Dream Home could use some TLC
Quasar
Posts: 679
I'm going through some older content I've picked up over the years, and decided to load up the full Dream Home set. It's still a good looking set for setting up renders but it could use a good Iray update. I really like the updates that have come out for other products like the Carnival items and the West Park sets. Are people still getting use out of the Dream Home? Would you use it more if it was updated? I would think an Iray update could be a good bonus for PC+ members at PC+ prices. Perhaps it never sold well enough for that though?
There is one quirk I've just noticed about it today. The Mud Room interior door opens up strait into a wall. Is there a trans map or something available to cut a hole in the wall? I answered my own question here. There is a panel cutout in the wall that just needs to be turned invisible in the scene tab.
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Comments
I would snap up a dream home iray update in an instant!
All you would have to do is run the 3Delight to Iray product to update the textures, then use either the built in emissive shader or any of the other emissive light shader products for the lights..
Actually, the Great Room has an Iray version added to the original file, with lights and cameras. It is just the basic room, nothing else, but it is a start.
You mean this one? I use it on old sets a lot. Sometimes you have to guide it to the best script to use, but it gives you a big leg up on converting an old set.
Yeah that one, and using that it would make the need to get specific iray texture sets for those old products that do not have them..
I’ve contemplated it a few times, but the sheer magnitude of the project means it’s a huge time sink.
If I can work out the logistics.. then yea. But bear in mind the size.. it would have to be split up.
I've picked up several of the sets as freebies and many are missing geometry or textures for the furniture. I'd hope that if an Iray conversion is ever attempted someone will go over the various pieces and correct the issues.
"many are missing geometry or textures for the furniture"
I'm not sure which parts you are referring to, Ken (as you must know the complete set consists of many individual components). The parts that I have generally come in three separate products:
First, there is a "base" set containing the room or section geometry and base textures i.e Great Room.
Second, there is a set containing furnishings for the base set i.e. for the Great room this is called Accessories, for others Furnishings
Third there are addon texture sets for the individual base sets and furnishings i.e. there is one for the Great Room called Eclectic.
Somewhere in the forums there is a complete listing of all the components and addons for the entire Dream Home series, BTW. Its a huge collection in its entirety, which is why it has been broken up into modular sections.
Ha, found it!
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/9663/
Theres a map, and, if you scroll down in the thread, there is a complete listing of everything.
The eclectic add-ons seem to have disappeared from the store since Moyra left the building. I have mine complete, but just in the nick of time....
All of her products including PC items were removed from the store when she left.
Some of them re-emerged at Renderosity. Even upgraded for iRay. Not the Dreamhome ones, though.
I have various rooms, Great Room, Bedroom, Breakfast nook (I think that is an add on to the Great Room), Front Hall (or whatever its called) and the Pool. At least. I have the furniture sets for several, I know for the bedroom but when I try to load it I just get grey rectangles and a bunch of "can't find file" pop ups.
Are you loading the furniture file? Sounds like you are loading the extra texture files instead of the furniture files that they're meant for.
This is why updated Iray mats would be so nice to have. The alternative suggestions are appreciated and worth exploring if you need them, but be prepared for a lot of work if you want to manually update the whole set. It makes sense that the updates would have to be split up. Maybe there could be an update for each section that includes the corresponding furniture set?
The Dreamhome was a MASSIVE project. I cannot imagine how much effort it would take to bring it all into Iray.
It looks like the textures would need to be updated for Iray as well. They were all painted with ambient occlusion baked onto them. In 3Delight, the wall corners blend smoothly, but in Iray, it looks like there is pixilated dirt in most of the corners. That just adds to the time sink factor of creating updates.
It's mapped well and broken up by material zones, so using other Iray shaders can work - check out the Homestyle range:
https://www.daz3d.com/homestyle-iray-shaders
https://www.daz3d.com/homestyle-2-iray-shaders
I used them for the Dream Home bathroom in this pic (a little hard to make out but it's the only one I've got handy)
^click for bigger
Hey Silent Winter that's a cool VR image. Those shaders are nice too. They're the same sets I'm working with now as I've been fiddling with the Dream Home.
Curious.. if 3DL renders ok.. I don't see why Iray wouldn't? Have you set the texture compression too low or something?
Yea, it was around 18 months if I remember correctly - and that was when I did content development full time. Now I run the PC as well, it would be even longer.
Being an addicted collector prone to random fetishes, for some insane reason I made it my goal to collect the entire Dream Home and all its textures. I ended up being majorly confused about what I had actually purchased, and the titles for the various rooms and textures "eclectic" and whatnot were too long to remember and organize. I finally gave up and am sure that I am missing something of the set here and there. I think I've used one or two rooms once or twice in a rendering.
I can't imagine having to go through and repurchase or even just redownload all those pieces again just to get Iray support. But I'm sure someone somewhere would appreciate it.
This old thread has a listing of all the files:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/9663/
I believe I actually managed to collect everything....
I've tried to do some manual conversions to Iray and it works "okay" from a distance, but there's one issue I found that I couldn't get around very well for closeup renders.
A lot of the 3Delight materials make extensive use of displacement for the detailed carving on mouldings, etc. However since Iray doesn't do microfacets, and the base geometry is fairly sparse, the displacement doesn't really work in Iray. So I tried adding SubD to walls, etc. but the geometry of the piece wasn't designed for further subdivision (i.e. not enough control loops). I remember on one room when I tried it, the fireplace pulled into this weird twisted oval hole in the wall.
I think it's more than just creating new surface settings for a lot of the package, I think you'd end up having to modify the base mesh for a lot of the rooms as well.
After a few failed attempts to get the same detailed results in Iray, I sadly put aside the Dream Home and haven't experimented with it any further.
The other big issue.. is frankly the detailing could do with an overhaul.. so it begs the question if I was going to that much effort, to not just start over with another one.
I'd totally get (my wallet) behind a "Dream Home 2" project! :D
Yeah, sometimes the takeaway really is 'use this as inspiration for a new thing'
There are a couple of options for handling the displacement - one is to bake to normals, which would require an external application (I've used Substance Designer for this), possibly aiming to apply SubD level 2 or 3 with displacement for the big shaping and normals on top of that. The other option is to break the models up, separating the parts that needed fine detail from those that didn't so that you could apply the SubD more selectively.
Richard: I was considering commenting on baking the displacement, but I'm thinking the number of surfaces involved might make that a really lengthy proposition.
Honestly, if it were me, I'd consider just redoing the textures completely in Iray.
I'd be tempted in that direction as well, especially for some of the Eclectic textures — a lot of the varnished wooden detail and furniture has the shine baked in to the textures, so I've mainly confined my efforts at conversion (with variable success) to the base materials. Sometimes it looks good, sometimes I just can't work out what's going wrong.
I hadn't thought about the compression settings. I've never really looked at them since I've never noticed a problem with them before. Now that I have, I saw my settings were at 512 for medium and 1024 for high. Upping it to 512 and 2048 helped but still didn't look good. Then I tried 2048 and 2048, which made a bigger improvement. Just to test, I went up to 4096 and 4096 and though there wasn't a big change where I was doing my test renders, it did change a little on the ceiling on the left. The first image is 3Delight with default mats, and the rest are Iray after Iray Uber was applied. They all used the headlamp as the only light.