Digitallab3D Closed Door Policy
xyer0
Posts: 6,384
Digitallab3D makes great photorealistic room sets. I rarely have to use shaders on them out of necessity, and the look of the promos is fairly easy to capture right out of the box.
I own nine. Out of those nine, none have doors, closets, cabinets or windows that open. When Home Office was released with a door that opened, I hoped it was the start of a new policy; (maybe next he would make the closet open, I thought). But the next two sets released, including today's bathroom, apparently have static doors as well. I would love to use these sets in narrative renders, but the closed door policy has severely limited my characters' interaction with the sets.
I decided to make the door on Designer Bedroom open by using the Geometry Editor to assign it to its own separate surface (the included surface included the doorframe, I think), only to discover that the box which formed the walls of the room lurked behind (which is understandable in retrospect). The vendor also has a propensity for reusing multiple props among different packages. Admittedly, Stonemason occasionally does the same, but his sets and packages are huge by comparison. I'm going to suss how to make the doors open as a result of the closed door policy, but I'd like for Digitallab3D to change his policy as well.
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Comments
I would like that as well :)
transmap
The main reason that doors are not openable, is not just because adding a bone to allow the door to pivot would be too much work. The trickier issue is that you need to model something behind the door, otherwise the open door is staring at the back side of other polys, which never looks too professional. Thus even if you do manage to remove some polys to add your own door, you still need to add something (albeit a few plane primitives maybe sufficent) to what is going on behind the door.
This is the why a lot of buildings sold have non-opening doors and/or obscured windows, otherwise the PA would have to model the interior as well, which could easily double the work required.
That's a bit silly. It should be expected that you might want one room to open into another, maybe even one from a different vendor. Same thing for windows. It should be expected you might want to have an HDRI or modeled environment out there, or else you can block out the windows yourself.
I often add a room from another set behind a door that will open. In fact, it's simpler if the open door leads to nothing, rather than to a false corridor.
I prefer doors that open. there doesn't need to be anything on the other side; as long as the door itself is modeled on both sides, I can add a room, a hall, or an alien planet - whatever fits the story I'm trying to tell with the image.
Yes, but some people will expect something behind a door if it can be opened. The fact that some buyers don't care, still leaves the PA open to complaints from other buyers that expect a model to be "complete"
The "Nothing behind the door" thing is pretty standard with sci-fi sets, and nobody seems to mind. What's the problem with ordinary rooms? There are already plenty of other interior sets provided by vendors that open into the Twilight Zone, and I don't recall seeing anyone complain about them. We customers are actually capable of putting something there if we need to. But doors that don't open don't even give us a choice, and I won't buy them. After all, if it's too much trouble for a professional creator to put working doors into the product, it will be way too much trouble for me to do it.
As long as the vender shows in the promos that there's nothing behind the door, I doubt if many would complain.
To blame it on the rare buyer that would complain, or use that as an excuse to sell an unfinished product...
Other things being equal, a door that can open will always be better than one that can't, as long as there are some that want that option. Options that don't have any potential negative sideeffects will always be an improvement.
Thanks, Digitallab3D! Please continue doing this. (And add the window(s) open/close next, please)
I'll chime in here with my feedback on this issue, speaking strictly for myself as a free-spending daz customer... I wishlist almost every product that DigitalLabs releases because they almost all look compelling to me and appear (in the promos and in gallery renders that use the products) to be pretty well done visually.
But after the first product I bought of theirs, Bachelor's Bedroom, I decided I'd be swearing off the brand.
Why? Because the walls and ceiling were all one-piece, making it awkward and annoying to use the set the way I wanted to frame my views because I couldn't just delete a wall or ceiling to give me free camera room & access. (I *greatly* dislike the distortions that often arise from using cameras wedged into small spaces like this or the trade-offs that come with framing the view--especially since in artwork one does not always wish to reference photography in the presentation) nor were the surfaces separate so I could at least make a wall or ceiling transparent.
