skyscrapers, high-rise buildings, modern cityscapes
sriesch
Posts: 4,243
in The Commons
What are people's favorite products for modern-themed glass and concrete skyscraper cityscapes (not trying to mach any specific real buildings)? I have Stonemason's Urban Sprawl 2 ( http://www.daz3d.com/urban-sprawl-2-the-big-city ) of course, and I've seen one or two over at Renderosity, but I don't see a lot of other products out there. I'm probably looking in the wrong place or searching for the wrong term.
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Comments
Was there ever an Urban Sprawl 1, or was that the various urban bundles?
There was an Urban Sprawl, with no number, then came US2.
Did it get removed at some point?
Looking over Stonemason's catalog, there's no Urban Sprawl with no number, and nothing else comes up on search.
Unfortunately urban sprawl is no longer in the store, it got retired. I should have snapped it up when it went on pre-retirement sale, but I missed my chance due to budget issues.
Blah.
I REALLY hate stuff getting retired like that. :/
I managed to get Urban Sprawl before retirement. It is still a great set. Working on something with it in Iray. What I love is that Stonemason, even back then, kept the lights separate from the lampposts which makes it easy to turn on emission for the lampposts! Lots of older sets have lights as all one piece and it is easier to use point lights because otherwise the whole light turns emissive. It is a shame he retired it because I think it is still a very useful set. There aren't that many sets like it. I have a couple from Rendo, but the ones I have are difficult to work with in Iray and I'm still figuring out all of the surfaces.
Urban Sprawl 2 is great, too. It would be nice if there were more city cityscrapes. I would love to render them out to make my own backgrounds for views out windows and stuff, but what I've seen so far is pretty limited.
There are a few sets like City Streets by Predaton that are useful, but mostly from the front. I imagine it wouldn't take much to add some primitives with brick shaders to close it off for long views. I do like how that one looks, though, for all of the iron balcony fire escapes. I haven't tried that one in Iray.
The Greeble City stuff is interesting for a more Sci Fi feel. There is also Andoria City is good if you want a more fantasy feel. I have the Distopia City blocks in my wishlist, but haven't gotten any of those to try out, again probably for a more Sci Fi look.
I've been playing with Greebles to see if I can make it look more old fashioned. I've had some success... the big problem is trying to get textures that look good at both long and close ranges.
Just tried C.H.B. Contemporary High Rise Buildings (poser version) by whitemagus
in Daz Studio with iray. The original materials are for Poser and I only quickly applied Daz Uber shader.
On glass I tried to apply iray glass, but have not found good settings for architectural glass yet.
Added Genesis 3 Female for dimensions comparison.
The newer buildings by Whitemagus come with DS materials along with the Poser materials.
Depending on what you're looking for, there are a lot of tutorials out there to generate cityscapes and buildings procedurally. Perhaps they could be adapted in something like Blender, exported/imported into DAZ?
...the oiriginal Urban Sprawl didn't have skyscrapers, mostly 2 - 4 story buildings
Urban Sprawl 3 is still in progress. Was hoping it would have been released for MM.
Some of the buildings from Utopia Blocks also work well in a contemporary setting.
A lot of his sets can be mixed together as well. For example, the one below uses the NYC Townhouses, City Courtyard, and individual structures from Urban Sprawl 2 as well as a couple standalone buildings from PD3A's City Streets.
I keep toying with doing my After theme as a webcomic. Stuff like this would be perfect...
(After: weird apocalypse)
The great thing about archtectural props is that you can get away with a lot more blatant tweaking of the materials settings, as well as simply stacking smaller buildings on top of each other to make taller ones. Besides Stonemason's Urban Sprawls and other city elements like the Greeble City and Urban Future packs, I tend to use a lot of the city building products from over at Rendo: Dreamland Models' Movie Sets, Powerages Powertown, the various White Magus products, RubiconDigital's Poser City, 3-D-C's Sci Fi city pieces, Ironman13's CIty Vibes, IanMPalmer's Instant City, and MRX3010's Cydonia sets. Of course, many of those are theoretically Poser only, but I've found that YURDigital's Poser Glossover script tames most of them to DAZ usibility pretty quickly.