Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 7
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One thing I discovered about Zofia Hair is that although it says it has Iray materials, they do not use the Iray Uber shader. They just use the old Daz Studio Default shader and also use displacement. I thought that must be an error, but CS told me it was not. They said that they allow Daz Studio Default shader for "Iray Materials" and allow the use of displacement, even when it isn't optimum. I considered returning this hair, but it still looks pretty good with the included materials, and with all the hair shader products available, I figured I could do whatever I wanted with it.
Good to know! I'm trying to think- mind went blank- would I need to apply the Iray Uber base then before doing Slosh's hair shaders for Iray? (I'm running on being awake about 22 hours at the moment, can't "thimk." ) I don't think I've ever used those shaders on hair that wasn't Iray to start with.
No, applying one of the shader presets from UHT or UHT2 seems to do that for you. I didn't have any problem with that.
Thanks! It bugs me that they are labeling those as Iray materials when they're really not. Very misleading.
I think maybe it is us that are interpreting "Iray Materials" to mean Uber shader. DS Materials can be any number of shaders - Daz Studio Default, omUbershader, AOA SSS shader, etc., so I guess Iray Materials can use different shaders, too. The MDL example shaders, for example, don't use Iray Uber shader, either, but they are obviously Iray, because of the MDL origins.
Oh wow. That Parthenon Club by @TangoAlpha description doesn't do it justice. (Vendors, don't you know people want to know about all the extra effort you put in? No mention of doors opening and closing? Kudos to you!) The bathrooms are mentioned in the description, but here's where they are located, etc. There's:
1. a mens bathroom (when looking at the bar, it's on your right)
2. that door opens and closes
3. and a ladies bathroom (and that is on the left side of the bar. Those are the closed brown doors.)
4. you guessed it, that door opens and closes
5. stall doors and yes, those open and close
6. the office door opens and closes. The room has a window and a pretty hanging light. Is pretty small though, you'll have to remove roof or go daft trying to figure out where you are in it.
7. there are TWO offices. Both are upstairs.
8. the storage room door opens and closes (That is the door behind the bar)
AHA! And the vendor made the partition between the rooms a separate material zone so you can have one big office- YES!!!!!! The offices each have windows to let in light. Well thought out.
I had to laugh. The boxes in the storage room are products from "TangoAlpha Estates" (apparently anticipating big sales, big bucks.)
EDIT: And upstairs on the landing, there is a private table for two!
EDIT: And bathroom has a window (weird, but did it to let in light) and the main room has a window way up high to let in light. It's toward the bar.
Screenshot showing table and chairs, roof is off so you see dangling lights (including one over the private table so it's well lit.)
So this is in the sale, can get it for $10.77 with a debut/new item. Going off sale in about 20 minutes if featured stores change.
Okay, funky. A nice funky I think- imagine loading up Modern Kitchen (still doing PerspectX) and there's a big reflective plane with an image of the Modern Kitchen on it. (It's called Reflective Plate in Scene, I am not just randomly assigning what I think it is.) I don't recall having a reflective plane/plate in other products- do you? (Edit- and it's labeled plate in the Scene tab, shouldn't that be plane?)
First of all, if you call up Modern Kitchen through Products (Remember, I am NEVER using Smart Content, all references are from Content Library.) you get a few separate props, the room. If you go through the Environments>Architecture, you don't even get it in the list, it's only in the thumbnail images and your only option is to load the set. I then noticed that several of PerspectX's products are that way, they're not in the list once you get into their name. BTW, that Reflective Plate is listed as a prop if you go the Products route, you can probably use it for other scenes.
Modern Kitchen next observation- and going to be blunt here-
The Scene groupings are not convenient. I wanted to expand the floor so I could get my camera back a bit. But NO. You can't ungroup the walls, can't do the floor separately. Strongly dislike this.
The materials are broken down and there was a very nice effort there to get you specific material zones, easy to use. But some things do not have Cutout Opacity- see next posts because one solution for the floor would be to add a second set then opacity out everything but the floor, and tack it on. Shouldn't have to do that though. Or you can opague out the floor and use another one from a different set.
