Usefulness of "Movie Sets"?
Collective3d
Posts: 446
Hey folks, developing the environmental sets that I do here at Daz is an ongoing thing with a lot of variables. Usually I will plan out my sets a couple months at a stretch. One of the biggest challenges is figuring out what is most useful. I talked about some of the issues in my interview for DS Creative a few months back, but just to touch lightly on the subject: it is very easy for a set to be too specific (limited genre type, for example), or too broad (I think a lot of the exterior houses fall into this), and also for them to be too limited in scope or much too wide open in scope.
In analyzing my sales over the past 3+ years, a few trends stand out. Typically speaking, the exterior-only houses (like Modern Home Exterior 1 and 2, the Cape Cod Style Home, etc) tend not to do very well. This is understandable, because they're not terribly useful on their own. You kind of have to own the whole set, or at least a few of them, to be able to build a neighborhood that fills an entire frame. This is an example of something being too broad, or too diffuse, in scope. On the other hand, the houses with full interiors (such as The Farmhouse, and Modern Home Deluxe 1) do very well. It seems you guys generally get a lot of use out of those. Another thing that sells very well is the Create A Room, and I get a lot of positive feedback regarding the PC freebie Portrait Vignettes.
Since full interior houses take a long time and a lot of comprative effort to develop, what I am looking at right now is developing a set of "Movie Sets" that are sort of a cross between the Create A Room (or even part of it) and the Movie Sets I have in the store right now (Victorian Dining Room, and Haunted House). The idea is that there would be 1 or 3-sided sets with a limited field of view, but with additional detail. For instance, through additions and custom setpieces for the Create A Room, I could expand its usefulness as a "sound stage" for framing whatever shots you need to build out of it. Or, instead of selling 1 complete 360 degree exterior-only house with a narrow patch of lawn, I could do a row of 3 facades with a much more detailed front lawn, and everything behind the house either cut away or lower detail, for shooting "establishing shots" that don't require you to be able to go anywhere in the scene. The backdrops could be extremely detailed mattes or partial cycloramas, making a "neighborhood" shot much easier to shoot.
So what I'm wondering here is, does that sound like something that would be useful for your renders? What types of Movie Sets would you like to see (genre specific, everyday, etc)? What kind of additions to the Create A Room Base Set would be most helpful or useful to you?
Feedback would be great, and most appreciated. There is an XPack for Create A Room already in the system and approaching a release date, and which features a lot of (I think) useful doors, wall hangings, and other decor. Let me know what you guys think about Movie Sets, and keep an eye out in the coming weeks for another giveaway on the Create A Room Xpack!
Thanks for all your feedback!
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Comments
These are only MY opinions, but here they are.....
Genre's should be pretty generic....with textures/props included (or as expansions) to customize a given set to a 'genre'. Ancient Civilization, Historical, Modern, Futuristic, Alien, Toon.....
I find I get the most out of a set that is COMPLETE, but customizable. Give us all four walls, but allow an easy way to 'hide' each one. Give us several lighting presets (for both 3DL and Iray) too.
For even an exterior house, there should be a simple interior. Just so when a door is opened, or windows are given actual glass shaders, it still looks right. The 'land' the house is on should have several presets....one for a dense urban suburb, one for a spacious suburb, one for a rural location, and one for an 'estate'. This could be done with some displacement maps, transparency maps, and different loads of shrub/fence/tree props for each. I find I tend to avoid sets that aren't 'four walls' or are 'exterior only'....
For interior sets, please make sure exterior facing walls HAVE an exterior. I like to sometimes have the camera 'look in' through the window or door, etc. Doesn't have to be really detailed, but it should be something. Preloads with no props, with base props, and with full props. Expansions and texture sets are also good. They allow us to spread out the cost over several purchases (and weeks/months) and get double- or triple- (or more) duty out of a single set. Of course, the base set should have at least one genre included....so it is usuable (for that genre) 'out-of-the-box'....and the expansions just allow it to be re-purposed or extended. Re-usability and extendibility is KEY for sets.
Boy hardy, could I ever use a Japanese fishing village with a working dock a" working dock" where they have markets set up right on the fishing docks. I really could use one of these sets for a animated project i have on hold because i've ben trying to figure out to kit bash one together.
If you make a Japanese fishing village with a working dock. It will be a instant buy for me.
