Making a large island: I need advice.
Second Technician Rimmer
Posts: 490
I need to create a rather large island decor set for a story. If I were to look for something similar, I think the Cage of Eden manga would b the one. That means jungle, caves, and a seashore line sufficiently large that I could create the illusion that my characters are totally lost and can be walking for miles. Of course, I realize that it has to be broken down to several pieces and when it comes to large environments, Terradome does comme to mind. Can anyone make some suggestion about which terradome parts could be of use to me?
Cheers :)
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I have a scene I'm going to be working on at some point and I needed a large enough area, much like you, where there is enough room for different locations of the same area to give the illusion of vastness.
What I did was greated a very large primitive plane with a decent division amount set. I then used d-formers to move parts of the plane < 0 for where I wanted water to show and > 0 where I wanted hills. I used another flat plane from a set with water (I think it was the Jolly boat) to create my streams/ponds then used the terradome (just the basic set) to give my area a full 360 horizon/background.
Well, if spending about $45 dollars is OK for your budget you should download Unity Free and then buy in the Unity Asset Store a product called 'Gaia' which will generate all types of mountains, islands, trees, plants, buildings and so on. Gaia also has the ability for you to add resources to it to expect the style and type of environments you can create with it.
Then it is your choice to export DAZ 3D models to Unity to use their or to export the Unity + Gaia environment to DAZ Studio. Unity has a free FBX Exporter. You can google and export DAZ 3D models to Blender with Diffeomorphic and prep them for Unity or you export to Unity directly from DAZ Studio with the FBX export or use the Morph 3D tools to prep DAZ 3D Assets for use in Unity.
Personally I don't think DAZ 3D could handle such an environment too well but if you've bough a set like the Harpwood Trail for DAZ Studio in the DAZ Store you know it will creek at such big models.
The biggest approach most of these approaches has is that of tiling textures; if you have rock extending for a km in the distance, it's going to look either bad up close, or tiled and bad far away. That's one potential problem.
If you can generate a terrain in a program, another approach might be to have a low resolution 'large scale' island for distant shots, then cut up smaller pieces for vignettes.
I'd also make use of Ultrascatter to populate the flora.
Vue would be a good start to generate the island and sea.
Thank you kind people for all the advices! That's a lot of leads to go through, I think I'll have a very busy week :) I wasn't aware that Unity had an expoirter, I'll have to look into that too.
A quicker way would be browse Turbosquid or CGtrader for pre-made islands.
Gaia is very easy. It's the retexturing between DAZ & Unity or DAZ & Blender that is a hassle and tedious although not difficult. Unity also has the Octane renderer built into it free.
Look at Skull Island: https://www.daz3d.com/skull-cove-island
it's low res but kinda matches your description
Carrara is very good for building large scale landscapes. It has a built-in terrain generator, ocean primitive (which can be animated), as well as a plant/tree generatpr. Plus it comes with lots of samples, from deserts to mountains to coastlines. And it's often heavily discounted in the store here.
Oh, and if you make masks for Carrara's replicators, they can be directly used in DS with Ultrascatter.
That's slightly unfair, since one of the instance previews was inadvertantly left switched on in that set. Turn it off and the viewport is as responsive as anything else.
DS will slow down if it's asked to draw & texture hundreds or thousands of full res items. But then so will most things.
...so you can create basic terrains in Carrara for use in Daz?
I also have Ultrascatter.
Ah true! I hadn't thought about the Bundle since it was 3dl, but conversion... yep. Gonna look into that too. Good catch Odaa :)
You can simulate massive settings by using stand alone props like Stonemasons's jungle construction kit for foreground items with flat images behind them, to simulate distance.
No it's not. I haven't received an update fixing it yet.
Besides that, DAZ Studio even has trouble handling much less since 4.10.x. which is complained about in multiple threads by others.
For close up shots, if you're using Iray, I would highly recommend using https://www.daz3d.com/secluded-island. I own many island sets and this has in my opinion the most realistic looking sand of all of them. The Tropical Cave/Coast/Quest/Jungle bundle shows pixels on closeups due to the geometry being so huge and the textures stretched across it. If you did use them, you'd probably want to swap out the shaders for any close up shots.
Yes. You need to export an obj from Carrara, and import that into DS.
...nice didn't know that was possible. Thanks