Will be back showing you how short that floor is on Modern Kitchen (how far I could back up the camera before the end of the floor shows.) It's a lovely set but that floor really is lacking.
Be sure and pick up the Moonshine Diner Kitchen Accessories for free with the purchase of a Debut/New item. Looks very nice!
Okay, how to do the floor- load a second set. Using X (NOTE THAT- NOT Z!) translation, just slide the translation slider to your left and that will extend the floor and line up perfectly. For items that are listed in Scene, delete them. Obviously you can't delete Room as that has the floor, and A FEW OTHER THINGS HIDDEN IN THE GROUP.
In that Group, some of the items won't have Cutout Opacity (like the backsplash, stove, etc) so with everything selected with the Surface Tool, in Surfaces (EXCEPT FLOOR, just to be sure it matches the other one, don't mess with it!) apply the Iray Uber so you can put Cutout Opacity to zero for everything except the floor. Bingo. All this should take you about 3 minutes max. Those floors are nice, you could add another Modern Kitchen to both sides of your extended plane and build a home or add a living room, etc. And shader the kitchen walls to match if you prefer. I can see adding a dining area there with the kitchen.
@PerspectX THIS SET NEEDS FIXING. The cabinet doesn't connect with the surface countertop, all the way around! Just showing one section.
I increased the Sharpen on the render so you can see the floor boards, so just ignore the white noise. See how incredibly short the floor is? You can see it in the edge of the render!!!
And with the extended floor. You can see the end of the cabinet and how it doesn't connect the counter with the cabinet. It goes all the way around like that, over to the stove. I didn't bother checking the other side of the stove, the vendor needs to do that. Submited a ticket.
What, who?
There's also a second preload that has cloakrooms at the front with opening dutch doors and a nightclub style scaffold & parcan coloured lighting rig, plus a coat rack, hangers etc. (and a third preload that just has a bare empty interior - great if you just want an outside render, or you want to repurpose the inside.)
Oh, and some of the bottle labels are worth a second glance too (read the back of the beer bottle...)
Also, the outside walls can be individually hidden (they're separate props)
And thanks for taking a look
Thank you!
Ok, I'm going to showcase a really really REALLY old product here, but it does have two good things going for it.... 1) it's a set of modular props to build your own scene but also includes some preloads for those of you who are like me and are really lazy and can't be bothered doing that :D .. and 2) it's FREE!!!!
In the RDNA Featured group for the PC sale, there is something called RDNA Platez Volume 1 (did I mention it was free?) Yes, it's old old old and it was made for Poser, but the good thing is that most pieces have decent material zones so we can use shaders on it.
I loaded one of the presets to get this. The floors I reshaded using the default iray shader, the architectural one as it gives a nice gloss to floors. :D The rest of it I just used the normal default iray shader that we all have with DS. Then I loaded a plane behind the door and added one of Didi Mc's backgrounds to it (it's one of her older ones, can't think of the name...think it was East of the Sun...available at rendo) to make it look like a sci fi building. The modules are quite sci fi looking with the extisting textures, but I really think they would suit fantasy as well, if you use the right shaders.
Not a great render I know, but it was just to show the fun you can have with this FREE Platez Vol 1 product. I used an HDRI from one of Colm Jackson's iray light sets, and just some other lights near the door there. Like I said, it's FREE!!! (whooooot!) so you just fiddle with shaders and surfaces to your hearts content without worrying you may have wasted money LOL.
I will admit that that window up top gave me fits - it kept casting a reflection over on the pylon on the right and i couldn't for the LIFE OF ME figure it out. (i ended up just removing it) Someone a bit brainier than I am should have no problems. LOL.
(remember, not a great render, was just testing it out to see what it looked like)
That does have a lot of potential and looks good, I grabbed it. Thanks! Old things are new to some people so always welcome. I feature a lot of "old" because I am definitely slowing down on "new" except for sets and thicker browed gals. I know people are scooping up PC+ items who don't have them ( I have done it for three years of PC sales, and it was structured differently- there were more bundles, like ten or more, per sale, IIRC) It's actually cute to see everyone excited at finding good deals that are cycling through again from previous years, and some new deals on older content as well.
