You Can Help Design the Next Create a Room XPack! [COMMERCIAL]
Collective3d
Posts: 446
Those who have been following the Collective3d Facebook page already know that the next XPack for the Create a Room series is currently in development. Due to the enormous popularity of this series, the third XPack is quickly becoming the largest one yet. 44 different wall sections have been completed so far, and I'm estimating there will be a minimum of 60 by time I am finished. For the sake of comparison, there are 25 total wall sections in the first 3 sets (Base, XPack 1, and XPack 2) combined.
In looking to add greater flexibility and customization, Create a Room XPack 3 provides wall sections in differing lengths, with square (rather than angled) corners. This switch comes directly from user feedback. Plain wall sections come in lengths of 2.5, 5, 10, and 15 feet. There is a 2.5 x 2.5 foot corner section as well, so the trim works on the longer outside angles. In additon, there are numerous window sections in 5 foot and 10 foot lengths, with animated sashes hooked up to morph sliders. Single, double, and triple window arrangements, each with 5 different styles of mullion. 2 different bay window styles. 5 and 10 foot sections with passage doors (5 varieties), entry doors (5 more varieties) and archways. I will be adding floor and ceiling sections in 5 x 5 foot squares, making it possible to build the floor plan of an entire home.
Each of the wall sections is mapped and unwrapped in such a way that color changing can be accomplished purely with the color picker in the diffuse channel. Each is mapped with baked ambient occlusion, and the normal maps are tiled appropriately. You just pick your color and render. The trim is fully unwrapped, and can easily be "finished" in plain paint, painted wood, or stained wood textures. The entire set is also backwards compatible with the previous Create a Room sets (expanding your choices even more) and many of the Movie Sets and Portrait Vignettes released over the years by Collective3d.
Beyond walls, floors, and ceilings, Create a Room XPack 3 will also include numerous additional furnishing and fixtures, including new paintings by Matthew Hibben. This is where you come in! I'd like to know what features are most useful or interesting to you, as the end user. What "quality of life" improvements would make the set easier to use? What props, furnishings, fixtures, or structural elements would be most useful or interesting? Your feedback has already driven the development of the set to this point, and I'd like you to drive it a little further. I'll be looking for comments, suggestions, and wish lists here in this thread, and also over on the Collective3d Facebook page. Let me know what you think!
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Comments
Ok, well since you asked...
I buy an insane amount of room sets. I mean nuts. I only have your first Create a Room pack, and I had severe quality of life issues. I don't know if you changed this since the first set, because I didn't go any further.
OK, so if one wanted to use shader presets on the rooms, the trim is out of scale with the walls. Example pic below. The walls and the trim are at a tile value of 1. It is no problem to tile down the walls, but it is much harder to tile up the trim. So I guess, just pay attention to the UV scale, and show some love to the shader preset users in your life. Your material zones are excellent, and I REALLY appreciate that.
cheers!
Stairs, traditional or not. Floors and railings designed for stairs. Vaulted ceilings.
Shortwalls and pass throughs. Arched room passage. French Doors. Wainscot and panelled walls... like cabinet doors not 1970's panelling!
Rather than plain old arcitecture, how about some antique fancy stuff; Georgian or Victorian, early American, French colonial? Fancy curved stairs and ballisters, the sort of thing that a person could use to create their own mansion. Look up 'Asnaghi'. It's an Italian design house that designs amazing interiors and furniture. I've bought a few 3D models from TurboSquid (argh...expensive!) of ornate older architecture, converted them in 3DSMax, fixed them in Blender (rigged doors and reduced the polygon count where possible) to use in Studio. The results are gorgeous but terribly time consuming. The 'Reading Room' ( https://www.daz3d.com/the-reading-room ) is a pretty good example of late Georgian style. It's one of my long time favourites and I'd love to be able to have separate elements to create my own scene. https://www.daz3d.com/the-grand-staircase , https://www.daz3d.com/celebrations-for-baroque-grandeur ; and https://www.daz3d.com/anderson-hall ; are all examples of arcitecture that could be broken down and offered as seperate elements. Perhaps you could get a group of folks together to do this. Jack Tomalin would be a huge asset to such a project. Ensure you offer a choice of textures too. Bright and airy or dark and somber would allow creating the same rooms with different moods.
