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Take Me Out to the Ball Game!
Every mid-20th century American city would have had one or more baseball fields: high school, college, or pro. This is Collective3d Baseball Field set down in River Front. The field comes with Iray materials but I'm using it with 3DL buildings, lights and sky, so I did the following steps to make it work:
1. Select all the baseball field objects in the Scene pane by expanding the product group and highlight everything.
2. Go to the Surfaces pane and select all the surfaces.
3. Click on the Presets tab then click on Shaders.
4. Type default into the search bar. You should (may) find near the top a shader called !SimpleSurface Base. Double-click to apply. This gives the Iray materials 3DL properties.
5. Go back to the Surfaces editor tab. Find the chain link fence surfaces under Backstop object. In the Opacity Strength channel, click on the image box and select Chain Link Fence opacity.jpg. You will now be able to see through the fence rather than having a solid plane.
6. Find the three Dirt_Decal surfaces and turn Opacity Strength to 0%.
Looks great mixed in with the rest of the city in the background.
Just like the old time stadiums - now they are oftentimes centered in a sea of parking!
Busy Streets!
I recently got "20 Low Rez Vehicles" from Rendo to help fill city streets. This is a Poser product but imports just fine into Daz Studio. Once installed to your Runtime, you can access it from Poser Formats/My DAZ3D Library/Props/Powerage/LRVehicles. To make for faster access, I right-clicked on the LRVehicles folder, selected Create a Category From/Selected Folder and added it to my Dreamland Props category.
The product has 20 vehicles: 13 cars and a school bus, dump truck, fire engine, police car, SUV, truck tractor (but no trailer) and a step van. You can add each prop individually but there's also a "60 Vehicles Powertown" preset. Click on the preset and you have 60 vehicles added to your scene. Powertown is a reference to another Powerage product, so the cars aren't located where we want them for River Front but I'll outline the steps to quickly get them set up for a busy street scene.
1. Load River Front or whatever city product you plan to use.
2. Click on the 60 Vehicles Powertown Preset.
3. The cars will be scattered over about four River Front city blocks, not aligned to the streets
4.Click on Windows/Panes/Align on the main menu to open the Align pane.
5. In the Scene pane, highlight the first 30 vehicles, click on Create/New Group from the main menu and give it the name Group 1. Repeat for the other 30 vehicles and name it Group 2.
6. Expand Group 1 in the Scene tab and select all 30 vehicles. On the Align pane, set X-Axis to Align:Centers and click the Apply button. The vehicles will get lined up in one long row. While still highlighted, go to the Parameter pane and select all 30 vehicles in the list. Type in 0 for Y-rotation. Set scale for all of them to 90%.
7. Repeat step 6 for Group 2 but type in 180 for Y-rotation. You'll now have two rows, facing opposite directions.
8. Select Group 1 in the Scene pane and move the group so the cars are in one lane of one of the roads. Repeat for Group 2. Zoom in and make sure the cars are facing the right way in the lanes for the country you are modeling. If not, switch them around.
9. Next select the first 15 vehicles in Group 1 and make it into Group 1a, Make the other 15 vehicle into Group 1b. Re-parent the two sub-groups under Group 1. Select Group 1a and move it into the second lane.
10. Repeat step 9 for Group 2.Now you'll have 4 lanes filled, although many cars in each lane will be overlapping.
11. There's two ways to resolve the overlap. One way is to select a vehicle then drag on the arrowhead aligned with the street and move it to a new position. The second is to select a group of vehicles in the Scene pane, then in the Align pane set X-axis to No Change and set z-axis to Distribute:Centers. Click Apply. This will spread the cars out evenly between the vehicles at either end of the selection. You can then fine tune the location by dragging or using the parameter dials.
12. Save the vehicles as a Scene Subset and you can merge it into any of your city scenes.
Cool. I'll have to remember this. I have those cars on my wishlist over there.
Street Signs
I forgot I had this until I saw it in Fast Grab today: Street Decor - Street Signs. This is a pretty complete set of street and highway signs with a lots of options for both US and European streets. As the store promo says: 19 sign shapes, four post designs (with galvanized, enameled & wood finishes), a variety of hardware, and 335 premade signs. Plus it comes with Photoshop templates and fonts to modify them to fit your own needs. Here's two renders with a number of these signs in use.
Nice. I keep missing these when they end up in FG. Still on my wishlist.
same.
Step Van Bundle is 70% off today. Here's the link to a post I made describing them plus some thumbnails of images featuring the van:
The signs are an excellent addition, I think you could scale them larger on the bridge, cause they really do help sell the scene,
Good suggestion! I was thinking they were small when I did the first render but sized them to match the concrete sides of the bridge. But after your comment, I was thinking you usually see them on a metal bracket jutting forward from the overpass so no need to constrain them. Here's a repeat of the same scene with the larger signs.
