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For me personally, I prefer using photographic backdrops, and if it's for Iray, maybe an HDRi would provide at least some of the exterior view. I know I tend to get very frustrated when I do exteriors with lots of foliage, as everything slows to a crawl. I love Alessandro's Ultimo Paradiso, but I've never had the machine to do much work with a fully populated island. I *want* to use that set, but never really could without removing most of the plants.
I think I tend more toward interiors with simple views of the exterior, rather than the other way around. Jst the way my renders tend to go, I think. I do have some of Stonemason's sets for cityscapes, but they're not really full of plants and trees, and I know those add a lot to the CPU overhead.
I wonder if it would work to have one central building (maybe replaceable, with add-ons sets), and that one has all the trimmings. But the other buildings on the block are basically flat images, with maybe some plants and streetlights to give the illusion of dimensionality.
I'm sure others are different in their needs, but for my work, good full interiors are hard to come by, and what I tend to look for.
That's the tough thing about doing good, natural exteriors. I don't know if billboards would work well for buildings, at least in the near distance (like the house next door to the main focal point, or even the one next to that), but I am working on doing the background houses and buildings that way.
I guess the way I'm approaching this concept is less about the backlot method (which, as I mentioned, I would love to do in some smaller, more limited capacity) but more of what could be built on a soundstage. I think that gives the greatest opportunity for customization with the smallest amount of overhead. And working from the inside-out, as you suggest, is probably the key way to go with things. A full scale mockup of a house's interior could be done pretty quickly. Then the "exterior" could be detailed matte paintings and a texture for the soundstage "floor" to make it look like a lawn or a driveway or a street. That way you get the benefit of the nicely detailed interior, with something quick and easy to look at through the windows.
Instead of the actual shootable exterior being a full thing, it could be done the way old shows like Happy Days did it. The front of the house is just an establishing shot, done either on a location or a backlot, and the exterior sets used for live action are just small soundstage mockups... the front of the garage as the back "wall", the side of the house as the left "wall", and a board fence as the right "wall".
There are lots of possibilities, almost all of them good ones, with the exception of highly detailed, large-scale exteriors, for just the reasons you mentioned. Foliage creates a lot of CPU and memory overhead.
For me the Movie Sets are useful if I just need a background filler for a quick render.
Houses - I like interiors included like in the Blue Collar Bungalow, where the interior layout conforms with the house's exterior. But I also purchased the 5 Low Poly Bungalow (exterior only) with the intent of using them to make a neighborhood. Unfortunately, there were no sidewalk and lawn included as in the promo images so making a neighborhood is not an option.
It looks like the Blue Collar Bungalow is no longer in your store. Does that mean we're out of luck for the sidewalk, street, and lawn?
I have reworked the first of the exterior-only Bungalows to include a garage, sidewalks, lawn, etc. The plan has been to re-do all 5 of them that way. But I may modify that plan based on feedback here. I want to focus my time and energy on what is most useful for the largest number of people.
Checking "Hide Items I own" it gives "11 of 24 items", some of them I got somewhere else. Remaining items not bought are Portrait Vignettes/Movie Sets - if not for free - and Create a Room, which is already covered by MacLean. Doing some already existing stuff in an-extremly-as-MacLean-clean-style won't tempt me to buy. Modern Home-stuff was almost an instant buy, but that's because I need a round-view; stage-view is useless for my needs, even the now fastgrab "Movie Sets Haunted House" took my attention at the time t was released and everytime I looked at this I was thinking: how will this work when I change the camera view.
I wish you best with those ready-to-render-sets (and lots of money) but I still hope you will release some more in the style of NFX-studios ...
Generally, I prefer breaking everything into matched interior/exteriors, preferably broken down to even smaller subsets for the interiors. Less use of resources and a lot easier to light and set up cameras as long as all the walls/floors/ceilings can be made visible separately. I've got a number of otherwise very good sets that are just a nightmare to work with because you have to hide a half dozen surfaces to get the angle/focal length you want, and it's not until you've started a render that you realize that hiding wall X has also hidden something that shouldn't be.
