Looking for isolated small town sets
Ati
Posts: 9,185
Hi,
I'd like to (virtually :)) create an isolated small town in Daz Studio that has its town center by the sea, but also has some houses scattered in the mountains. I'm thinking along the lines of something like these:
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/17033
https://www.assetstore.unity3d.com/en/#!/content/38045
Not so medieval, more like in today's time. Local shops, townsquare, houses for people etc. But not a major tourist attraction. Both exterior and interior. Terrain I can do, with roads and vegetation, so I'm mainly looking for the actual houses/shops/coffee shops and the interiors for some of them.
I've gone through most of the products in the DAZ store, and I always find something in each set that doesn't fit... :)
What would you suggest? Self-promotions are also welcomed. :) Older sets are also fine, I'm planning to render them in 3Delight.
Thanks!
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Comments
http://www.daz3d.com/build-a-street-english-country-village
Check out PowerAge's store over at Rendo: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/vendor/powerage
Including Goldenwood:https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/goldenwood-vol1/109748/ and https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/goldenwood-vol2/109919/
Mon Quatier: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/mon-quartier/104431/
and Residential: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/residential/102579/
If you can use a somewhat toony set there is Skull Cove:http://www.daz3d.com/skull-cove-complete :
RDNA's deep freeze category used to have a number of sets for building various village scenes. The down side was that most of them were frontages so you have to be careful about being able to see through them. It's worth checking anyway.
This was not on my list. Might be worth checking out, thank you.
I was thinking about a bit more variety, but I guess I have to get used to "faking" stuff. Right now my mind is set to build an entire town, and then use some parts of it as needed. But I just recently watched the TV series "Hemlock Grove", and oh my, the way they faked the entire town, or city, or whatever it was, was terrible. :)
These are too luxurious for what I had in mind.
The buildings from here look pretty good. Thanks!
Thank you, this has some really interesting stuff... Here comes the newbie question: as I see, these are for Poser. Can this be used in Daz Studio without issues?
They are old enough that the geometry is usable in either program. Nothing is weightmapped (which is where most of the incompatibilities come from). The textures are a bit low-res, these are old items. In middle distance it shouldn't be a problem, you may want to slap them with shaders if you're going close-up, but it may be all right without further effort. And, yes, they were built for Poser, so you may want to tweak the surfaces for Studio. But you don't have to. Generally its things like ambience and specularity that need some adjustment. But someone who's better at it than I am would be better to ask. I have generally just used them as is.
With Iray, though I haven't a clue. These are too old to have ever heard about iray. Most of the Transpond stuff is dated around 2004.
I'll note that I've had pretty good results retexturing stuff in Iray. The critical issues is that the model doesn't have any obvious blocky edges (smoothing can help, but it's kind of hit and miss with older stuff), and intelligently laid out material zones.
Retexturing an item where there's maybe one mat texture for the whole thing and it's not very high resolution... is f'in annoying, though doable if you have the patience and skills. You'd want to blow up the original texture and then paste over better textures, using the original texture as a template.
Retexturing an item with decently split out mat zones isn't terribly hard -- 'oh hey, I have a stone wall, let's find a tiling stone wall texture.'
You can get decent textures free at http://www.textures.com/ . Or, if you can grab it on sale and like to play with textures, I HIGHLY recommend Filter Forge.
An awful lot of the stuff of the vintage of the Transpond sets (both here and in other stores) is all one matt zone. I daresay that one could go at them with the geometry editor and give them new ones, which might work for shaders. Sometimes you may want to do that anyway so you can adjust surfaces in order to use the same model several times and have it look different.
These are a couple of the Country Cottage set houses seen through the window of the old Tavern set from the PC. It's an old file that was done in DS3, but the more recent one that I have was for a fan fest and hasn't posted yet.
Given that the Tavern is about the same vintage as the country cotteges, I don't know whether this makes for a better example or not. The lighting is fairly awful, but at least you can see everything.
Actually, the Country Cottage set does have material zones, as well as corresponding individual material maps. The attached screenshot shows the material zones for one of the cottages. The maps are low res by todays standards, but they don't look bad except in very closeup views. They are not purely facades, just lacking a rear wall, but are designed for exterior only (although the exterior maps do get applied to the interiors as well). Adding a wall on the back would enclose the structures.
Yeah, that doesn't look bad, SixDS.
I grabbed a free model of a farmhouse to play with. Sure enough, one mat zone. I managed to make a mask for the windows but the edges of the model were ugly and ... enh.
Ah, looks like there are plenty of matt zones. Good. I've found the Transpond stuff to be extremely useful. I've used the street sections from the Baker Street set for all kinds of things, and even the frontages of some of the buildings from the set as well, although they are a bit shallow to actually use as buildings on their own. I've not actually used the Western town or the Adobes yet, but I snapped them up when I found them. I'm a bit mystified as to why the country cottages have no backs when they are clearly intended for exterior scenes. But maybe it was to keep the polys down.
Iray is not going to be an issue, I plan to render in 3Delight. I like the looks of it better.
Texturing is the next big topic I will need to learn. I mean yeah, I can do it, but I'm not really happy with the results yet.
I believe we bought FilterForge on the same day. ;) Lovely peace of software.
This looks promising, thanks.
I'm still not sure this is what I will go for with this particular scene, but I'm pretty sure I can find some use for these.
Baker Street was the other set that I relaly liked from there. That's definitely not for this project, but it got my attention as soon as I saw it. :)
Hehe, I'm not alone with liking it then. :)
If you are alright with the slightly toony look then 3DUniverses Sandy Bay might be of interest: http://www.daz3d.com/sandy-bay-seaside-village
Alternatively it might be worth taking a look at Dark Anvils stuff over at Poser Direct here: http://www.poserdirect.com/darkanvil.html & the Dark Anvil website is here: http://www.darkanvil.net/index.html
And don't forget Faveral. His stuff isn't *just* medieval.
A layout like this would be nice, maybe a little less cartoony.
These are simply gorgeous... :) I'll definitely have to look into using poser files in DS.
Thanks!
Provence and Alsace from him are both among the candidates. I love both.
The Poser files load fine in DS (I am a DS User), a bit of playing with the surfaces will normally get you better results, I find increasing the Positive Bump limit up, often quite a ways from the +0.01 default to 2.0 and some adjustments to reduce the glossy plastic look, try setting the Lighting Model (in the General section) to something other than Plastic and maybe adjusting the Specular settings and the results can be worth the tiime. The attachment below is a straight render of the Low Poly Thatched Inn using the Poser defaults in DS 4.8 using one of Dimension Theory's Cloud Nine Sky Domes/Lights Set.
I am also a fan of 1971s stuff over at Rendo if you want something a bit different, but he does do more 'normal' sets as well, again Poser native files but they work in DS, and a few tweaks to the surfaces as above and they get better. The second attachment is 1971s Spiked House with the surfaces adjusted as above.