NYC Back Alley for DAZ Studio
Step into the gap between two old New York buildings. NYC Back Alley is an 18-metre service alley, 3.8 m wide, between two four-storey brick tenements: steel lintels and stone sills over double-hung windows with dim rooms behind them, bricked-up openings, three fire-escape systems with platforms, stairs, drop ladders and gooseneck ladders, a service entrance with a concrete stoop, railing and lamp, a louvred utility door and a basement areaway. Old asphalt with concrete strips, a catch basin, a manhole, patches and a pothole leads to a chain-link fence with a gate and padlock; beyond it, and behind you at the street, stand the facades of the city. Downpipes, conduits, meters, an electrical cabinet, telecom cables and an exhaust hood cover the walls. Use it for crime and noir, chase and meeting scenes, thrillers, horror, character backdrops and rainy city nights.
Load one of seven ready scenes - Used (the main preload), Fully Detailed (more crates, pallets, bags, a bicycle, ladder, broom and mop), Clean, Grungy (open dumpster lid, more trash, Aged materials), Empty (architecture only), Wet Night and Night. Every scene comes with 20 cameras: the 12 of the brief - from the Hero View and Long Alley to the Character Portrait, Wet Ground and Cinematic Night - and eight story setups such as Under the Lamp, At the Metal Door, Through the Fence and After the Rain.
The wet alley is built in: seven puddles shaped on the ground with natural ragged edges, damp patches and wet strips along the walls, and the Asphalt Wet material set reflect the lamps, the lit windows and the fire escapes. Ground decals add oil stains, dirt, cracks and small debris, so the asphalt never looks tiled.
Six lighting presets set everything in one click: Day, Overcast and Golden Hour use the Iray Sun-Sky for New York; Evening, Night and Wet Night use the product's own evening and night skies so the lamps light the brick. Every lamp has an emissive bulb and a real light; light-group scripts switch four groups of lit windows, the wall lamps, the service entrance, the street lamps of the background and two camera fill lights. Visibility scripts hide either building, the upper floors, the fire escapes, dumpsters, trash, decorations, decals, puddles, utilities, the background or the fence.
Everything is modular on a 2.0 m grid: wall modules, windows and doors, fire-escape parts, ground pieces, utilities, lamps and props load separately, and 20 sets merge into an open scene in place. Material presets switch the whole alley between Clean, Used and Aged or one group at a time - brick (Clean, Used, Aged, Dark), asphalt (Dry, Used, Aged, Wet, Dirty) and metal (Black Painted, Used, Rusted, Dark Gray). Doors, the fence gate, sashes and dumpster lids open; repeated pieces are DAZ node instances, which keeps memory use and Iray load down.
What's included
- 7 ready scenes: 01 Used, 02 Fully Detailed, 03 Clean, 04 Grungy, 05 Empty, 06 Wet Night, 07 Night - each with 20 cameras, the lights of the lamps and its lighting.
- 20 sets (merge into the open scene, in place): Alley Shell, Fire Escapes, Utilities, Wall Lamps, Background, Windows and Doors (Full, Empty, Clean, Used, Grungy), Props (Full, Clean, Used, Grungy), Ground Decals (Clean, Used, Grungy, Wet), Puddles (Wet), Cameras.
- 102 modules and props: wall modules (straight, windows, fire-escape windows, service entrance, utility door, blind, bricked-up, ends, base band, basement, roof line), windows and doors, window dressing (curtains, roller blinds, window AC unit, window bars, rooms), fire escape (platform, railing, support, stair, drop ladder, gooseneck ladder), ground and entrances (2 / 4 m pieces, drain, damaged piece, manhole, service stoop, basement entrance), utilities, four lamps (jelly jar, gooseneck, bulkhead, cobra-head street light), chain-link fence with and without gate, city background, large and small dumpsters and props (trash cans, wheelie bin, trash bags, pallet, crates, milk crate, cartons, old boards, metal drum, bicycle, chair, broom, mop, bucket, ladder, paper scraps, weeds).
- Six lighting presets (Day, Overcast, Golden Hour, Evening, Night, Wet Night) plus the same six as render-settings presets; nine light groups (on / off) and three background presets (Day, Sunset, Night).
- Material scripts Clean / Used / Aged for the whole product and group presets Brick Clean / Used / Aged / Dark, Asphalt Dry / Used / Aged / Wet / Dirty, Metal Clean (Black Painted) / Used / Rusted / Dark Gray - also as material presets for selected items.
- Visibility scripts (Hide Left / Right Building, Upper Floors, Fire Escapes, Dumpsters, Trash, Decorations, Ground Decals, Puddles, Utilities, Background, Fence; Show All), fence scripts (Gate Open / Closed, Without / With Gate, Padlock Off / On) and depth-of-field scripts (Character, Service Door, Fire Escape, Trash Area, Wet Ground, Off).
- Movable parts: door leaves and the fence gate (Door Open), service-door lever (Turn), lower window sashes (Open), dumpster and wheelie-bin lids (Open); removable padlock.
- Iray Uber materials with base colour, roughness, normal and, where needed, metallic and opacity maps (up to 2048 px); two procedural sky HDRIs for the evening and night presets.
- Content Library icons for all 219 files, Smart Content metadata and a detailed read-me.
Dimensions and geometry
Alley 18.0 x 3.8 m between the walls; four storeys of 3.20 m above a 0.60 m base band, roof line 13.4 m; chain-link fence 2.4 m high with a gate; basement areaway with steps down to -2.0 m. Wall modules are 2.0 / 4.0 m wide on a 2.0 m grid. A ready scene has about 370 - 470 nodes, about half of them DAZ node instances (about 220,000 unique polygons). Texture files total about 545 MB for all looks; a scene loads only the maps of its current look.
Compatibility and notes
Tested in DAZ Studio 4.24 (loading) and DAZ Studio 6 (loading and Iray rendering) on Windows, installed from the package into a registered content library: scenes, all 20 sets, all 102 props, lighting, material, light-group, background, visibility and fence scripts. No figure, plugin or other product is required. The one-click presets are plain DAZ Script (.dsa) files and only change nodes that belong to this product, also next to other AuraVix Studio products in the same scene.
The lighting presets change your render settings (Iray environment, sky, tone mapping: exposure, white point, highlights). Day, Overcast and Golden Hour use the Iray Sun-Sky, where Iray renders no light nodes - the lamps are lit only in Evening, Night and Wet Night. The alley is a narrow canyon, so Golden Hour is set to 16:00 with the sky turned so the sun rakes down one wall, and a warm tone-mapping white point gives it the late-afternoon colour.
All scene images are NVIDIA Iray renders made in DAZ Studio 6 from the product installed from the package, lit only by its own lighting presets and changed only by its own scripts - no extra lights, no postwork beyond the Iray denoiser; cameras render the store's 4:3 frame. The modules / props and visibility tiles are the product's Content Library icons.
Smart Content metadata is included and structurally validated. The product is available through Content Library without it.
Installation
Merge the Environments, Runtime and Documentation folders of the ZIP into a registered DAZ content library (the ZIP has no enclosing Content folder). Find the product in Environments > AuraVix_Studio > NYC Back Alley.
AuraVix_Studio, Environments and Props
https://www.renderosity.com/marketplace/products/173613/nyc-back-alley-for-daz-studio