I played around all evening yesterday, and one thing I found when doing walls and shaders, in Volume 2 of Mec4D's shaders, the glossy wall shader (Think it's shader 12) looks like the same wall texture on a lot of these products's walls. (Nikisatez's living room.) It's a great shader. One thing I've found is when adding shaders to planes, you really have to tweak the vertical and horizontal tiles to get them to match the tiling of other walls. I'm getting the hang of it.
@tangoalpha Oops. I had done a copy/paste for kitchen vendor and had two windows open, when I highlighted you apparently it didn't copy. Fixed it! I'll go grab one of your beers when I get a chance, but people will have to get your set to find out for themselves what's on the back! BTW, folks- there's a bank to go with the theme, don't forget about that one.
Someone was wondering about Krayon Hair slowing down renders. I did a test, and there's only a two minute difference on my machine, just in case you were wondering about that hair. I did Lindsey with and without hair. Comparison: (and keep in mind, I have an Alienware51 with a 970 graphics card) Without hair was 5 minutes 18 seconds and with it was exactly 7 minutes 20 seconds.
Without Hair With Hair
1 min 45 seconds: 64% vs 29%
3 minutes: 92% vs 72% (major catchup!)
This is interesting. At 3 min 25 seconds, without hair is 2667 iterations (95%) vs 1743 (81%)
If you get a new/debut item, there's two characters in P3D that go to $3.87. Emi and Brita.
Thanks, I'm picking up Emi.
Anyone got the Airport Island Stuff? It looks pretty intersting. Would like to see some RL Renders and some Info on the Flexibility.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/120316/the-new-airport-island-products
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/120376/airport-island-memory-requirements-iray
Oh, this little tool looks like fun! Anyone tried it? Position Helper Tool looks very helpful for large sets. And it's free. if you haven't visited the Freebie thread, DivaMakeup has done a splendid job of listing all the RNDA freebies. She said even though they say Poser, most of them are working- and really, with all the neat shaders we have available, think of what those props would look like with updated materials. (I have a question- I have seen materials and textures used interchangeably, do shader presets change materials or textures?)
I've been having fun with Dreamland Models Movie Sets: River Land and six of the Low Poly Blocks. I'm rendering in 3DL and it takes less than 1 minute for most scenes and 2 minutes for this one. Although the Dreamland sets were made for Poser, they work quite well in Daz Studio after a little prep work. This scene also has props from Maclean's Streets, Merlin's The Church, Predatron's Lorenzo Lorez and Loretta Lorez (I always get a kick out of that name because my grandmother was a Loretta), and 1stBastion's Oncoming Traffic: Lo-Poly SUV. I have some more Lorez figure sets that I'll have to blend in. I have to go through my runtime and see what other city-related props I can use (if anyone has any to recommend, I'd be glad to hear). I also want to try out Ultrascatter to spread around some debris and look at some grunge shaders for the building walls.
I've also been playing around with the River Land weather prop. This could be used in other sets as well for quick fog and rain. Again, a 3DL render.
Very nice! I haven't used Poser, any chance you can describe the prep work needed to use these in Daz Studio? I've only used one Poser prop, and fortunately it was just double-click like I'm used to in DS. Also like the Coppertone girl and dog advertisement on that dark brown building!
Thanks! Actually, I've been capturing what I did to make them useable in an Art Studio thread Exploring Dreamland in Daz Studio.
Great! I'll check it out. Thanks for doing that!
I've been busy with Zbrush but I'll take a few minutes to give you some insight on a villa I loaded up in the Perry Walinga sets yesterday, This is the Villa Park section of the island. I'm going to test different lights right now to ensure this wasn't some sort of user error (but it was a light product I use all the time. Doing Apocalyptic lights by Dumor now, check back in about TEN MINUTES. EDIT: I've seen enough. Same results with the pool. Grass looks slightly better. So definitely not user error with the lighting, those are the results I got for the pool. I'm going to test default Iray lights.
