Carrara River Dells Freebie
evilproducer
Posts: 9,040
Hi all, I originally started this scene with the idea of making something saleable. As I progressed with it, I knew I had a lot to learn and that there were some issues with it that would make it easier almost to start from scratch. I still think this is a really cool scene, with some neat ideas, and hate for it to sit on my hard drive for only me to use. As such, I am making it available as a free scene for anyone to use.
The scene is my artistic representation of the Wisconsin Dells area of the Wisconsin River. This is not a specific stretch of the river or specific rock outcrops or islands. It is just supposed to be suggestive of the unique geography of the area. The size is approximately 500' x 500'.
The islands are not attached to the terrain and can be moved, removed, duplicated, etc. as you wish. The islands have their own replicators for trees and plants, as well as the cliffs. The scene makes heavy use of replicators and they are set up in a somewhat modular way, in that if an area of the scene is not in view, there is a good chance you can hide a replicator or two to speed up your render time without effecting what the camera is seeing. In the midday scene I tried an experiment with putting a large sphere around the scene and wrapping a spherical render around it to give the illusion of a larger world. This is nothing new, except the experimental part for me, was rendering it with an alpha where the sky would be, so that you can still use a realistic atmosphere, clouds, etc. without being hemmed in by the sphere. Unfortunately there is some fringing where the alpha meets the tree line. Still, unless you are aiming the camera out at the sphere directly it does a fairly nice job extending the scene. Feel free to delete it if you don't like it.
I have a couple different fern plants. They are both vertex objects. One is higher res fern with a painted texture using Carrara's 3D paint brush. The other is a lower res fern with a procedural shader. They are located in the River Dells plant folder (which can be added to your Object Browser). If you are doing a scene with ferns close to the camera, I would recommend adding the hi-res fern to the needed replicator and deleting the default lower res fern. Check first, because I may have experimented with the higher res ferns in some of the replicators and forgot to switch back to the lower res fern.
Anyway, here is the link. If you have any questions, please ask! Also, I would love any comments you have about the scene, as well as constructive criticism so that I may inprove my terrain and environments in the future.
The file is in my Dropbox. There is no membership requirement to download. I was aslo going to put it up on ShareCG, but the uploader chokes on me. The file is around 107 MB zipped.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1q869tm9v28yvd3/River-Dells.zip?dl=0
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Comments
Wow, thank you very much. I remember some posts related to your early stages of this project. I know it is an amazing set. Thank you for generously offering it as a freebie.
I do too... been a couple of years and I always admired it. THANK YOU!!!
Silene
You all are very welcome! I meant to do this a long time ago, but I was having trouble with some links broken to image maps, and with the Carrara 8.5 Mac bug, there is no indication of what file Carrara is looking for in the dialogue. Finally I hit upon the idea of making a lime green and hot pink image map, so when Carrara asked me to find the missing map, I chose one of those and looked to see what shaders they showed up in, so that I could find the right map.
That's a clever idea... when I make custom shaded objects and save them to a project file...inevitably I end up moving and copying a file from it to use someplace else, renaming it and so begins the shader hunt the next time I open it. Thanks!
Silene
It really helped a lot! There were only two instances where it was looking for the image map, so it didn't take much digging around. I tried to use duplicate shaders where I could. I only have 42 master shaders, and half of those are probably the distribution maps for the surface replicators.
Dammit sir, I wish I'd thought of doing that!!!
I still say with a bit more polish and a DS version (easy now with Ultrascatter), you could make decent bucks from it. But thanks for your generosity putting it out there.
Thanks EP, definately worth a few dollars !!!!!
.
it is an epic set, I was fortunate enough to beta test it a few years ago and agree with TA that a DAZ studio version would have made you lots of DAZ munnies EP!
Sadly I did not have the skills to make it happen though I did try to export it to DS, Carrara trees are just way too heavy and a different tree solution would be needed even with instances.
some crazy video composition and virtual singing
and some panning around 360 Carrara renders as Skypheres in iClone
Octane render gave me issues with disappearing mesh, I have a later video resolving this but on the Youtube iPad app cannot easily search my channels for it right now, tomorrow on my computer will try and find it
(over 1K videos and odd naming it is not easy to find stuff)
Aaargh. I am having trouble downloading. My home connection is not stable enough and I get interrupted before the file completes downloading. For some reason, it is not resuming where it left off even though the disconnect is just for a few seconds. I will have to wait until I go to a spot with a more stable connection to post any screenshots.
@the3Digit, beautiful as always, Wendy.
I have done some experiments with bringing Carrara plants and trees to Studio. I've gotten them in, but I am concerned by the resource load. Tim has given me some good advice on reducing the polycount. I think the specific examples are in my "Nobody asked me" thread. There are also some good free plant programs, but some need java or something else I don't have. Has anyone tried arboro?
EDIT: Here is an example of getting a tomato plant from Carrra's plant modeler to Studio. Tim chimes in with the untriangulate advice. Somewhere else he also notes that you can model branchs instead of leaves and then use instancing to fill the tree itself, thus reducing resource drain even more.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2449631/#Comment_2449631
and
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/2450521/#Comment_2450521
Wow! Many thanks for this great set!
Pure awesomeness, thank you for sharing
The key is to get the per-tree poly count down - left to run amok, Carrara trees can easily convert to 2 million + polys. For DS, we really want them around or below 200K if possible. The "art" is to do that and still have them looking good . . .
That is just not something I care to do. If someone wants to use a set like that, then they should use Carrara. D|S makes a great plugin for Carrara.
Let me know if you can get it! Has anyone else had an issue downloading it?
indeed but when DAZ in their ignorance knocked you back I tried to see if their favourite son could load it whith modification ( so you could get it in store for Carrara and something for the click and render crowd too)
it could'nt
enough said
I do appreciate the effort you put into the attempt.
awesome... downloaded fine..
I haven't tried it yet but will soon....................... thankyou
great model to use... had a play with it before dinner
Perfect. Thanks so much, will put it to good use.
Yay - I got it to download. Thank you again, Evilproducer!
that's terrific, thanks Evil, cant wait to play
Thanks for the awesome freebie.
Posted a news piece at CarraraCafe too: http://carraracafe.com/news/carrara-river-dells-freebie/
Can we host the freebie at CarraraCafe too?
Feel free! The more the merrier! Lord knows ShareCG chokes whenever I try and upload it!
Thank you very much very nice.
Thank you @evilproducer, this looks terrific! And also really worth being in a store as a paid product!!
You are welcome!
Better than good, looking forward to it, thanks EP>
Glad to see you back on the forums too.