographs of scenery to use as backgrounds in some of my images. If they are positioned correctly they look like 3 dimensional sets. For animated videos or games, the doors absolutely have to open.
Personally, I wouldn't need a room behind the open door, just a hole in the wall where the doorway is. I can put an empty box behind the hole myself.
I also stripped down a model of a facade of a building to just the door and corridor by making everything else invisible. Now I can just shove this through any wall. If I can't make a hole in the wall, I let part of the corridor protrude enough to give the impression of space, and colour the inside of the corridor black. I can retexture this model to make it look like different materials, and add woodwork to change the style.
Maybe a PA needs to market flatmapped door in wall props for any building, you render the texture to fit.
Can have sliding doors too.
Line it up and size it, fit render frame to the prop, hide it and render the texture.
Maybe the whole process could even be scripted!
You can always use the Geometry Editor in DS or the Grouping Tool in Poser to either remove the door mesh or assign it to a new material and make it invisible, then do the same on a second copy of the model to get a door or just use a separate door prop. Primitives can be used to add an impression of a door frame or of thickness to the door itself, as long as you don't need high detail.
Thanks for letting me know. I'll have to try and figure out how to use the Geometry Editor and/or Grouping Tool.
..when I need an interior, I just kitbash something together for what will be seen though the door (often you don't need an entire room, just what is visible through the open door from teh camera POV.
An example below of what I did with Jack Tomalin's Nouveau Vignette using ArtCollaboration's Folding Screens prop for the windows and interior wall by the door.
Sometimes the extra work involved to rigging "everything" isn't worth the extra week or two it takes to do all of them in a large pack. If a pack don't make enough to cover the extra week of work it won't be done on the future packs. As stonemason said. If you do an open door you need to make an interior as well and most of time it don't make any different in the time of return. A good majority of people won't even use them. They are buying the set as a backdrop to fill in their render. Your more likely to find opening doors and windows on smaller set cause they are easy rigs. A lot of us do this for a living and can't afford to waist the time to do those complicated rigs. We do have families to support and bills to pay and ever day and hour counts.
Yeah as mentioned above, IMO working doors themselves are not a problem, very easy to rig, but everywhere you have one, you will have the need / expectation for a fully render-able interior behind it. Customers will expect nothing less, as will Daz's QA testers.
FWIW, I think the DVD sets for Warehouse 13 (the SyFy series) are a great example of scene construction and intercuts. We see the character approaching a door from the outside, start to open it, and cut to an interior shot of them coming in through the door. The same in reverse when exiting a room or building. What is almost never shown is the camera following the actors through a door. This is because many of the exterior shots did NOT have useable interiors and many of the interior locations did not match to the desired exterior scenes.
The final season set has an extended bonus section that covers the set, the extensive use of CG, and examples of the actor/CG interaction.