Ability to snap items to each other
grinch2901
Posts: 1,246
One of the things I like to do occasionally has been to play Fallout 4 because I like the system it uses for building settlements. Basically you have a few primatives (cubes, cubes squashed horizintally to make wall sections, cubes squashed vertically to make floor / ceiling panels) and they have different textures for wood, concrete, metal, etc. They "snap" together at the corners so a new wall sections just basically jumps to the edge of the last one placed and clicks into place automatially. And that's it. And yet, these few basic primatives plus a few other odds and ends like stairs (which also snap into place) and props for decorating can and have been used to make an incredible variety of rooms, buildings, and entire settlements in the game. Watch a few "let's build" videos on Youtube to see what I mean.
The ability to "snap" items together on edged would make creating settings for our 3D characters a beeze. Dare I say, a snap! Today you can fake it by either manually putting in the right x/y/z positions or by eyeballing it. But it's a lot slower and more tedious. This would be a very useful capability in DAZ studio. I don't know if a plugin could pull it off or it would have to be in the main program but it's one of my "gee I wish this existed' items so I thought I'd put it here.
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Comments
This would be cool and useful. I do find it kind of painful to eyeball to put things together =[.
It's not a perfect solution, but DAZ Studio does have an Align pane. You can select items and snap one to the other.
Also, if you know the sizes of your items, tou can use the Snapping options in the Tool Settings pane
Didn't know that @richard haseltine. Cool stuff!
There is also this the MICK medieval interior construction kit. https://www.daz3d.com/mick-medieval-interior-construction-kit
You can just snap the parts together to build your own medieval dwelling.
Whaaat?! There are snapping options and an align tool? Wow, I need to dig into those!
Just when uou wanted game engine capabilities added to DS, Richard and Maclean to the rescue, LOL
Doing one now !
demo
Oh wow, that's a fantastic solution and a really cool set of building blocks, Midnight_stories. I've been making an airport interior because none seem to exist and I think this gives me some great ideas about how to size the items so they are "snappable" to make it go from a small regional to a large international one.
Can't wait until your biohazard product hits the store! I'm thinkging interior of a space ship, dark and cramped a'la battleship galactica style more than Star Wars or Star Trek or the like.
I found using the Daz primitives gave me a good guide to size and build around that after exporting !
Nice. What build pack is that? Or is that something currently being developed? (Watches the first video) Oh, Bio Snap Hazzard Center.
It's a 5 part package complete, and I'm putting into QA this week, sorry guys not trying to Hijack this thread !
Ah, kewl.... Was trying to find Easy Snap Bio Hazard Center in the shop and it wasn't coming up. >>giggles<< What do those larger rooms look like inside?
Here's a fly through of an early version, it's got an elivator now and 2nd set of steps plus a props pack coming.
All the buildings in Fallout 4 are made from constuction kits. You can see them if you use the fallout 4 "CreationKit". (There are various parts, such as wall sections, wall sections with door frames, wall sections with windows, corner sections etc, in different styles and textures)
Well, as for easy-snap corrridors, rooms, and doors... the sort of thing I've been looking for would be more in the visual style of Sinuouss Modern Bedroom or of Sci-Fi Spaceship Bedroom, basically that sort of retro-future semi-plastic, smooth-rounded-walls sort of look. Little or no greeblees, just plain, mostly featureless walls, but with sloping, futuristic curves. But yeah, pretty sure a lot of people would use the heck out of Fallout-style corridors and rooms in DS. But it sounds like @grinch2901 is more talking about the easy modularity he saw IN the Fallout mod packs, not so much the style of the modpacks themselves.
Yes, regarding Fallout 4 I was referring to how in the vanilla game there is a mode where you build settlements up yourself. In fact you have to in at least one settlement - the first - but very minimally. It's a bunch of textured primatives that have a standard size and snap together along edges so you can make boxy buildings with them. Add a few mods and you can can get more textures, more shapes, more flaxibility. But you can make some very cools stuff even without mods if you don't mind broken down post-apocalypic shack textures.
Here's how that works, in a quick three minute how-to video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuF4RiQqR-M
Making a small house or room in DAZ would be pretty easy with basic primatives if this was native to the program.
Anyway, I'm not lookg to make a replica of St Paul's cathedral in DAZ Studio using primatives. I'm looking to create some quick sets that easily click together but which don't all need to be loaded at once. So in my airport example, I currently have an airport gate, a security checkpoint, and a ticket counter. If I had made them properly sized like Midnight_stories did, I could snap them together to make a small airport (one ticket counter, one checkpoint, one or two gates) or a huge airport (10 ticket counters, five checkpoints, 10 gates, for example). As it stands now, I need to try to eyeball their placement if I want to do that because they are kinda randomly sized (scaled to a DAZ human but not a fixed X/Z size to allow for snapping as in Midnight_stories approach)