Yeah, that is what I'm hoping to address with Create A Room, the ability to put together only the elements you need in regards to floors, walls, and ceilings, put in whatever decor you want, and render. Some of the things that make a set useful to me are ease of use, customization, and CPU/memory usage. Some of the things I'll be introducing in future expansions are various L-shaped walls, and walls with square (rather than 45 degree) edges. I had experimented in doing the promos for the first Xpack with doubling up the room by loading the set twice. It works great, except those 45 degree cutouts in the wall intersections are visible. Maybe I can add some floor-to-ceiling exposed beams to cover that in the existing sets. It won't necessarily be something that was done in the actual Craftsman style, but it's Craftsman-esque.
I have taken a liking to your portrait vingettes. Initially I downloaded them because they were free thinking, 'I'll probably never use that'. They are incredibly handy for a quick backdrop however and I'm using and wanting stuff like that more and more. Obviously not many are going to want every genre or style, but the more there is to choose from and the more adaptable and customisable it is, the better.
I like your thoughts on being able to 'create-a-room' behind the facade. If you can see through that window and have the basic detail required in there it ties the scene together more effectively. Likewise if I can turn around and shoot a camera out of the same window with the same basic details it makes everything more believable. It's kind of the same for an interior where the next frame in a sequence needs to shot from the opposite derection to the first one - I want that fourth wall. I want the ceiling for low angle shots and I'm good if its grouped so I can hide it for high angle shots. I like the sets where the wall and everything on it is a seperate object that can be deleted. It took me a while to get it through my head that what the camera can't see doesn't matter. Except maybe where lights are concerned. But I like modeled details wherever possible and being able to delete geometry is always good.
So I probably have enough medieval castle hallways and scifi corridors. :) A couple of shopping precinct facades would be of interest to me. A few different types of shop fronts with details like the footpath, awnings, rubbish bins, benches, signs, streetlights, an ATM etc. Problem is most modern shop windows are large and transparent and there's that whole issue of needing a detailed interior. That could be good for a series that could connect together if you needed a wider angle in your shot. And variety. Lack of variety in my own content library forced me to look at manipulating materials to make the same old thing render after render look a bit different. Products like those vingettes took care of that in some situations (and getting them as pc+ freebies was awesome - thanks!).
It's the same with interior sets where one wall interfaces with the 'outside'. I'm ok when there's nothing across the street, it's probably reasonable to expect I can fill in that detail myself, and might very well want to customise it. What I really like is when I can go 'outside' and get a shot back inside through that interfacing wall with some of the basic exterior details provided. I've got to a point in my learning curve where i've realised that to get exactly what I want, I have to know how to do at least some basic modeling and material creation. For the time it takes for all the processes involved in creating a render, I guess the more of it you take care of for me in the product the better. :) I also realise there is a point you have to start making compromises on all sorts of things. It is rare indeed when you can cater for everything!
A street of shops and a street of houses would both be verry useful to me. And probably not a dead flat street, something to simulate a more natural topology. Possibly an intersection at some point and a corner at one end so you can shoot down the street. And I guess now I need to see both sides of the street at the same time and...well, I'll leave it all in your capable hands C3D. :) Just a few thoughts. I'll be looking forward to whatever you come up with.
I'm probably weird, but I tend to render interior scenes a lot. What matters to me is to be able to hide the ceiling and other elements of the scene but also that I can light it pretty easily. I don't tend to use exterior movie set type settings too often.
Check out the Create A Room. Some of the portrait vignettes are a little more specific and/or come with additional props, but the Create A Room might be something you'd be interested in. A lot of times hiding the ceiling and lighting with an HDRI is sufficient to get pretty decent results.
It's usually better to have the mid-ground be actual geometry (if simplified) and only have far-ground stuff be HDRI imagery or composited in during post.
For INTERIOR sets, having lighting presets is pretty important. HDRI-style or Exterior style lighting tends to work against interior renders. Having actual lights (with IES profiles) can really bring the scene to life. Especially if there are multiple presets....for the 'lights out' look, the 'daylight coming in through the windows' look, or the 'lights on at night', etc.....
Having basic foliage (that is either prop-based, or bilboarded) that can be removed/hidden would be best in my opinion. That way, if it looks too fake in the render, the artist can just replace those particular plants with more complex versions. Even basic grass could just be shader-based....if it's not clearly in view and close-up, you can get away with a lot just adding a partially transparent 'edging' the has little blade tips on a shell that goes around the edges of the house/sidewalk/etc.
