Fantasy Castle Keep 2 for Iray????
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Fantasy Castle Keep 2 for Iray
https://www.daz3d.com/fantasy-castle-keep-2-for-iray
Anyone know what this product is about?
I see lots of castles for sale that all look amazing, but they never seem to show up in artist's renders.
Are these scaled so you can place figures on them or are these like Stonemason's greebles and are supposed to be used only as backdrops?
In point, they have balconies and staircases....would be amazing to place figures on those stairwells in battle.
And they break the one or two tier common castle sets that seem to be the only other choice for medieval exteriors.
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OK, I don't have the specific product you mentioned, but I can speak to a castle related product that I used recently, that being the Castle Creator
It's pretty easy to scale things up and down, and the 'baseline' size is fairly big for this product. I distorted the building quite a bit, as I needed a 'flat roof' for a treasury structure for my Talos render.
In the render above, I scaled the castle structure down A LOT (and really squished the the y axis), to match Talos, who is at 100% scale, with Herc and Hylas actually being rescaled to 5% of Talos's scale. I also added a couple of other things to the castle structure, such as a different door arch and the squre pillars.
I just looked at the Fantasy Castle - Surround Walls as well (this is an older product from the V1 days that I bought a couple of days ago...). It's definitely a 3d environment, although it is a rather simple structure, essentially 4 walls with some catwalks on the walls (no stairs to the catwalks or doors into the towers from the catwalks). It's scaled fairly large already, to allow characters to walk through the drawbridge entrance, or to stand on the catwalks on the walls or within the walls. The interior buildings (pictured on the product page) are in another product apparently.
So yeah, in both of these cases, they are indeed 3d structures that you can place characters on/around. I like the Castle Creator set, and the FC was on sale for cheap
As far as how you tell if it's a 2d backdrop or an actual 3d structure, all I can suggest is to look at the product description, and if you have the Daz Deals browser addon, gallery pics and forum posts that relate to the product in question may be linked from the product page. As to how well they stand up in renders, that may be another story, although applying newer shaders may be an option in some cases, depending on what you are going for. In my case, I did apply a 'mossy marble' shader to the structure Talos is crouched upon.
Edit: I just took a look at the Fairytale Edition - Fantasy Castle texture addon, and saw this gallery render under the gallery links (via the Daz Deals plugin).:
Note the skellies standing atop the castle walls.
Here's another render using the above castle, this time as a tourist destination:
Aint that sumthin! I can happily report that this is a FULL-SIZED castle.
Can't believe they have so many of these and for so affordable.
Why is every elf in the damn woods and every knight just standing around when the store has castles?
1) The set does not include gound or any base level.
2) The whole castle is hollow, with no insides..
3) There is no sky or backdrops.
Yeah, there are other products for that. There's a Fantasy Castle Grounds moat base for sale at the moment, designed to be used with the Fantasy Castle, which can be resized as needed. As for sky and other terrain, there are the Terradome products (you'll probably want Terradome 3) and the Skydome products, but make sure you get the Daz ready versions for skydomes. The Poser skydomes may not appear properly, I've seen this in a couple of products now, where I had to swap out a skydome for a TD3 one.
You can also simply leave the sky out and add one in Photoshop, but emissive/reflective skydomes can help create that 'light from all directions' effect.
As for the lack of internals on the castle you grabbed, you could add some floors, interior walls and such using primitave shapes (cubes and such), but for more detailed backgrounds you'll probably want to use the ready made interior sets, which there are many in the Daz store. It all depends on how much 'do it yourself' work you are open to as to whether you'd want to build a castle interior room yourself.
Thanks for all the suggestions.
Actually, the Fantasy Castle with the Iray addition is comparitively new. It came out in 2011. There is an older Fantasy castle which goes back several years before that. And I think Castle Creator is even older.
I have that Castle and haven't gotten around to rendering it, but was happy to see an Iray update for it. In general, everything I've rendered from Laurie S (who did the original castle) has been very good and translated to Iray surprisingly well. I picked up a bunch more stuff in this blowout from her and Moyra. Some of them are very old pieces. It's fun to see what works in Iray.
It's not just new shaders but apparently updated geometry, which is very cool.
I bought the fantasy castle grounds a while back. The geometry is quite impressive but it really, really needs an up to date set of textures. Ultrascattered grass would be a good thing, too.
Cheers,
Alex.
Glad you like my products Currently I am working on the Mage tower and add ons .. I will release them the same way with the remapped objs at no extra cost for PC members and PBR textures.
Will definitely try the new one with updated textures. I was playing a bit with this one using Iray Uber Base shaders, a while ago:
Fantasy Castle 2011 - Castle Surround - https://www.daz3d.com/catalog/product/view/id/13399
That would be another one that would be great to have updated to go allong with the Fantasy Castle Keep 2 for Iray (Hint, Hint)
What a great render @ Taoz. I NEED that unicorn now!
