Stonemason's 'Winter Castle' question
HorusRa
Posts: 1,665
The description seems vague, or at least to me. Anyone purchased this could tell me and others just what exactly is included in this? The mountain and castle? It says boulders, but I don't see any in the promos. Is this just a construction set, ('one wall' makes it sound like a construction set thing)? Is it an entire scene as shown in the main promo? Boulders, towers, are these extras? DO the stairs come with it? Rarely ever do I have problems with descriptions, but this one is quite vague. 
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We made inquiries and there are a bunch of thumbnails that didn't make it on to the page. They should be available soon.
I bought and downloaded this yesterday but I haven't had a chance to properly look at it yet. There's a complete scene of the castle and mountain, which appears to include the atmospherics as well. There are seperate props of walls and other bits plus some boulders.
The installer is over 530 mb so you really get your money's worth. The geometry is only about 40 mb, most of the rest is the textures.
There are two installers: DAZ Studio Iray and Wavefront Object.
Cheers,
Alex.
.
I love stonemason content and have 80% f it. this castle looked really awesome until I seen no 3DL mats included....No Sale.Pass.
Challenge accepted!
Ok, looking at it, the base terrain uses Stonemason's cool layered skin thing. That's not easy to copy.
Going to try some simple approaches and see if they work decently. (The complex approach would be painstakingly copying every shader over to the shader from Winter Terrains, but if that was the only way to do it right, then yeah, this is a 'not for 3dl folks' product)
Interesting you accept a challenge I never made. I wonder would you buy a brand new car and then expect to have it painted so you could wash it & wax it? if i'm gunna buy an expensive model I expect to be able to use it for my needs. Iray does not fit my needs for animation So I pass . Hows thats a challenge..lol . Iray maybe fine for still render folks and I wish them well and hope they enjoy it. for animation Renderman-lite and 3DL cpu Metal Ray rendering is the best option for me. I been reading that even professional animation studios use cpu rendering over gpu rendering. for a number of reasons ... now Will if you would be willing to convert all the Iray only models to 3dl for me for free that maybe a game changer for me buying it..I have 2 thats need converting now. .. Other wise I have no need wanting to spend hours converting a model i need for animation that should be ready to use out of the box at $ 34 bucks or even $24 bucks. thats my point. I have other nice castle and I own stonemasons winter terrain. so its no big deal passing on this one. Animation takes long enough to create with out having extra texture work. not to mention that my 2 graphic cards only render 6 gigs max they do not combine... My sets for animations with characters will excceed that 6 gigs vram ina heart beat
Ok, I will be sure to make a note that you aren't one for levity.
I like to experiment with converting products that are only 3dl or only iray into the other shader. Sometimes the conversion is way easier and faster than people would think, and I like to find that out for people. Sometimes the conversion is incredibly hard, and, well, likewise.
In this case, the Iray shaders involved are unique and quite specific. While I think one could, with the 3DL Winter Terrain similar shaders, convert it over, it would be an incredibly difficult conversion process.
The other approach is simply plop in other shaders. This works best if the base model is very detailed and can 'take' carrying the surface effect mostly by itself.
So, I then attempted to see how well the surfaces would work with other 3DL shaders applied. In this case, various forms of Rock shader ( http://www.daz3d.com/rock-shader-for-daz-studio ).
The final effect is nothing like a Winter Castle, but I think it came out nicely. It reminds me of some castles I've seen in Spain (somewhat).
Yea I'm a Capricorn.. :)
Thank you Barefoot Upto My Soul for the nice compliment not many daz users drop over $5000 for a custom made pc . My PC is custom built & now 3 years old. I upgraded my graphic cards last year to 2 - 980 ti's it came with a gtx780 & filled the cpu memory to the limit which is 64 gigs. it came with 16 gigs new. the main thing is I have a good Intel Ivy-bridge 3.333 Ghz dual - 6 core processor with HT over clocking on demand . without having to go into bios to do it. cost like hell when i bought it but its starting to show its age now with the new stuff thats coming out .
I think what makes my animations stand apart from most other daz studio animation is I like to use a lot of props and expansive environments and my films usually run 2 minutes or more. which i can not render in Iray with any satisfactory render times . I believe is because my use of so many props and character supersedes the limits of my graphic GPU forcing my the render to fall back on the cpu. which then really slows down the Iray render. even though when running SLI with 2 - 980ti can give me 12 gigs of combined vram daz Iray dos not use SLi combined technology and only will use the vram of the first card which is 6 gig of vram. .. that is my complaint with Iray is how much resources it takes to make animation scene with it. I could go spend $10.000 on building a Independent gpu server . but that is just to much investment for a daz animation. at that kind of investment I would be much better off moving over totally to Maya or 3d Max. thats just to much money to invest in something that I hardly if ever make any money on... it takes month and months to create a entertaining animation. plus sound & film editing, copyright licensing paperwork etc. and i know I'm not perfect animator by any means, I have a errors and mistakes sometimes in my animation mostly because i am learning how to do something new to create some movement . But I am learning to catch those before going to final render.