One of the things I've missed on otherwise well-done exterior sets is quick optional closure on all the paths into and out of the scene. For instance, if you look at FirstBastion's excellent Last Chance Gas Station, kitbashing extra trees, woodlands, railyards, etc. behind the building or across the little stretch of highway is no trouble at all; I have plenty of goodies to do that. But the ability to take shots along the road itself is severely limited, because it's hard to kitbash terrain that matches up with the highway. It'd be terrific if there were a couple of simple optional bookend pieces that I could preload to provide a curve in the road off in each direction, maybe taking it behind a simple hill, that type of thing. For a small garden scene with a cobblestone path, have an optional side piece that takes the path out through a gate and then turns it to the side, backed by some shrubs, etc.
It seems to me that offering this kind of addition (I have no idea what a set designer would call it) to optionally close off the set's pathways would add significant value to environments. As is, they just get to the edge of the environment and stop.
I love the idea of movie sets. I've only gotten a couple of "interior" sets and always find the four walls a bit constricting and hard to get things established and set up. Really only 2 or 3 wall is what I need. As long as the "movie set" is priced accordingly and less expensive than a full interior set.
What you're talking about in regards to difficulties in shooting down a road in a scene that wasn't designed for it is a classic problem with cinematography. In a real world neighborhood, especially a tract development in an urban or suburban area, you have grids of streets that go on and on as far as visiblility allows (at least in the Midwest, where a 2 foot hill is considered a mountain). If you're shooting a movie on a soundstage dressed as a neighborhood, or even on a backlot, it's really just designed to be shot from certain angles. It is difficult or impossible to create scenery as far as the eye can see in every direction.
The issue is compounded in 3d scenes, since everything that's added to the scene brings in more polygons and more textures loaded into memory. Go stand in the middle of your street (hopefully when there is no traffic!) and look straight down so you're seeing the street in 1-point perspective (ie, like looking down a railroad track or a hallway). Assuming you live in a typical urban or suburban neighborhood, how many houses can you see? Dozens? Hundreds? Hundreds of houses in a 3d scene, even very low polygon houses, are going to quickly add up to potentially millions of polygons. When they do shots like that in the movies (I can particularly think of a shot in Carpenter's Halloween where he points the camera straight down a long block of suburban houses), they do it primarily on location.. ie, they go to an actual neighborhood to do it.
One thing you could do, using my houses as an example, would be to put a short block together with houses on each side, center your camera on the street so it's parallel to the road, and take a render. That's your foreground. Group and duplicate that set of houses, move it ahead so it's the next group of houses down. Hide or delete the orignal set. Render and save that with a transparent background. Keep doing that, moving the block farther and farther away. In the end, you use Photoshop or Gimp to composite all of those shots together, and you (in theory) have a seamless street that goes on forever.
Movie sets - or Soundstage sets - are incredibly flexible. I used to be fixated on matching interior/exterior sets. And then I watched the Warehouse 13 DVDs and listened to the commentaries included. Exterior shot of a particular building in a certain neighborhood, interior shots in a different building or on a soundstage; how the art director managed to get several different scenes out of the same soundstage construction just by repainting and relighting. And the incredible amount of post-work cgi add-ons they used to flesh out the scenes.
I highly recommend the final season set - it has an extended coverage of the creation of the entire show.
Here is a sample of the technique I mentioned. These are development scenes I have in my personal library, a small block of houses that exists ONLY for use in very long-range shots, so please forgive the godawful tiling on the street texture, and the pathetic video game trees. There are 50 houses visible in the shot (with the Collective3d Baseball Field™ in the far background), but in reality there are only 10 houses. I just kept moving that same block of 10 houses farther down, and rendering. The individual plates are saved as PNG file so the background is transparent. I dropped them into Photoshop, layered them, did a progressively stronger gaussian blur on each layer moving farther from the camera, merged the scene, did a quick curves adjustment, and flattened it.
This is obviously a crappy example, but I think it illustrates what you could do with a real scene.
I will check that out!
...I'd like to see a midwest city set with buildings similar to these:
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Hey, C3D...the link to your store in your sig goes to your old name (it's written right, but links wrong).
What's this haunted house that was mentioned above?
I used your Victorian set in this render and I LOVED it! Really great quality (love the FLOOR) and whatever I didn't need was easily turned off. http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/135261/ ;
Keep up the great work and keep the vignettes and small sets coming! :3
I agree about needing more useful neigborhood sets, small town sets, and urban sets with versitile int/ext combinations.
