I think that terrain material uses a mask which blends a rock and sand texture together,so you'll want to use the blender node in Poser to get it looking right,

EldritchCellar posted at 1:54AM Mon, 09 November 2015 - #4237591

I was looking at some of your models earlier, some old freebies of yours... the floating eyebot and the mechanical tentacle. I was noticing that sometimes you use control edges and other times not for your hard edge modeling in poser (for the smoothing) and yet I wasn't detecting much in the way of smoothing problems. Didn't look like you were splitting vertices, were you setting smoothing groups in 3dmax or something? I've modeled some hard surface things using edge loop/control edge style bevels and the specularity on the corners and such is nice and without artifacts but it drives the poly count through the roof. For instance just looking at some of your modeled bolts and greebling I'm not seeing bevels or control loops but everything looks fine in Poser so I'm thinking smoothing groups?

can't remember the tentacle,that's a very old model..probably a good example of what not to be looking at,with those first models I was just learning while making content so are filled with plenty of mistakes. the floaty bot thing is a good example of optimizing subdivided geometry. I had to sub-d it to get the curved surface,but then I went in and removed about half of what the sub-d had given,and then went and modeled some extra bits on top of that,as you say sub-d will add a heap of extra faces that you probably don't need.so it's best to remove them, for the hard surface stuff I use all of the above..used to be just splitting/breaking verts,but for the past 7 years or so I was using smooth groups in the obj(that's the one thing Poser had over DS that affected my workflow,the ability to read smooth groups), I rarely add control loops,and to that end subdividing one of my models in poser would just make it a mess. and I also used the smooth angle available in Poser and DS to keep faces hard. I do try to bevel as much as possible but that's just for aesthetic reasons, not to avoid artifacts.it's to get that nice edge highlighting. Keeping hard faces looking hard and without weird looking smoothing is something to really keep in mind when modeling for Poser,DS,Vue etc

for some cool looking hard surface modeling techniques https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEc6CYyzn1oVI4lrFrNC16g/videos

usually just a cube or even just an extruded edge,most of the building facades I do start from a photo of an actual facade,corrected/squared up as much as possible in Photoshop and then applied to a plane as texture,then just cut/slice and extrude to match whatever shapes are in the texture,and re-do the uv's as your modeling. and then if your doing commercially available content you'll have to make the walls separate so users can remove them for rendering

EldritchCellar posted at 7:08PM Sun, 08 November 2015 - #4237316

Hey, can I bum that 'Enchanted Forest' offaya? Strictly for educational purposes? :)

no..but your more than welcome to buy it..for educational purposes :P

I guess all you can do is follow the tutorials,read the manuals and don't be afraid to push the buttons,it's really just learning the tools you have and then you can make anything.I did follow a lot of tuts on modeling for video games which made for some efficient modeling,but if your doing this just for your own comics,and not intending to redistribute your models then you do have the luxury of cutting corners,I really enjoy doing models for my own illustrations as you can get it done so much quicker and better if no one else will be using the model.when you start making content for sale then you need to start thinking about how the end user will be working with it.and the limitations of whatever program the end user will be working with,what kind camera angles they'll be using(they always seem to render from angles you don't expect them to be rendering from),also you want to consider how many extra figures /props etc they will be adding so keeping things efficient is important.

something I do say to people though is try not to look at what other modelers and content creators are doing,use real world buildings as your reference points instead..that way you wont be repeating the same mistakes other content creators have made.

well,I guess don't look at the whole,look at what makes up the whole..they're just cylinders and boxes,and any modeler can do that

yep 3dmax,but buildings are simple,you could model it in anything..and I can understand some not too thrilled to see me here,..but 90 odd percent of my store is still Poser content

quietrob posted at 2:23AM Thu, 05 November 2015 - #4236987

@Stonemason. That is simply amazing! I just read up on Z depth rendering. I understand instancing. As stated, I own the Utopian Blocks (I have almost everything you made for Poser. Purchase order or screenshot given upon request) and I also just joined the CG Society.