Speeding through the City
I recently picked up the new Animation Four Wheeler Template. There's a number animations already set up for some of the cars sold at Daz (Car Ranger, Army Truck 1930, 1936 AM Sedan, Luxury Car 1950, Family Car 1950, Pickup Truck 1930, Delivery Sedan and Wagon 1930). Preset icons for those cars appear with the other parts of AFWT so you don't have to go looking for them. It's easy to use the prepared animations: load the car, apply an animation, then position it in your scene as you would normally (translate and rotate). I found that I could access the animation timeline through DS's Timeline, Keymate, and Animate panes without any special action on my part. I made a small GIF to show a car speeding through the neighborhood.
In addition to the cars it comes with, you can apply the animations to other vehicles. I haven't tried that yet, so I'll make a future post once I learn how.
Here's another animation of the same car and motion except I parented a camera to the chassis and have it inside the car.
That is just AWESOME!!!!!!
This is a lot more fun than I was expecting. A whole new way to experience a 3D city.
One more animation of the same scene. In this case, I moved the parented camera up and away from the car so it follows down the street and through the turn then a different stationary camera picks up the scene to show the car disappearing down the road.
It would be cool to have a camera pointing at the side of the car too, assuming the wheels spin.
Here you go. You can see the tires rotate, wheels turn, and (hard to see) steering wheel turns. Now it just needs a driver!
Really good work here, RGcincy. This was exactly what we were thinking when we were creating this product - 3D City Scenes have new and different looks and possibilities. On One-click Presets we're using only Daz owned cars, 'cause we weren't sure if other vendors wouldn't object if we use their vehicles with our wheels.
Linday
Well, you had a good idea and I'm glad I got it. I would think other vendors wouldn't mind you rigging their cars as long as you need to own their products to use them in yours. It would only help increase their sales.
Flying
Not at all what it was made for, but here is a "flying car":
This was my first atempt. It was a little jerky so I tried again as you can see above.
I attached the biplane to the chassis bone of the Four Wheeler Template. You can see the chassis in the attached image - it's the blue and white checkerboard object. I then added some yaw and roll to the plane itself along the way.
Animated Fire Engine
The Animation Four Wheeler Template has a number of Daz vehicles rigged for animation. You can also rig your own vehicles, but as a short cut, you can just parent a vehicle to the template. First, load the template by using the preset (the blue and white checkerboard vehicle). Load your prop (in my case a fire engine) and parent it to the chassis bone of the template. You may find as I did that the vehicle is buried in the ground. You can either change the Y-translate of the prop or of the template so the wheels are on the ground. Next load the animation you plan to use, then position the template so that any turns occur at the intersection of a road or driveway. Since the wheels aren't rigged, it's probably best to have a more distant view of the vehicle as the wheels won't rotate or turn. Here's the animated fire truck:
Here's a render of the template:
And here's a render of the fire engine parented to the template:
This is pretty cool!
Dreamland Single Homes
Single Homes Bundle One is a new Dreamland product designed for Daz Studio (many of his previous products that I've showcased were made for Poser). It comes with three houses, detached garages, lots, driveway, street, power poles, and several other features. It has two forms of grass (simple and modeled). It has a large number of Iray roof and wall materials as well as a large number of presets to turn design features on/off. In this first Iray render of Single Home 01, I put a Caravan Minivan (for Poser) in the driveway (I'll do a more detailed review of this car in the future). For the sky I used Green Hills Skydome and HDRI. The grass is the simple version. These houses have a style that fits with many of the Dreamland City Block products, so these could be used as foreground houses in a city scene.
There's a number of lights preset on the house. I turned many of them off, otherwise you have a house that looks like it's having a party in every room. For this night scene, I used First Light Skydome and HDRI for the sky.
I think you are doing an amzing job of showing us how to render a great city scene!!!
Why thank you @Saphirewild It's fun to see which products go together and how best to use them.
Dreamland Single Homes - Presets
I mentioned previously that there are a number of presets for the Single Homes Bundle One houses. A listing of some of them:
One thing I like about the above presets is that the pop-up images in the Content Library are large, so you can easily see what the preset is going to do.
As you can tell from the above, there are many, many options to modify the design. This is a great product for the price in my opinion.
Here's a daytime Iray render with different roof color, wall color, siding instead of brick, different types of siding (clapboard, fish scale, and asbestos), and many of the extra design trim turned off.
That looks pretty great!
Smaller Homes
One comment I've read about the new Dreamland houses is they are large, luxurious, and of a type only wealthy people could afford. Some of the City Blocks Dreamland sells at Rendo have smaller homes. I wondered if the new Iray materials from the Single Home collection could be applied to them and the answer is yes.
This first render shows two houses from City Block 14. The materials are the native Poser ones converted using the Iray uber base.
This next render shows materials from the new Single Homes Bundle One being applied. Since there are shaders for the wall colors and wall type (brick, siding, plaster), those can be changed by selecting the appropriate surfaces and applying the shaders as normal. Since the single home's roof colors, grass, sidewalks, walkways, roads, etc. are modified using material presets, they don't make any changes when applied to the city block structures. What I did was load one of the single homes and do a copy/paste for these surfaces. This takes a bit of time but you can save the result as a scene or sub-scene file for easy reapplication. This render shows the single home materials on the smaller city block houses. So if you like Iray renders, buy one of the new single homes and you have a variety of materials to use on 3DL structures.