I would like to see a decent island comunity set or a island military base, along the lines of some sort of James Bond evil organization hideout.
Some other ideas would be arctic science lab with detailed interiors as well as external vistas, desert military training camp with detailed living quarters, detailed mountain road set with textures that look good up close and in wide shots etc. Some basics, like gas stations, convienience stores, banks, book stores, fast food drive thru, toll booth, speed trap, boarder check point. Columbian drug lord bunker, airports, or airfields.
Another thing I've never really seen is a sets for battle fields, WWII, Korea, Vietnam, The Pacific Islands, DesertStorm.
It's surprising how you can't find soccer fields, football stadiums, pro basketball, pro baseball, pro hockey, pro tennis, or golf sets on the DAZ site, not to mention any racing sets, car, boat, bike, dog, or horse.
Just throwing it out there.
JD
I strongly prefer 4 walls, s I can do camera shots from different angles. Like over the shoulder shots for two people in a coversation or a face-off (action/combat). I could probably use 3 wall sets, but I usually pass on them because of the reduced flexiblity. I also defintly favor exteriors with interiors. One thing I hate about some of Stomemason's exteriors is the lack of thematiclly appropriate interiors. A lot of my renders are inpsired by pencil-and-paper role-playing sessions, and if it looks interesting on the outside we will be heading in to investigate. Interiors can have a similar problem, such as starship hangar bays with no starship. I really cannot stress enough how much I prefer complete sets.
Right now I'm lookig for 1950s stuff (office/university buildings especially come to mind), traditional Fantasy, and Sci-Fi. I feel like I have a lot of modern stuff already, or at least there is alot in the store. Stuff that matches up thematically with e.g. Stonemason's sets come to mind (e.g. interiors for his desert outpost).
Edit: Speaking of Stonemason, IIRC, he used instances in his last two nature sets. Might want to take a look at those to see how they can be used. I think that's the way to go to create realistic looking sets.
I believe this is the one being referred too:
http://www.daz3d.com/collective3d-movie-sets-haunted-house
Fixed the signature, thanks for the heads up!
I have to say again that everyone is giving really useful feedback. I think I have a pretty solid direction in which to start development of the next round of sets. I can't promise everyone will get all the stuff on their wishlist (that wasn't entirely the point of this) but hopefully you all will start finding more useful sets coming out in general.
Thanks, guys, and keep the feedback coming if you have it!
I have run into this countless times and find it so frustrating and restricting.
And to C3D, I pretty much agree with everything said here. LOVE your vignette scenes---they are so useful.
I've got all but three of yours.
I'd like to see a small Southern town with porches that have rocking chairs and hanging bench swings. Real porches that wrap around, not just for the door. With sidewalks that come up to the front porch steps. And you don't even have to throw in a pink flamingo.
My main thing is material zones for the walls. Having part of it wallpapered and part wood trim separating the painted part. I've got so many shaders that would make great wallpaper, but I'd like part of the wall to be accented. You could include one in the set to swap out so we have that option.
It's not a full interior, but Create A Room is a customizable stage set with walls that include many levels of customizable trim, with baseboards, chair rails, and wainscot. It also includes a couple presets that do exactly what you're looking for: wallpaper above and paneling below. The textures can be easily customized with Photoshop or Gimp, and additional presets will be included with future expansions.
Yep, I had gone to take a look at your various sets
On the subject of things no one has made yet... why has no one made a modern Tudor style house for DAZ/Poser? http://www.zillow.com/blog/timeless-doesnt-mean-traditional-in-these-tudors-129693/ It's an incredibly common and classic design style in many areas, yet I've yet to find anything Tudor that isn't clearly supposed to be from several hundred years ago. If you really want to come up with a really useful product, might I suggest a basic 2-3 story house that comes with three to four diffent external finishes. Say... Tudor, Victorian, Colonial and French Provencial? I'd think that combination could be done just by swapping out/hiding shutters, roofs, columns, ballastrades and textures. Likewise, there's an inexplicable shortage of modern adobe-style housing. There are a few larger structures, but a simple 2-3 bedroom house, as is commonly found in California and most of the southwest? I've been in a lot of neighborhoods in SoCal and New Mexico where there's little else but, yet I've yet to find one that's DAZ ready..
D'oh! This is a terrific idea. I'll give it some practice. Thanks!