Creating Big City Scenes in DAZ Studio

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  • EightiesIsEnoughEightiesIsEnough Posts: 1,110
    edited October 2018

    I found the blocks, they were actually in the props folder, and I admit I originally checked the Figures folder.

    Another thing I'd like to ask: If I have multiple city blocks on the main River Front base, as in the base filled to capacity, would it result in a slow render in 3Delight?  I ask this because when I saved it, the process of saving seems to be slow (as in multiple minutes), and this is only with two street blocks added (asssuming nine city blocks fill a street block).  So I am wondering if a slow render is likely?

    I read in another thread that there is a way to reduce the texture images' file sizes, but how would I be able to reduce the file sizes without ruining the visual quality of the texture images?

    At least the city blocks from Renderosity may have multiple textures, unless I misinterpreted the images on the corresponding Renderosity page for each item.

    Post edited by EightiesIsEnough on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    I haven’t seen any 3DL render time issues with a large number of sets added. Each one adds geometry, so the viewport movement will get increasingly slow as will load/save time. How slow will depend upon how much free ram you have. 

    I have scene optimizer which can reduce the texture sizes selectively. You could reduce textures further away from the camera while keeping those close by at normal resolution.

     

  • So maybe I might need to expand my RAM in order to allow for a faster save time. That might be an idea for a future purchase at Best Buy during the post-Christmas sales.

  • EightiesIsEnoughEightiesIsEnough Posts: 1,110
    edited October 2018
    RGcincy said:

    Divided Highway

     

    I recently picked up @FirstBastion Divided Highway. It comes with 3DL and Iray materials. I was wondering how to integrate it into River Front since it needs to be embedded in the terrain and it came to me that the perfect spot was the river, which is a nice long narrow space. I loaded the Divided Highway set, grouped all its elements, turned off its lights (as I already have a set in the scene), hid it's skydome, hid fb_floor-center item (to show all the highway's roadbed), and moved the group to -3000 x / -7067 y / 30,000 z. I also found a perfect spot for Urban Sprawl 3, along the river in the flat industrial wharf area, where there are no roads to interfere with those that come with US3 product. Here's a 3DL render using Camera 10 from the Divided Highway set:

    Click on image for larger view.

     

    Here's an aerial screen capture showing the location in River Front:

     

    I'm going to kitbash some fillers for the Divided Highway walls so it can also be rendered from above. Not sure how complex that might be at this point, as they have a number of nooks and crannies.

    I was briefly interested in purchasing the divided highway prop down the road, but the one issue I have is that there are areas that have brown dirt where the river wuold normally be without the divided highway.  And there is no curved version that would fill the curved section of the river.

    That said, I think, for me, I am better off keeping the river as is, and probably adding a ship dock and harbor.

    Post edited by EightiesIsEnough on
  • RGcincy said:

    Shops and Stores

     

    There's all kind of shopping in big cities. Here I call out some stores contained in a couple of sets. These first ones are from Mountain Valley.

    • Travel agent, jewelry, stationary, and barber shop:

    • Paint store and bar:

    • Bike shop and gas station:

     

    These next ones are from Dreamland Models city blocks (available at rendo, his low poly blocks are available at Daz).

    • Another gas station in city block 15:

    • A grocery store in city block 14 and another one in city block 8:

    • A tire shop in city block 7:

    • A theatre, fashio stores and hardware store in city block 7:

    • Butcher and dentist shops from city block 7:

    I purchased the Mountain Valley set.  Should be a great addition to the downtown portion of my city.

    I also purchased the Collective3d residential neighborhoods last spring or summer, and also downloaded a free neighborhood on ShareCG a long while ago.

    I also downloaded, about a year ago, buildings more suited for a downtown district, but the problem is, they only has the fronts of the buildings.

    Maybe instead of buying many of the props, , and while I do intend on purchasing the remaining 11 of Dreamland's City Blocks, I could be creative in the coming weeks and create some low-poly buildings.

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    Whenever you’ve completed some renders of your city, please post some, I’d love to see what it looks like.

    If you are running into long render times, you can hide foreground buildings, render and save the background as a png, hide those and render the front buildings, then layer your images in post work.

  • EightiesIsEnoughEightiesIsEnough Posts: 1,110
    edited October 2018

    I'd like to ask something else too.  With each base that came with the city blocks (Block Outer props), is there any way for me to hide some stretches of pavement on roads?

    Post edited by EightiesIsEnough on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    Did you just want to hide the pavement or replace it? If you just want to hide it, you can use the Geometry Editor to select the road polygons you want to hide in the viewport, then right click in the viewport and choose Geometry Visibility/Hide Selected Polygon(s). That will leave a gap however that you will have to fill by placing a plane under the road surface.

    Or you can select the desired road polygons and assign them to the grass surface for example (select polys with Geometry Editor then right click and choose Geometry Assignment/Assign to Surface/Grass) and they will show grass instead of road. The grass in the old roadbed, however, will be depressed below the curb but there's a way to fix that too. I can tell you how if that's what you are trying to do.