A selection of curtains, drapes and blinds for the windows.
Thanks for all the feedback so far! Keep it coming!
I second this! If we could move the blinds (roll them/down ; close/open) that would be amazing!
Walls with separate inside/outside material zones!
Can't say how annoying it is when wallpaper applied to the interior shows up on the exterior. :)
I kept thinking 'curtains'. And the material zones thing is also something I've actually wished for.
Seconding the curtains and blinds suggestions. Also, it would be nice if the windows could be opened.
As for variety... some kind of ceiling trim and some variations on the floor trim would be appreciated and would help easily distinguish between different environments in a narration. Other than that, sliding doors, french doors or some diversity in their design and wood panneling for the whole wall. I really like the idea about the stairs and that would require materials (or geometry) for holes in the floor, asides from railings, connecting carpets, etc.
That.. looks like a lot of work. Good luck!
How about traditional Swiss Alpine buildings?
Yes. Window treatments. They tend to fall through the cracks since they aren't precisely furniture, but the ones that are designed for a specific room aren't necessarily made to be swapped out and put into another. If they can even be removed with anything less than the geometry editor.
Other window styles are always welcome when their sizes are standardized and you can swap them out easily. I don't see casement windows in any of your previous sets. (Or those ghod-awful louver windows, but some places do have them, and we're talking about scene-building.) Transom windws are another style which isn't often used in residential structures, but they do exist.
The stairs are another useful item. Straight flight, or the sort that turns (usually at 90 degrees) at a landing. With or wthout a cupboard under them. And of course fireplaces, You have some lovely ones in your other sets, but I don't know that they could swap into the rooms built wth these. Most things can be scaled to fit to some degree, but much scaling and the porportions go wildly off.
The comment above about period style architechture is a good one, you might want to think of that at ome point in the future. But at this point you seem to be aiming for basically early 20th century to fairly current structures.
I can definitely say that a lot of the stuff I'm seeing here is already planned for XPack 3, so it seems we're on the same wavelength.
I'm a little wary of extending into architectural styles predating the 20th century, or at least those that are less common in the last 100 years, but it is something I will look into. The major issue is that more ornate styles consume more development time, and certain styles border on "period" or "genre" and tend to be more specific than general, and therefore tend not to sell as well. For example, I question the utility and usefulness of, say, a full Louis XIV drawing room compared to a contemporary American or European style living room. The former would take twice as long to make, while the latter would sell twice as many copies. But it's something I would like to do.
I considered casements for this set, but ended up sticking with animated sash windows. As it stands, there are over 20 combinations of sash windows in XPack 3, all of them animated with morph sliders. Originally I developed the set to have walls with standard sized window openings, and the windows themselves being separate pieces that could be put in place. But on second thought, I decided it would be easier for the end user (although more tedious for the developer) for the wall and windows to be a single piece. That way there is less aligning that needs to be done, since Daz does not have vertex snapping. It is also difficult to align the windows with a casing around the opening.
Likewise, things like baseboards and crown moldings would be a major pain in the ass to align inside DS, so I made the decision to make those also part of the wall mesh. There's also the case where you have an outside corner and the ends of the trimboards need to be mitred together. The way I've decided to do it, with walls, windows, and trims all as one piece, makes it easier for the user to drop in walls and then align them to the floor with a single press. Unfortunately, it makes a lot of work out of adding additional variety. Let's say I have, currently, 60 wall pieces. If I add a new style of baseboard, I now have 120 wall pieces. Things would be vastly simplified if DS had snapping or better alignment tools but, alas, that isn't the case.
Keep the ideas and comments coming, though. I'm developing not just XPack 3, but potentially XPack 4 as well. So long as folks continue to find a use for these sets, I'll keep rolling them out!
This.
Updated WIP render of what's been developed so far for XPack 3.
66 different wall sections are ready to go, and I estimate there will be about 20 more by time it is finished. There are 5 different styles of windows in 3 different sizes and arrangements. 6 unique interior door styles. The single doors have versions with the hinge on opposite sides, so the swing direction is different. The double doors come in hinged and sliding pocket versions. Will be doing exterior door sections this week. Working on floor designs today.