The background city lights that are seen behind the main city to the next collection of buildings in the background. Are those part of the Utopian Blocks and thus can be rendered with nightlights in DAZ Studio? Now that I know it was indeed postworked, I'm off to study Godray tuts for Photoshop 6.

Much thanks to the Master Builder, Stonemason. This humble thread has just become the Hall of Worthies.

no worries :) the city lights are just a photo of a city at night, probably from cgtextures.com ,that is set to screen so that all you get are the lights,then mask out the buildings so the lights sit in the background,I use zdepth to do color range selections(photoshop) of groups of buildings then I can paint in clouds behind them, do that from the front to the back and you should get some nice depth to the image,then the god-rays are just painted in on separate layer, I find volumetrics are just easier to do in post,you'll get better control and don't need to worry about the extra rendering time.

quietrob posted at 10:17PM Wed, 04 November 2015 - #4235566

Look at this render. How do you think he did this? I have the blocks but I'd rather make it for a contemporary setting.

I rendered that in DAZ Studio,then all the clouds are painted in with help from a zdepth render,most of the buildings are instanced so it was pretty fast to render

This sort of reminded me why Vendors don't usually frequent forums, I seem to forget that about once a year when I'm in between projects.

hehe

I think content creators are better off letting the stores do the promotion, all you can really do is make good looking promos and hand it off for them to use their channels for promo, it's kind of what your paying them for, anything extra that an individual does is minimal and just eats into production time(facebook posts,forum posts etc don't generally equal sales), same goes for support ,if you can find a store that handles that for you it'll equal more production time.

Quote - What if Toy Story was put out with bad poser 3 lighting

slightly OT ,but wasn't Toy Story lit with shadow mapping..so it kinda was put out with P3 lighting :)

agree with the sentiment though,no one cares that Poser or pre made content was used,they care that the imagery is made to a high standard.

Quote - > Quote - Why don't Poser meshes use normal maps ?

Poser and Normal maps get along quite nicely, I use them in my products all the time, mostly for clothes wrinkles and such...they work great. Zbrush and Normal maps are the bomb.

The one drawback is it's there all the time, regardless if the figure needs/wants it. For instance one of my ideas that the dev team has never taken hold of is to have different normal maps that are driven by body part rotations...much like morphs are. But normal maps can resemble much greater deatil than morphs, though they don't actually displace the mesh...they just trick the eye. So when the pant leg is straight no wrinkles behind the knee, when the shin rotates along x axis a normal map is inserted onto the shin map node. A rough example of my rough idea.

pretty sure you can do this already,since textures can be animated you just need to do the proper linking,it's similar to a JCM,but instead its a joint controlled texture so you can bend an arm and have the veins or muscles from a displacement(or normal) map increase/decrease in strength etc

looking good Chris..well done!

I'll get a post up at rdna and see if they can help.

if I just use IDL then there's still going to be the issue of AO being cast from these surfaces,I am using AO in the material for specific reasons on muliple surfaces..on the terrains I use it as a mask to blend between a couple different ground textures,on the rooftops I have a very wide falloff which gives a cool grungy look to the rooftops and on the road I also have a wide AO falloff for the vehicles contact shadows...so I do realy want the AO to be in the materials,at least on those specific surfaces.

and yea,I always work a few versions behind so this is being made in Poserpro7.

should add that I'm not one to go for absolute realism in my scenes,I love the AO effect as it picks out details very well.so technical accuracy always takes a backseat to what looks cool :)

still thinking the only option here is to petition SM for an include/exclude option..the 3dmax renderers I use have that option and it comes in handy for a lot of things.

thanks again for the help,will post again if I get a fix at dna

Cheers

yea,obviously with no AO on the lights and no AO on the surfaces then it all renders fine,but that's not an option as the end user may want to use AO on the lights(& me too)..and that network is just too complicated for this set,what size is the RGB map(the mask) thats driving everything?