I grabbed that one as fast as I could lol. Love those castles. Looking forward to the updates Laurie, your stuff is always awesome.
You can sub any ground plane you want into the scene, I use water and/or ground from any of the ones that I have pretty much interchangeably although I do love Terradome 3.
You can also get Faverals MICK (Medieval Interior Construction Kit). You can build almost any interior you could ever want with this. I suggest the bundle - its a bit pricey but its literally got three rooms of furniture included as well as 3 completely built rooms AND all the stuff used to make those rooms to build your own. Something close to 200 props I believe. If you wait for a sale it will be a bit more affordabe but honestly its worth every penny of the full price. Just don't buy one of the add on rooms separately you have to have the kit for them to work.
Yeah Laurie, the sooner that you can get us Iray versions of those products, yeah those look very nice. I like the multiple texture options for the Fantasy Castle and Keep, and would love to see Iray versions of each of them at some point. Could be a nice way to keep PC+ club releases interesting over the next few weeks, free would be even better!
@ Ice Dragon Art
Yeah now I remember seeing the MICK packages, they were on sale fairly recently. At the time, though, I wasn't on the castle kick, but now that I've acquired a bunch of castle exteriors for cheap, I may want that now... Thanks for pointing it out (wishlisted for the next time it goes on sale). Looks like a great product!
Hint+
Thanks! The unicorn is this one:
SF Unicorn for DAZ Horse 2 - https://www.daz3d.com/catalog/product/view/id/17336
I love this castle and the moat for it. I've used it a few times though I don't think any of the renders made it into my gallery. I have a lot of Laurie S products and they are all great. I'm looking forward to checking out how the new Iray update does with it.
Bwahahahahaah I'm laughing at you @alexhcowley .
I went to you deviant art page....http://efredrules.deviantart.com/
And thought "What idiot uploads nature pictures to an artist's gallery."
....As I was moving the mouse up to the left to close the page out...I went:
"Oh wait, is that....is that...?"
Well damn, done.
You make some crazy compositions. lol
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But yeah, finding these castles was an unexpected win.
Very, very happy. Can't wait to place them in those impossible locations for sci-fi scenes...
I love that, when the build structures in impossible/super-risky places...
OK, the new one looks good, but it's really heavy on both RAM and VRAM (close to 7 GB on both)...
... holy poop, seriously? Wow.
Yikes. and that's before we add other figures, etc?
Well, sorry, miscalculation, have to correct RAM usage to about 4½-5 GB (at least that what it uses in the start of the render), but for VRAM it gets close to 7 GB during rendering everything included. In other words you'll need at least 5 GB free RAM (to avoid swapping) and 7 GB VRAM to render it.
7 GB on the GPU probably counts out most Daz users.
It sounds like a job for the Scene Optimizer. Have you tried that? A distant render like that could probably get by with deleting bump and normal maps and reducing textures by a factor of 4 or 8.
Remember as well that it comes as separate parts (11 according to the promo details) so if you only use what you need/can see those ram figures will drop (or rise if you use more bits of course, but I would suggest instances is the way to go in that case), now off to put it in my cart as I have not got round to buying it yet.
@Laurie S, any chance of seeing some of the original texture expansions (Dark Tales maybe) updated for the new maps/Iray?
Yep much too heavy for my liking and computer; I'm going to return it. Its not difficult to do Iray mats myself from the original - I'm struggling to see what additions this set makes. Some of the problem is very likely the 4k maps in just about every slot that can take a map for distance shots thats not needed at all. would have been nice if there was a set for distance which used less resources.
Just tried that (factor 4), that reduced RAM usage to about 1.3 GB and VRAM to about 2.5 GB. I don't think I'd go for 8x though, that would probably be too much.
I rendered the attached on a 980Ti (6048MB used). I loaded the Scene 1 (whole model), approx 8 GB CPU Ram.
Render 500 iterations ~86% convergence, ~4.5 Minutes.
Folks should bear in mind that the community generally seems to want large scale, detailed models that have a lot of flexibility. This Castle isn't different from most of Jack's products in that regard.
3D Rendering is not for the faint of hardware.
Here's the original keep, converted to Iray (which was a little bit of a pain since there are lots of surfaces and the default glossy color seems to be hot pink, which is... what?)
Mild gore: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Last-Castle-o-684395446
The issue that is arising is the increase in file size. I know theres been discussions in the past where I've included 2048 versions of maps, but that is met with comments/critisicms about file bloat.. I'm not sure what the answer is other than split the products.. but I just wanted to chime in to say VRAM is a concern to us content creators.
Maybe the ideal solution would be for DAZ to buy out scene optimizer and to bundle it into a version of DS. Then the high resolution maps becomes some what irrelevant if there is an easy way for all users to click a few buttons and the resolution drops.