  • I am wondering if the slow saving of the River Front base with city blocks attached to it is due to having too many big files, such as big video files, cluttering my hard drive?

    Either way, I am going to transfer many of my video and large audio files to my external hard drive and/or CD-ROMs in the coming days.

  • EightiesIsEnoughEightiesIsEnough Posts: 1,110
    edited November 2018

    I may have figured out the problem regarding the slower saving of the River Front base with some of the city blocks.  I scaled the blocks down to 25% the normal size, and I created a new group in which I added the River Front prop to it.  It saves much faster now.

    This is a very interesting and informative thread.  It gives me inspiration to design my own city

    I'm also going to download the Dysteria city blocks 01 to 20 (two packs of ten each) this evening, as they are free.

    As for an idea on how to fill the void in the Divided Highway scene, might I suggest a railroad?

    I'm also surprised there is no shopping mall mentioned in this thread yet.

    Also, are the buildings in Mountain Valley separate items and can at least some of them be detached?

     

    Post edited by EightiesIsEnough on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    Glad you got things saving faster. Hope you share your progress if you design your own city!

    The railroad is a good idea. I haven't tried to incorporate one yet, same for shopping mall - there's a good interior for a mall in the store but I haven't seen any exterior sets. Probably requires kitbashing or model creation.

    The Mountain Valley buildings are grouped in six "quarters". The Tribunal building (large central structure) is separate. For each quarter, you can hide building surfaces in the Geometry Editor. They are labeled by building number and the first one I tried left the adjoining building intact (I was concerned they might share surfaces or walls). A second one I tried did share some surfaces. So with a little bit of effort you may be able to get some individual buildings via the geometry editor. You can delete the hidden geometry then save the building as an individual prop if you wanted to.

  • One thing that I'm quite surprised doesn't exist on Renderosity nor in the DAZ Shop, is a supermarket, interior and/or exterior.

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    The closest I've seen is an empty big box store (but you would have to fill the shelves) and well-stocked convenience stores.

  • Filling the shelves is definitely an issue.  Building the shell of the store. that could be done.  I might be something I'd tackle.

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    That would be great if you did. I wonder if there's a script that could create instances and place everything in it's place?

  • @ JonSea31

    Hi, I just searched something on ShareCG and saw some shop interior, remebered I read something about here. So here I post the link Aemi's Shop.

    Yeah its an realy old poser prop and the products in the shelves have writings that looks like chinese letters on them. To make it usable you may need to adjust the shader settings and even replace the textures or convert it to iRay I don't know. But at least you get something to start with.

    While I'm at it here is a Shopping Cart. The description call it high poly and you may need to adjust things as well.

    If you are in search of a realistic looking commercial shopping cart here I found a product in the shop Hobo Scene Props.

  • Here are some freebie products for to fill up the shelves in the shop interior.

    Gas Station & Convenience Store

  • New to this thread. I've been looking for a cityscape 3D model like the ones by Dreamland, Powerage and Stonemason - some of whose products I've alrerady purchased - but on a steep hill or slope overlooking or next to a big central business district, as seen in the ones found in the attached pics:

    San Francisco:

    Lombard St, San Francisco San Francisco

    Quebec City:

    Quebec City

    Hong Kong:

    Hong Kong

    Some products come close, but still no cigar. I'd gladly make one if I had the time and expertise:

    https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/goldenwood-vol1/109748/
    https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/goldenwood-vol2/109919/
    https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/the-dirty-street-for-ds-iray/128425/
    https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/italian-street-for-daz-studio/129290/
    https://www.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/harbour-town/116970/

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834
    edited January 2019

    @deepred6502

    One DAZ product that places city buildings up and down hills is Medina Cityscape Generator. It works well but unfortunately only has a middle-eastern building style. There was some early talk of additional sets but nothing that came out to my knowledge. Some also discussed trying to replace the included buildings, but since it uses an encrypted script, you would have to reuse the existing file names with new files. I don't know if anyone ever gave that a try.

    There's a web-based medieval city generator but it only does aerial layout (map) views. 

    There's a commercial product called Scene City that is a blender add on. You can create a road and building network. One of the images shows buildings going up a hill but it's not clear if they follow the terrain or just stick through. There's a companion product called SceneTerrain which says "Works with SceneCity, let your cities blend naturally on the terrain features".

    Post edited by RGcincy on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    Wanted to post a link to some big city scenes barbult made using UltraScatterPro. She's made some huge cities.

    Using Dystopia 

     

    Using Urban Sprawl 3  Be sure to look at all five of the tests she published

    Note the images are links to a couple of barbult's examples, just to show what's possible

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,131
    RGcincy said:

    Wanted to post a link to some big city scenes barbult made using UltraScatterPro. She's made some huge cities.

    Using Dystopia 

     

    Using Urban Sprawl 3  Be sure to look at all five of the tests she published

    Note the images are links to a couple of barbult's examples, just to show what's possible

    Those look quite realistic in their 'randomness'.