The short answer is YES! Movie sets would be great. Ive had an eye on many of your sets for some time but I never end up purchasing because I know that I would have to hunt for matching interiors. Facades with customizable interiors would be great. Anything that would achieve the illusion of a complete house or whatever would be great. I dont necessarily need the complete house as long as I can still achieve a number of different interior and exterior shots from different angles.
Create a Room is a great product and ive been hoping for expansions ever since I got it on day one (I think).
As for genre's, ALL PLEASE. I would be interested in just about any movie set genre that can be seen in film today (or in the past).
And lastly, thanks for reaching out to get feedback from us. I always appreciate a vender that caters to their customers.
I would like more shader/material options, so a house could have different style paint jobs and roofs, for plants/trees/grass seasons could change from summer to fall to snow covered. Maybe a grey scale material option so we can change the colors ourselves.
Having the facades for a whole neighborood street would be a thing I woud buy, particularly if the houses could be re-ordered or left out (say 6 house fronts and yards where three will fill a scene, allowing me to have a random set to do multiple neighborhoods in (not neccessarily in the same product, as long as they are interchangeable I would but them singly. Front yard and street section would be necessary). Yes, I have your room creator, and are interested in any expansion packs you come up with. I do a lot of comics, and need at least three sides to a room, though can use movie sets if it fits my story line.
As far as what types of movie sets, let me think about that and post again later.
Great feedback!
A lot of the customization stuff you mention is available with the Create A Room and the upcoming expansions, so it seems I'm on the right track there.
What I have in mind right now is, for instance, a scene made up of only facades, that looks like the one in the attached image, just drop and render. While the background in this set was about 5 million polys worth of trees and additional houses, in the facade scene, all the background stuff would be on a matte or a cyclorama type prop, the garages would be extremely low poly with low res textures, and the houses themselves would only contain the portions visible to the camera within a certain field of view (so, for instance, the center house would have the front and side walls and front gable/roof slope, while the flanking houses would be lower poly and only have the front and one side). That way you could drop the camera near the center, and shoot the scene with a little bit of leeway to move the camera side to side a bit, but mostly focusing on the "hero" house in the center.
I would do a number of setup shots that way, and then the interiors could be created on the "sound stage" using the Create A Room and its various addons. If possible, the Create A Room could even be moved up to abut the inside of a facade so you could move the camera up and "look in" if you so desired.
Does that sound like it would be a useful setup?
What I really want to create here is a vast series of odds and ends and complete sets that, combined, would allow folks to build whatever they specifically need. For instance, the Create A Room right now comes with walls with various levels of Craftsman-style trim, doors, and windows, and "clean" textures. For a texture set, I could do a more "run down" paint job and provide planar-mapped overlays to create cracks or holes in the wall, layers of dust or cobwebs, etc.
Essentially, when a set is built for a television show or a movie, they will design and construct the walls on a soundstage to whatever specifications are required for the show or the particular scene. They'll then go to one of the warehouses on the various studio lots and "shop" for things like furniture, decor, etc. This is the kind of thing I have in mind (additionally, the fine pieces of furniture and decor already available from other PAs could be used to fill the scene as well).
Ivy: I don't know about something as specific as a Japanese fising village (that's a very specific thing), but I'll look into it!
i love "movie sets" as I've works movies and theater. Must haves.
Genres: Add me to the Japanese villiage and a sci-fi club. A contemporary suburb so I can have monsters and weird stuff chasing people around...
My personal take, doing both art and having worked in the film industry...
My "oh, joy!" product is a working exterior/interior. Even Universal Studios has many of these -- the corner diner made popular in the Back to the Future movies comes to mind. Some of the Colonial Drive backlot houses are more than just facades. While the interiors aren't full sound stages, many of them have working set elements. They do make movies in them.
To give you an idea of how it works in the "real world" -- plus it's fun just looking -- here's a virtual tour of the Uni backlot. Click on the Colonial Drive sets, then any of the numbered houses with interiors:
http://universal.filmmakersdestination.com/home/sound-stages-backlot/virtual-tour/
To me, if it's good enough for Columbo, Adam-12, and Emergency, it's good enough for making Daz scenes!
Since many of us are now using Iray, what is CRITICAL is removable walls and ceiling, so that we can rely on the easier-to-use HDRi's for lighting. Personally, I'd add an option of the missing wall in the three-walled set concept. That works in theater or live audience, but can be somewhat limited when setting up shooting dramatic scenes for multi-camera angles. Have some pushbutton options for hiding and displaying all the exterior walls and ceiling, plus any interior wall that might make it too cramped when shooting a smaller interior.