Then there's the thing with no opening doors, cupboards or windows, which means no shots of someone looking in through a doorway, in the act of entering or exiting the room, or walking out onto a balcony say (because who doesn't have a rooftop or balcony idling about in their runtime that'd be perfect to have outside a bedroom?! So pretty much I have sworn off DigitalLabs and any other maker/products that are interior setpieces that don't come apart and have no opening doors, windows, closets. (Although I will confess to breaking my ban to buy DigitalLab's Campus Library because I wanted the bookcases & books.)
if vendors feel like they are doing okay saleswise I guess they don't need to listen to shoppers, but I guess if enough of us stop buying products that don't really give us what we want, and we say so publicly in posts like this one, maybe things will change. :)
~Gen
There was a post recently about a similar artist, Tesla3dCorp, praising them, and the artist posted on the thread that they had read some harsh critiques of their work and had consequently begun to stop making rooms of one mesh with no rigging. Photorealistic renders of empty rooms are great for architectural pre-vis, but most of us want our characters to be the best looking objects in our renders. Since the OP, Digitallab3D has not yet made a change in policy. But perhaps a change is gonna come.
I have had some luck working around this sort of issue by using an IRay section plane, which basically “removes” anything on one side of the plane. This makes it easier to position cameras, even from what would normally be outside the model.
I can customize models when necessary, but doors and such ought to be at least separate items if not rigged. There's really no good reason not to make it so.
That sounds like a solution, @pds, please tell us more about section planes or provide a link to information about them. Thanks for posting.
One of the rooms I own has no mechanism for it to open, but you know what, It's a separate object and I can make it move on my own.
Even that's a blessing.
Create>Iray Section Plane
As it loads it will hide everything in front of the plane (but you can rotate and reposition it as needed0. Obviosuly this works only with Iray, but it is pretty simple to use there.
Thanks, @RichardHaseltine, as always for your encyclopaedic knowledge and near-ubiquity.
Thanks Richard! You beat me to it! I wasn’t at my computer earlier and couldn’t remember the exact menu location, otherwise I would have mentioned it in my post.
Personally I find section planes awkward to use and they take a while for me to set up, so I would prefer to be able to hide ceilings and walls.
I tried it in the Bachelor's bedroom, and threw in the towel. It probably is easier for a faster computer, but if I have to go into preview mode, it slows my machine down a lot. I also had a kitchen that was like this..... The thing I find about me, is if I have to tweak a set too much, I don't use it.
Thanks for that tip, pds! Since I have already bought the Bachelor's Bedroom set, I'll be out nothing to try using section plane to open up my camera placement options :) so maybe I'll get better use from the set. :)
~Gen
Yeah, thanks, pds, for teaching me something new. Now to get a system that will make Iray screendraws less glacial.
Cheers, xyer0! It’s not always a perfect solution, but it’s definitely a great option.
I have a kitchen that's like that, I used Geometry Editor to select a wall surface and made it invisible, then hit "Delete hidden" to get rid of it permanently and saved it as a set for future use. Only had to do it once, and future uses are taken care of.
I've never had luck with the section plane. I want to see through just the wall, not everything behind it as well!
Sorry to bring an old thread back to life, but does anyone know if the door opens on https://www.daz3d.com/japanese-restaurant-spa-and-hot-spring-bundle ? Also, does the restaurant have 4 complete walls? They don't seem to show it in the promos.
I'm loading it up now, unless someone else has already done it. Back in a few.
It is a box with an open end, the outside container of the set is one piece. However, that does not include Partition, which is that wall of screen. The partition can be turned off, so that is a wall that is gone. The rest do not have any options. But with that one wall gone, and the end open, you really don't need any more gone. (For lighting. For cameras, maybe.)
It has a ceiling that can be turned off in the Surfaces with the opacity, but that's attached to the container, which would still be there.
Here's some renders showing the interior, and light settings which will avoid the "light pouring in from the end" look. I'll check out the door.
Well, the Partition can X translate and move to cover the doorway, but there isn't a door per se. Then you'll have a gap at the other end of the room of course, unless you simply scale the partition to be longer. Easy to do as the doorway itself isn't very wide.