What I would change: (this is the default out of the box)
First, I don't particularly like the grass plane colors or the grass itself. I like more subdued grass, and I think this has white flowers or something dotted through it. The grass WITH THE LIGHTING I USED (and not default Iray) looks cartoony IMO.
Second, the yellow flowers with orange centers by the fences are flatter than pancakes. I couldn't find scaling at all- was going to do Y scaling to increase the thickness, and just bury the (longer) stems in the ground with Y translation. Couldn't find translation either. First time for everything! Are these things instances, and how do I tell?
Third, the glass/ pool is a bit too reflective for my preference, you can't see inside the house at all and the pool water doesn't even really show up, but everything is reflected. I don't like the materials for the pool steps in the render in progress- they look like chrome!
(This is not, repeat NOT my typical render, for people new to the thread. This is showing you how the pool looks, using the SAME lighting as the house.) Read below.
Fourth: Now this is being nit-picky, but normally (and I have a LOT of sets) when I render the house, the pool doesn't need different lighting to look good. I did not change the lighting for the pool render and you can see it looks gawd-awful. So that is a drawback IMO. I mean, I'll want the house and pool to be in the same scenes! So I would imagine the pool materials will need to be darkened unless you want a wash out (as shown!) So I did a render and changed the Exposure Value to 14.78 to 15.27 (the higher the number, the "darker" the scene) and I just am not "getting" the ambience of the construction of the pool. I like that Perry is ambitious and trying to do unique pools, it's just not working out with lighting that I've used many times (including rendering pools.) So you can play with lighting, camera angle, tweak, or substitute in a pool.
TIP: I thought the white around the turtles in the pool were lights, and I found it under Surfaces (Villa Ground>Pool Light Strip) so unless you're doing a night render, definitely turn those suckers off if you're using this pool. They are ON BY DEFAULT and I rendered the default scene for testing purposes.
I have a pretty zippy computer, and doing 800 pixel wide renders for one home is about 18-20 minutes.
For the money, you get a lot if the villas are different, because there's quite a few. I have not gone in to the villas (and sticking with Zbrush today too) because there is a dedicated thread for this product that is covering it well. If I get a chance this weekend or later tonight I'll take a peek at them. Would I buy this product again, even though I don't like the grass and pool? Definitely. The Turtle villa is not cookie-cutter, it definitely looks modern and lighting from outside is a breeze with all the glass windows. Abd depending on your lighting, you may get different pool results. (Anyone renders it and it looks different, feel free to post.) I do have to be honest and say I will be replacing the grass and the pool, so I wouldn't say this is a good-to-go out of the box product, at least not for me.
The dome with the darker blue at the bottom was left that way because it was easy to put a few whitecaps on to make an "ocean" in the background. (Plus, I'm not making scenes, I'm testing props.) Where it looks ultra dark is where I had to darken the lights to test the pool.
The default Iray lighting is doing better, it's rendering now. I still do not like the grass at all, too many white flowers dotted in and the grass doesn't seem very realistic. The pool looks better though.
Edit: Here it is. I left the lights on in the pool so we could compare apples to apples.
Oh weird. And a tip for you-
These villas load at different locations, not World Center (0/0/0) so take your villa to World Center if you want to do a one house scene, because otherwise your characters are REALLY going to be out in Lah-Lah land. Which brings me to my question- Why doesn't the character appear in the villa (is still way out in nowhere land) if you enter the exact same coordinates that the villa is located?
And next, talk about weird. I could NOT LOAD HAIR ON MY FIGURE IF SHE WAS IN THE HOUSE! I tried five different hair products. Once I pulled her outside, ALL FIVE WORKED. The house is interfering with the loading of hair onto the figure! That's a new one.
So here's a closeup of the default Iray lights with a gal in the pool, first with the pool lights on. This means the lights going around each stair (very nice touch, Perry always puts in nice details) and the pool lights around the rim of the pool. (Not the typical round ones in the sides of the pool, this rims the pool.) I wanted to see if that was what gave the water the green floating area to our right, but it's not. The one without the pool lights is rendering now.
Gosh, I dislike those flowers! Those will be gone when I do a keepable render.
Same lighting, but with pool lights off.