  • RGcincy said:

    @deepred6502

    One DAZ product that places city buildings up and down hills is Medina Cityscape Generator. It works well but unfortunately only has a middle-eastern building style. There was some early talk of additional sets but nothing that came out to my knowledge. Some also discussed trying to replace the included buildings, but since it uses an encrypted script, you would have to reuse the existing file names with new files. I don't know if anyone ever gave that a try.

    There's a web-based medieval city generator but it only does aerial layout (map) views. 

    There's a commercial product called Scene City that is a blender add on. You can create a road and building network. One of the images shows buildings going up a hill but it's not clear if they follow the terrain or just stick through. There's a companion product called SceneTerrain which says "Works with SceneCity, let your cities blend naturally on the terrain features".

    Thanks for the advice. I'll just have to save a few bucks for it. Or, if Ansiko and V3Digitimes are reading this, it's a possible idea for a future product.

  • EightiesIsEnoughEightiesIsEnough Posts: 1,110
    edited February 2019
    RGcincy said:

    Wanted to post a link to some big city scenes barbult made using UltraScatterPro. She's made some huge cities.

    Using Dystopia 

     

    Using Urban Sprawl 3  Be sure to look at all five of the tests she published

    Note the images are links to a couple of barbult's examples, just to show what's possible

    Those look quite realistic in their 'randomness'.

    I got a question: If I were to replicate some of the blocks using UltraScatterPro, could the scene load faster than it would with the method of selecting and duplicating a prop?

    Also, does the original UltraScatter allow the ability to scatter props in specific places like in UltraScatterPro?

    Post edited by EightiesIsEnough on
  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    I took a scene with 4-5 Low Poly blocks in it. The scene takes about 1.5 minutes to load. I created 10 instances of one of the blocks, saved the scene, closed down and reopened Daz Studio, and it loaded in the same amount of time even though there were 10 extra blocks in it. So I think you should expect either of the Ultrascatter products (which create instances) to have a low impact on load time.

    If you want to scatter in a matrix, I believe you need the Pro version although there may be a way to set up a distribution map in the original to do something similar. Instances Plus+ is another product I have which does matrices. They all will do a random distribution.

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    I got started with this thread when Dreamland Models released River Front and the Low-Poly Blocks in the Daz store. Then after a while, he left Daz. River Front was just released at another store  along with the low-poly blocks. You can create big city scenes without any of these products but the beginning of thise thread all dealt with how to use them in Daz Studio.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,131
    RGcincy said:

    I got started with this thread when Dreamland Models released River Front and the Low-Poly Blocks in the Daz store. Then after a while, he left Daz. River Front was just released at another store  along with the low-poly blocks. You can create big city scenes without any of these products but the beginning of thise thread all dealt with how to use them in Daz Studio.

    I have the Movie Sets: 80 Lots set but have yet to buy any of the City Blocks or other products intended for those lots. They are really good products though as you've shown.

  • RGcincyRGcincy Posts: 2,834

    New York Stores  

    I don't have this yet as it just came out in the store, but looks to be a good addition for city scenes. Although labeled New York, I've seen this same look in many cities and small town's downtown or neighborhood shopping district.

  • nonesuch00nonesuch00 Posts: 18,131

    That is a common look all over the old US downtown areas, even small rural towns are pretty similar, sans fire escapes and so many blocks of buildings.

  • EightiesIsEnoughEightiesIsEnough Posts: 1,110
    edited April 2019

    I purchased the UltraScatterPro and Scene Optimizer in recent days while they were on sale.  They seem promising.

    I do have a few questions regarding both priducts.  First, the UltraScatterPro...

    1. If I were to scatter the city blocks throughout the River Front base,without going over pavement, what steps would i have to take in order to accomplish this?

    2. if i were to randomly arrange houses added to a city block scene, how could that be accomplished?

    3. Now, for Scene Optimizer, someone mentioned the idea of reducing texture sizes away from a camera.  What steps would I have to do in order to make that possible?

    I think, based on the past posts, the UltraScatterPro option seems to be more promising and achieve better results.

     

    Post edited by EightiesIsEnough on
  • I see nobody responded yet.  Maybe I wasn't clear enough in what I said.

    I shall rephrase my question in this case.

    If I was to scatter city blocks on the River Front base, and have the duplicates scattered throughout the top five rows (assuming, overhead, the five rows closer to the top of the screen are what I am talking about).  If I were to have, say, eight duplicates scattered throughout the desired rows, and not overlap the streets and sidewalks, and randomly rotate in 90 degree increments, what parameters in the would I have to set?

    I tried surface, volume, and matrix tabs, but no success.  The PDF manual seems to not be pretty clear enough to give results I want.  I tried matrix, but every time I did it created a duplicate diagonally to the next block on the lower right.  Volume doesn't seem to work, as it overlaps the streets, sidewalks, and other copied blocks.

    What parameters should be used in the settings, distribution, scaling and rotation tabs?  And should I use matrix, volume, or surface, or would I have to use all three of these?

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