I like Iray for the real time render preview that is very helpful. and I don't need iray mats in order for preview to work for me. . but its is impossible to use Iray for a serious animation with the pc I have now GPU rendering really needs a render farm to use Iray for rendering serious animation. not many hobbyist i know are going shell out that kind of money for render time on a farm. at $30 and up for GPU hours on a render farm. which is what Pixar tractor is charging right now for CPU render farm. . not to mention I am very good at using 3dl and renderman-lite for Maya which at the time i bought the plugin it was only $250 Now I think its 4 times that so that is properly why i prefer it better for my work flow. i have a lot more experience with 3DL
from what I read in article about how Pixar made the animation monsters University use CPU rendering over gpu render. the first reason was for lighting control. then there is the render times require for each Pixar scene, which are are incredibly long. some scenes Pixar makes takes weeks to months to render as they state "All told, it has taken more than 100 million CPU hours to render the film in its final form. If you used one CPU to do the job, it would have taken about 10,000 years to finish. With all of those CPUs that Pixar did have, it took a couple of years to render.". gpu rendering creates way more heat than cpu rendering and cpu is easier to keep cool under pressure.. GPU is also much more costly to maintain and repair making its less attractive as a render engine plus the upgrade cost would be astronomical. so the studios prefer cpu rendering don't get me wrong Iray is a great for still art realistic rendering using daz studio for the basic user. but Iray is not much good to use for long running animation rendering, until the rendering get less resource intensive. which really needs to start with the model and the textures .. But that is just my opinion. other opinions will differ
Ahhh... thanks for the info about the IRAY only ground terrain shaders. I love that Stonemason made this castle which matches the Winter Ruins castle.
Didn't someone make a LIE snow top layer shader ? Would Stonemason's dirt shader work like that if the diffuse could be made white... for a snowy top layer over rock shaders?
Well I smiled.
Lemons, make great lemonade - some folks like, others not so much.
... And while I suck at using 3DL, what others manage is amazing; it's also great to see what Will manages in his conversions.
the only other thing you can do which I have done with SM's other iray AND 3Delight terrains (and urbansprawl 4 streets) for Carrara and Octane im my case, is render a top view and re UV the terrain if its not already, to flat mapping.
If you use canvases you can do a normal map too, if you can open the exr, image magic viewer will, I believe Photoshop will too not Elements! Though D|S should read them not sure about 3Delight though, Carrara will not.
And yes SM now has to be heavily discounted to get my money on the later sets.
@ColemanRugh "Didn't someone make a LIE snow top layer shader ?"
Here you go.
http://www.daz3d.com/da-let-it-snow
Some day I'll have to adapt my noise shaders to 3DL... you can create shaders that put stuff 'on top' of other stuff.
Just haven't felt super motivated about it.
I always enjoy your sense of humor, Will.
Ivy: those stats on Monsters University are mind-boggling! I appreciate where you're coming from, and your animated mini-films are amazing, particularly given your resource constraints.
Odd that this doesn't have 3Delight snow shaders, Stonemason's Winter Kingdom: Castle Ruins is proof that he does know how to make them.
It's a LOT of work to set up shaders the way he does. Almost every surface in Winter Castle uses a layered shader with 3 layers of stuff, each carefully balanced to create the effect he wants.
That's... time consuming, exacting work.
Here's another one. It doesn't use LIE, but it is based on the snow Stonemason's Winter Kingdom set.
http://www.daz3d.com/let-it-snow-ds-shader
This one works really well in 3delight
Will, your Rock Shader expirement piece looks like a good clay-mation set. We need a bunch of stop-motion sheep climbing up those stairs.
Ha!
Here's another 3DL render of Winter Castle! ... Sort of (Ok, LineRender9000)
Love it Will what was that? LineRender9000
LineRender9000: http://www.daz3d.com/linerender9000
Ciao
TD
Linerender9000, like it said in the quote. Heh.
It's a combination of 'shaded output' run through graphic pen filter in Photoshop with a crucial fractal lines layer adding fine details on top.