(I know Create-a-Room is a three-walled set, and my notes above aren't intended to knock the idea. It's just that it's not as useful to me as a full interior where all walls can be shown or hidden.)
In case you're interested, the interior of the Munster house is Interior 8. I'm pretty sure the interior of it wasn't built up until sometime after about 1974, when I was last there. Uni didn't always have practical interiors for their Anywhere USA facades.
My renders tend to be fairly widespread in nature, but I'm always looking for a nice house, with kitchen, living room, and a bedroom. Example: click on Interior 9 on Universal's Colonial Street properties. That would make a terrific set (you don't have to provide all the rooms.) Interior 6 shows one with an open ceiling. Since we have the option of removing meshes, how about a control for show/hide the ceiling, as well as show/hide the roof. With both gone, the scene could be lit with a simple HDRi. Otherwise, every interior would need custom lighting, and that's a lot of work.
I can tell you in the movie biz, courtrooms, school rooms, jail/prison cells, and general offices are among those that rank high for pre-built interior set rentals. I'm guessing many of us Daz film makers have similar needs.
Finally, on "neghborhoods." The problem with building practical int/ext sets here is that it's unlikely a neighborhood would have all the genre types we might be inrterested in: a 60s split level, modern 2-story, single-story California ranch, farm, Psycho house, *and* Dune hut. I do like the idea of three neighborhood-friendly facades, with the possibility that in one of them, you make it a full interior set.
What ever way you go with this, good luck with it, and a loud thank you! for asking!
Hmmm.... since I was curious and I knew I have quite a few of your items, you have 24 items in the store. I have all but two of them. Which means I'll probably buy whatever it is you make so I wouldn't worry about it ;)
I was just looking at your catalog today. Apparently, I have all but 10 of your listed products! More, actually, because I see some of the things I own are no longer in your catalog.
I use the exterior only sets as much, if not more, than the complete sets. And when I need additional homes in an area, I turn to the low-poly bungalows.
I use Iray almost exclusively now, and I seldom use backdrops, millenium environments or cycloramas anymore. Then again, I like to render such scenes without drawing the dome, and use my own photography to fill the empty areas of the background.
I love the whole "create-a-room" concept and expect to buy most, if not all, of the sets in that series. I do a lot of kit-bashing, and this series fits that mode of scene creation perfectly.
Thank you for such nice sets, too. Please keep them coming.
Sets that are kitbashing-friendly are exactly what I have in mind, and what the Create A Room was designed to be, so I'm glad that's really useful!
That backlot tour is absolutely amazing. I think the biggest challenge in something like that would be how to handle all the foliage and odds and ends in a way that's realistic and doesn't go overboard on poly counts and texture sizes. Something like that might need to wait for home computer technology to catch up a bit. When a scene like that is done at a CG house, it's done on computers a lot more powerful than the average user has in their home (and than I have in my home), and rendered at a render farm, where 25,000 processors can work on it at once. It would be incredible to be able to load in one of those backlot scenes, complete, and be able to put the camera just about anywhere.
I do like the idea of doing a central "hero" house with a partial or full interior, with the surrounding houses being less complete, or even just facades.
Overall, is it important for you guys to have all the stuff in the background (for instance, the row of houses behind the one you're shooting) or do you prefer to composite stuff like that in post?
In regards to an earlier comment regarding lighting sets... for Iray specifically, is this really as important as it might have been for 3Delight? I find in Iray I can get along pretty well with the sun/sky or an HDRI, with a few omnis dropped into the position of whatever artificial light sources might be in the scene, adjusting the exposure as necessary.
Last question from this set: would "so-so" foliage from me, that is included in the set, be preferable to, say, just adding your own foliage? For instance, Predatron and XFrog, among others, have wonderful foliage sets and do them much better than I ever could. In fact, I use them a lot in my own promos.
Not really sure what you mean by "movie sets" unless you mean themes. I saw your haunted house set in fastgrab and while the detail was amazing, I saw very few possibilities for renders with the limited scope and what was included. Your Portrait Vignettes have proven to be useful for me and I feel that expanding on those would be a good way to go, with extra walls and props and such. I like the neighborhood idea, but feel the most important aspect of it would be the layout, foundation, such as the streets and yards all connected with the buildings being secondary and interchangable. If you have 3-4 different house styles with a few different texture sets for each, that would go a long way in populating a street scene or even a few street scenes, especially with instancing
One idea I could see being useful is a farmhouse scene complete with the land around it, fencing, barns, windmill, house, haybales, detailed ground and dirt driveway, picnic area, etc and you could use the trees as the boundary around it so that the scene could be set up from any angle at any level below the tree line. I kitbash scenes like this often, but it is time consuming setting them up.
