62707 How to Craft and Populate and Detail Big Cities in Daz Studio
Details
With so many urban assets available at the Daz 3D store, a natural inclination is to build an urban environment or to even create a whole city! But where do you start to generate such a sophisticated environment?
With 3.5 hours of tutorials, Richard Schafermeyer (rgcincy) takes you through the steps of crafting, populating and detailing a big city for Daz Studio. He’ll show you techniques, scripts and the best assets to construct a busy metropolis!
He'll be creating from a bird’s eye view as well as down at street level, having a particular emphasise on realism and making a “used” look for the buildings and streets.
Crafting
•Build a road network
•Adding buildings
•Main tools: movement methods, instances, various scripts, scene subsets and layer compositing
Populating
•Populate your streets with people and vehicles
•Main tools: instances, scattering, billboards and use of low-resolution figures
Detailing
•Adding dirt, weathering and a used look to buildings
•Adding and scattering debris elements in a street for realism
The tutorials will take a close look at:-
Issues to Overcome
• Memory limitations (RAM, VRAM)
• Moving around a large scene
• Creating variety (buildings, people, vehicles)
• Lack of sufficient models for specific era or locale
• Positioning numerous objects
• Making it look lived-in
• Showing infrastructure
• Street elements and visual clutter (e.g., mailboxes, benches, light poles, etc.)
General Techniques to Use
• Instances
• Scene subsets
• PNG layers, Iray Canvases
• Billboards
• Foreground vs background resolution
• Scripts
• Kitbashing
Viewing a Big City
• Bird’s eye view – see full scope of a city
• Drive through
• Street scene with big city showing in background
• Vignettes – Implied City
About the presenter : Richard Schafermeyer (rgcincy)
Rich Schafermeyer is a long-time 3D artist and programmer. He got his start with the original Poser and Bryce 3D. In 2001, he wrote his first 3D modeler that evolved into the still available Shape Magic. He began to use Daz Studio in 2012. With a research and engineering background, the physics of dForce grabbed his attention! He decided it would be helpful to others if he shared his learnings and has frequently done so in the Daz forums. He's also dived deep into the topic of creating big city environments in Daz and again has posted some of his learning points in the forums.
What's Included and Features
How to Craft and Populate and Detail Big Cities in Daz Studio:
Presentation outline document - includes all product resources used to create our big city
Big City Powerpoint slide deck
Session 1 tutorial : 1 hour and 43 minutes:
00:02 Introduction
00:07 Definition of a big city
00:07 Issues to overcome in building a big city
00:10 City products available and commentary on each
00:13 Urban Sprawl 2 and 3
00:17 Products where some assembly required
00:19 Generate a city automatically by software tools
00:21 Different eras and geographies
00:23 Medina city generator
00:24 Plan your city
00:25 Select era, region and economic status
00:30 Daz Studio demo : River Front (Poser product)
00:32 Alter the nudge value on transforms
00:34 Use ambient light to improve the city set
00:35 Low poly products
00:37 Creating the city a block at a time and moving city blocks
00:40 Demo of Daz product : streets
00:42 Make your own city grid
00:48 Building our city : 65 products used!
00:51 Daz Studio : How to load buildings
00:55 Moving the buildings
00:57 Scripts by MCasual for moving buildings to different blocks.
01:02 Scene subsets to help memory limitations
01:08 Dealing with anomalies when compositing city components
01:11 Saving a scene subset
01:13 Combining scene subsets using Gimp
01:24 Converting models from other sources for Daz Studio
01:26 Daz Studio demo: making a city park
01:29 Daz Studio demo : creating a city construction
01:33 The Ultrascatter Pro script
Session 2 tutorial : 1 hour and 36 minutes:
00:04 Introduction
00:06 Birds eye view - showing the details including people and vehicle
00:08 Night scene
00:10 Highway scene
00:10 Birdman vehicles
00:12 Adding details : scaffolding
00:13 Residential area using bill boards
00:14 Daz Studio Demo : Construction site (completed with better lighting)
00:18 Three ways to add people
00:20 Script to assist with billboards facing the camera
00:21 Script to drop billboards to the floor
00:25 Now-crowd product - billboard products
00:31 Crowd resources - low poly 3D figures that you can repose
00:34 Place billboards at random script
00:39 Have billboard characters face different directions
00:41 Problems of instances
00:48 Adding vehicles
00:50 Instancing optimisation
00:54 Use scripts to drop the cars to the road surface plane
00:56 Use the timeline to alter the spacing between cars
01:07 Detailing a city
01:12 Placing and scattering rubbish : Ultrascatter Pro
01:23 Dirt geometry shells for buildings and modifying them
01:40 Conclusion
Notes
This product includes:
2 General Installera
https://www.daz3d.com/how-to-craft-and-populate-and-detail-big-cities-in-daz-studio