You can follow the progress and leave comments at the Collective3d Facebook page as well!
First, want to say I bought several of your procucts in the recent sale and just spent a good bit of time building an interior using your Room Creator sets. I didn't want a corner or one small room, I wanted an interior that more or less looked like it belonged inside your Modern Home Exterior 1. Extremely versatile product that I really loved using. That said, here were my experiences and areas I wished there was just that little bit of extra content..
Overall though it's a great product and I can't wait to snap up the next add-on!
But what if one of us wants 1970s paneling?
Seriously, I'm storyboarding a '70s-era film and some tacky faux-wood paneling would be very useful! Granted, I'm probably in the minority here...
That was just for clarification, LoL! Other than bump map you can just grab a picture of some and slap it on the wall! And heck with those lines the bump map almost draws itself.
I have attempted this but you would be surprised how difficult it is to find a seamless jpeg of faux-wood panel! LOL
I've used the Room Creator to design sets that resemble the last three apartments I've lived in. The one thing I would ask for are Kitchen cabinets in different styles.
I'm looking forward to this. Room Creator is my go-to for scene creation. I even borrowed props the other day to make one of those tiny work bathrooms.
For someone new to your room creator, will it be necessary to buy all the previous versions to use Expansion pack 3? So I'd have to buy the Base Set, Exp Pack 1, Exp Pack 2 as well? If so, will there be some kind of bundle sale for the previous versons when Expansion Pack 3 goes on sale? It would probably get a lot more people to buy if that happened.
Right now, although I love what I see in expansion pack 3 with all the window options, I'm kind of sitting on the fence due to the cost involved to get to that point.
And if it hasn't been said already, a trap door in the floor and a drop down ceiling door with folding ladder to go to an attic would awesome additions.
I am discussing the possibility of some kind of bundle with Daz. No promises, but I'd like to do one. That said, XPack 3 is, for all intents and purposes, Create a Room 2. It shares floor and ceiling meshes and textures with the Base Set but those can be worked around. The Base Set and the XPacks do contain fixtures (electrical outlets, lighting fixtures, etc) not included with XPack 3, however.
There have been a lot of great suggestions in this thread. A lot of those things were already in development for XPack 3, some were added as a result of your comments here, and a bunch of the others are being added to future developments. One thing I would like to do is start including "Create a Room Compatible" elements in future Movie Sets. For instance, a living room set with a flight of stairs, and the stairs might be sized and mapped to seamlessly integrate with Create a Room. That, or something like "Create a Room Presets," where I make a room using elements from the existing Create a Room sets, and then develop unique things like kitchen cabinets or stairs that go with it.
Keep the suggestions rolling. Obviously, I can't think of everything! Remember that Create a Room is intended to be a starting point, giving you the ability to start throwing together a room with the provided tools, to kitbash a set for whatever you need to shoot. Some things are very specific to whatever exact room you have in mind, and might not have a lot of utility in a general kitbash set, but I still want to hear all your ideas. You are, after all, the ones using the tool!
I don't think anyone has mentioned.....closets!
You make your own closets with all the fancy wall pieces!
I know you can't create too many dependencies on the other xpacks. However I do like presets, e.g., double click this icon for a 'basic room with walls, outlets, floor vents, ceiling fan and door'. Starter content like that is much faster than building the room from scratch -- we can just modify as desired.
I love the flexibility of being able to do all the detailed modifications with your products, I just also like the optional presets to speed things up.
Lol, I just read your earlier thread wehre you mentioned 'Create a Room Presets.' So you can ignore my post. Or just consider it a +1 vote. :)
This one is finally in the QA queue, so hopefully it will be getting a release soon™!
When all was said and done, this Xpack contained almost twice as many pieces as the previous three Create a Room sets combined. There are a lot of goodies here.
Also, it comes with a preset featuring a rebuild of the old NFXstudios Farmhouse using only Create a Room pieces!
Wow, that looks amazing! Now I'm going to need more store credit.