Don't know if you have seen the City Block Sets by Dreamlandmodels at Rendo. They are very well done, but very limited in usefulness for me since I don't base any renders from that timezone, but if they were more modern I would be jumping at them.
I'm very familiar with the Dreamland sets. They are definitely keyed into the postwar/1950s era in a way that's hard to break out of. A lot of the houses I do come from that period and earlier, but are also acceptable as modern dwellings, since so many of them still exist in a lot of older neighborhoods.
I also really like the idea of having a large neighborhood where the houses can be interchanged. The biggest issue with that, is the driveways and walkways are so dependent on the specific house that's going on that specific spot. Grass grows higher than the concrete, so the concrete is "below" the level of the grass. I can see no good way of doing this in a realistic fashion that is completely customizable. It's one of the things I've been struggling with for the past year or more, otherwise I'd have a dozen or more additional sets in my store by now. It's possible that each house location could have a generic driveway, and a hole where the house (with the walkway portion of it's property) can fit into. It's not full customization, but better than the houses being fixed in place. On the other hand, the backlot concept (on a limited basis) might be more useful with several different pre-planned stretches of houses that are static, and you can drop in whichever set of houses (1920s kit houses, postwar tract houses, modern McMansions, etc) you need.
I've spent several hours debating over which of your viginettes to buy in PC sales..which ones are most useful as is, which are are most useful in a utilitatrian stance..which one I have a direct need for..
(This was caused by getting the new one as a freebie, btw, and how very nice it was).
For backgrounds, it really depends on the genre to be honest. A typical modern neighborhood, it's easy enough to find a rights appropriate image to use. For something elese..say sci-fi western, it can not be...but in any case, simple jpg backgrounds can be nice, and useful for kitbashing.
Foliage is outside my experience..I don't think I'd like "bare" lawns, for example, bu don't know how to balance that.
The main thing I'd want for a "movie set" is usability... for example, Doors open and show not a full room, but a bit of a hall or something so some standing in it doesn't look like they're standing in an empty frame. Same thing with Garage doors, for exmple. (even if they're just boxes behind the doors with jpg rooms.).. Exterior locations are that...then you move to a room set for interior stuff.
I like the idea of movie sets alot. Your haunted house for example. Its great on its own but the props contained in them are invaluable! If you could somehow incorporate the idea of a room builder so we can make our own inside you already existing set pieces that would be stupendous!
Everyone is providing extremely useful feedback, and I'm already bouncing a few new design ideas around. Keep it coming!
I like to put my characters in a scene rather than matrix like empty space. I generally get the character ready then add a scene. I like my scenes to be able to be loaded easily so I can move the character into the right spot. I like to have iRay lights and also camera sets with position pose to put the character in back in the scene. The cameras do not have to be perfect but enough to frame the scene.
Sometimes I like to buy scenes that could pass from my favorite movies, tv shows, and or books. That is if that is what you mean by movie scenes. If you mean scenes that look like we are rendering a movie scene set with green screens and cameras and all that, that would be cool too.
Right now I am on my tablet and did a cursory glance of the topic but will give a closer look once I am at my computer and hopefully wearing my glasses.
I kinda disagree about the value of even the haunted house because its all separate props and kit bashing is where its at. I did a render just today using elements of that set along with an HDRi that i thought turned out wonderful.
Here is a link to it but be warned nudity ahead. Nothing perverted but if you are offended by the female form dont click
http://surreal-muse.deviantart.com/art/Nature-walk-611353460
Speaking of movie sets and Universal's Backlot, I think mely3D new offering might fit right into the discussion.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/89306/mely3d-output-commercial#latest
As Wonderland said, customizing for me is the key. Not sure what the real world setting looks like in other places, but for the most part Southern California neighborhoods were mass produced in “tracts” of 5- hundreds of houses with 1-5 different models and limited color variations (some of the "differences" were as simple as "would you like the garage on the left side of the front door, or the right side?") Older neighborhoods start to differentiate over time as houses are demolished and rebuilt, or expanded to add room, patios, etc. But if you pay close enough attention, you can still see the basic outlines of models 1-5 even in 40+ year old housing tracts.
