Terradome 2 versus Terradome 3
cherpenbeck
Posts: 1,416
in The Commons
Why do the landscapes in the promos look so much more convincing with Terradome 2 for Poser as with Terradome 3 for DAZ3D? What is different? And why can't I use the Terradome 2 Landscapes in DAZ3D, as there are a lot of Poser items which work well in DAZ3d -environment?
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Comments
ISTR the earlier Terradomes used features of Poser that don't exist in DAZ|Studio. When Terradome 3 was being put together, it had to be pretty much rebuilt from the concept on up — the earlier landscape sets don't work in the new one because 3 is completely different. There's also the matter of very different render engines in Poser and D|S; the materials won't match, so they'll need to be rebuilt from the bare texture image maps as well.
Beside the materials, Terradome 2 uses pmd injection for morphs, and that doesn't work in DS.
Having both, I'd say a good bit of it is because the promos for TD 2 were done for RDNA over a much longer period of time while the promos for TD 3 were made for DAZ very quickly. Also, generally, the TD 2 promos use more non-Terradome items as the central focus and are rendered darker, while the promos for TD 3 are often of nothing except the actual T3D sets and shaders and tend to use a lot more bright, brilliantly saturated colored skies. As a relative example, look at how much better the first wave of test renders for new DAZ core characters always seems to be than the promotional images that DAZ has made for themselves. All that said, I will say that I like the way water renders in the TD 2 examples, but I don't think that there was a really great volumetric water shader for Iray at the point that TD 3 came out.
So, sadly, I will have to wait till someone takes the effort to develop Terradome 3 a bit further.
Or just swap out shaders and HDRIs until you find something you like. I'd love to see more items specifically developed for TD 3, but the creators are working on other things and I suspect that the availabilty of so many high quality HDRI and camera sets, and products with advanced instancing, has changed the landscape market quite a bit since the days of Terradome 2.