Hi Traci and Basicwiz,

You are not alone at that one. :-)

I like to go into wire frame mode and look from the top camera.

My units in Poser are Feet.

To move to the Top is a negative number and the homes on the top which is North by the way I have built this set.

So if you want a character on the sidewalk on the north side it is about -152 on the zTran

If you wanted the character to be at the top left corner of the block you would enter -152 on the xTran

So imagine a math grid.

To the left is a negative number and to the right is a positive number.

To move up is a negative number and to move down is a positive number.

Homes 1-4 are on the North side of the block so the side walk is around -152 on the zTran

Homes 4-7 are on the East side of the grid so the sidewalk is around 152 on the xTran

Homes 7-10 are on the South side so the sidewalk is around 152 on the zTran

Homes 10-1 are on the West side and the sidewalk is around -152 on the xTran

Those numbers are good on all my city blocks now if you rotate the block you will have to figure out which home you want to be

in front of and use the same method to get in the general position.

As far as the feet are concerned the number for the top of the sidewalk is around 0.8333 on the yTran.

Those number can get you in the general area and then the spinners can take it from there instead

of having to buy a new mouse every week from trying to move and move and move.

Hope this helps.

Tom

Here are the settings for my light.

As I said before I used one light but I was mistaken I used a point light, with the setting you see here.

Shadow set to .65

Shadows on ect with ambient Occlusion on with the settings in the little box that shows up when you click

on [Scene O C Options] button.

Number of samples helps to get a smoother shadow and help to get rid of schmutz in the scene when white meets white in a corner or along an edge.

Ambient Occlusion is a cheap version of Indirect Lighting.

Well that should be enough to get the ball rolling.

Tom

Thanks Bob!

I forgot to say the snow was created with Snarlygribby's Snow Maker. Thanks Royston for letting me use it in this set!

The snow in the air was from a new prop I included in this set that you can load which is a parented prop that is set right in front of the Main Camera no matter where the Main Camera is in the scene.

Then I made a simple library of materials that can be applied to the prop that have snow, rain or even fog on them.

Uses the snow number Snow 05 for this image.

Tom

Let me start with my system specs.

Frankenstein build with the biggest tower I could find.

AMD 8350 8 core at 4.01 Ghz

32 Gig of Ram

64 Bit Windows 7

2 NVidia Geforce GTX 660 running 4@ Samsung 27" Monitors

4 Plextor 256 Gig Solid State Hard Drives

1 1.5 TB 7200 spinner

and my baby a pocket Seagate 2 TB Drive for daily back up.

Never leave home with out it.

The one thing to keep in mind is as Ted has told me about a thousand times,

There is no one size fits all render setting, so these setting are for this image only

Bucket size is default 32 so anything from now on that is not listed is Poser Default settings

Number of threads 7 as I have 8 cores and want one so I can run other programs. Use Own Process is checked.

Quality is set to 12 so the renderer takes a lot more samples. A more refined image for the little details.

Shaderate default is 0.95 which is good for test renders but the default shade rate for most objects is 0.2

so my choice of 0.25 is pretty good for helping with all the small details.

Also keep in mind that it takes all these setting to get a decent image and one feed off of another.

That is why they are divided up into sections such as Quality.

Next is Features and they are my defaults

Then we have enable ray tracing check and that is my default always other wise,

you would not see reflections in the windows like you see in the first image.

Bounces is set to 1 which is good enough for all my city block sets.

Ted explains Bounces this way.

1 if you want to see your face in the mirror.

2 if you want to see the back of your head in the mirror behind you.

3 if you want to to the reflection of a reflection of a reflections such as there mirror balls setting near each other

4 if you want your render to take a few weeks.

you get the idea.

1920 x 180 is the size of mu final render.

This render took almost 18 hours to render as the picket fence you see in the yard is a transparency mapped item.

Also the SSS adds time to the render as well and the many many displacement maps on the siding snow roofing etc.

So all these things get a pretty good looking image with out resorting to Enable Indirect Light which is a whole other subject.

I had a Skydome in the image so I used a spot light with shadows set to the setting you will see next, in the post.

Tom

Here are my render settings.

Also forgot to say that when you export from your modeling program, make sure that optimize verts is not checked or the export will weld the edges you spent time spliting.

Tom

Hi John,

You might try

bucket size of 48

Shate Rate 0.05

Filter to Sinc filter 3

Lower your raytrace bounces to 1

1 for image in the chrome ball

2 for a chrome ball in another chrome ball

3 for a chrome ball refecting a chrome ball in another chrome ball and on and on

Pixel samples to 12 or even higher  (type in)

and maybe even try with enable Inderiect Light unchecked as a second attempt

Just my 2 cents worth

Tom

This looks fantastic Ted!

Had to drag me back into the Poser forum did you? :-)

Thanks Moriador

81 City Blocks is on sale for the next 2 days at 50% off along with

Movie Sets, City Block Thirteen

Movie Sets, City Block Fourteen

Here is another look at Low Poly Nine in conjuction with 81 City Blocks.

Tom

This is the letter I sent out as to what was updated.

Hi Guys and Gals,
It has been a while now that I have wanted to go back and add some features to my Movie Sets, 81 City Blocks set.
First of all, save your existing zip files in case you want to return to the old way of doing things, for what ever reason.
(1) I added Bagginsbills puddles materials for the roads as well as reworked some of the ones that existed before.
(2) I also added some material options to hide the parking lines that were on the original set. You can now have
the parking lines or not for each of the road material sets.
(3) I also reworked the grass materials and added a few.
(4) I also cloned the Props folder into the Character folder and vise verse so you can access them from either one.
(5) I also added one ERC control on the Low Poly Block One to turn all the trees at one time.
So most of the changes I made were just for materials.
Thanks to all of you who made this my number one selling product. I hope you like it as much as I do for renders!
Regards, Tom

That is a good idea.

Thanks E

Tom

If I want to add hair to these guys and have the poses for the figure change the hair as well where do I drag the hair or shirt or pants for that matter?

Tom

Thanks will give them a try.

Tom

Nice modeling!

Tom