I am a doctor who fan but also like urban fantasy. I also like the fair share of the Star _____ franchises like star wars and star trek for example. I like to mix themes that sometimes only make sense to me. My favorite show as a kid was star trek voyager (partly because I had a crush on the first officer) but my favorite sci-fi movie as a kid was stargate. I loved the fact that the characters could go to a different planet without the aid of a starship. It had influenced my stories to where I like that walk to another world type of thing. It makes mixing sci-fi and traditional fantasy/ medieval stuff. Though I once got flack for having a story based on that technology with it being a romantic story verses a story dealing with traveling. The flack I got was that I put Willy nilly a stargate into the story which was not the case. I based the whole story on the idea of two characters from different worlds meeting each other via a stargate but finding true love despite lots of differences. I did not want to use space faring transportation as that did not fit the feel I wanted nor was there a way without a stargate or space faring transportation for the two to meet. Well also not using a tardis or similar technology.
Sorry for the rant if that was one. Basically saying that I like to blend genres and stuff to make the stories work. Even more stargate like technology or scenes would be great. I want a stargate sarcophagus by itself or in a room dedicated to it. A sarcophagus would blend vampire mythology with my stargate inspired stuff quite well. I am trying to think of other ideas you could try.
I agree kitbashing is a must for me also and I see your point. I guess I didn't see the use for the plants included since I have a TON of trees, grass and shrubs I use for kitbashing already and my focus was more on a use for the house front
Does it come with a Delorean? ;) (Close enough Marty, now we just wait for the lightnening)
The biggest value for me in this set to be honest is the terrain. I am still too stupid to make heads or tails of the daz deformer that to have an actual hill was worth the price of admission lol
Daniel
I didn't know there was any such thing as a "Daz Deforner," but what I would love is if Daz or another PA built a tool for Studio that did instance scattering on a surface. To do really natural looking grass, you have you scatter 10s of millions of individual blades. In a professional suite like 3ds Max, you would use one of the multitude of instance scattering tools to distribute proxies of the grass mesh, which doesn't impact your viewport performance because the proxies are all instances and invisible until render time.
Max itself comes with a proxy tool that is specific to Mental Ray, the predecessor of Iray. It would be lovely for environment builders if we had something like that for Daz Studio.
Yah daz has a deforming tool that can be used to fix pokethru (also helpful from what i understand to get hair to fit under hats) to creating landscape type planes or deforming meshes to make them do all sorts of jacked up things and than actually save them as a morph. But like i said i am too dumb to figure out what to do or how to do it.
Daniel
Would something like Draagonstorm's Instances Plus help for the instances issue? I haven't bought/used it myself, because I haven't needed to do too much with instances, but it looks useful.
As far as the movie sets concept goes, it sounds very useful. It does seem like the sort of thing that will work well with Create A Room and/or if make sure that every wall, the roof and the floor are separately boned. (I will be the happiest camper ever once Create A Room has doors!)
The AntFarm sold some things here that are somewhat like you're talking about, but they were very specific, and also a bit old (it's been a while since we had SKUs that low!) -- The BC Office bundle. I've found them very useful, just, as noted, very specific.
I think I've seen that instancing tool before. It's not really clear (at least to me, anyway) whether it distributes the instances along the surface of an actual mesh. If it does, scattering 10 million instances might be better on performance than having 10 million non-instanced polygons in the scene, but I'm not sure if it would be THAT big of a performance improvement. The best thing is to scatter proxy instances. That way there is no actual geometry in the scene, instanced or otherwise. Billboard instances of the proxy are created solely at runtime (so 10 million instanced polys might take a long time to render, but would not affect viewport/computer performance outside of the actual rendering process). Maybe I'll look deeper into that tool and see what I can do with it.
Looks pretty cool. Probably looks a bit different now, especially after the fire a few years back that gutted a lot more of this section than I care to think about, but it's pretty faithful to how it looked in the 80s.
To see what it looks like now, try the virtual tour, New York, exterior vantage 2.
I've already got a few of your bits and pieces and have just bought the Modern Home Exterior. I like fairly low poly stuff (with lots of material zones) that provides a backdrop/setting for the action rather than competes with it and can be used from a wide variety of different angles. Thanks for asking :)
Thanks too to Tobor for the link to the virtual set tour. It's amazing and sparks a ton of ideas. I'm not sure it's possible to look at it from an artist's point of view and not be inspired to create something. Added to 'favourites' forever :)