So,

Using poser 6, I'm trying to do some film-style, multi-angle animations that take place in a suburban setting.

I have a scene where a girl is walking along a street that borders a park on one side and a few houses on the
other... After searching high and low for a pre-built modern, small town set and coming up with nothing. I decided to build my own.

I've made some streets, a few buildings... a deformed plane with a tiling grass texture stands in for the grassy area of the park. And for a sky I've used a huge half-circle with a sky texture map on it. And I've boarded the whole thing with raised "mountain" objects on four sides. Trying to cover the fact that this "small town" really is very, very small (basically just the one long street.)

I was hoping someone here might have some tips for me -- to help sell the idea that this is taking place is a real space...

I need to add trees to the park (which will also help obscure the skyline a little,) but I'm worried about the huge number of polygons each one of those is going to take up. I might use a few in the front. Then switch to something less processor intensive to "pad out" the background. Any suggestions?

Same thing for houses. A few fully modeled ones in the foreground. Then maybe just 2d textures in the distance? Does that sound like a good idea?

Any suggestions, hints, whatever would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks,
Anthony

The reverse angle.

one way to make 2d forest to fill the background is to use "RDNA Fields - Volumetric Field Figure" scaled up and replace the grass textures with rendered trees. I did 3 setups of square renders with trees and shrubs i have and rendered from the front camera. saved with alpha channels. pulled up the alpha channels in paintshop pro and made the trans maps form them. This allows me to put my volumetric forest with my tree models and have them look similar.

One way to have a whole forest for the price of a few poligons is to use a plane and apply a tree texture to it, with the appropriate transparency map. You could take a 3D tree, do a number of renders of it from various angles, each time saving the render and the alpha channel (save as TIF and you'll get both. You can then easily separate the 2 in a paint program). You then create a simple plane and load the textures to get a flat tree that you can put anywhere. You can do this with just about anything (houses, cars, furniture,...) and place these in the background at a very low cost.

I use Mason's tree billboards for all my background trees. They are basically trees painted onto squares, with a transmap. This way they are 1 poly trees ;)

Your scene actually looks pretty good. Depending on how small your town is, I might recommend looking into some of Stonemason's buildings on Daz (Like the Warehouse District). You could put a few of these buildings in the way background to beef up the town a bit. I know most small towns have a water tower somewhere.

You might also try rendering clips/scenes in layers. Is this an animation? Or still? When I render, I often render the stuff way in the background first, and then bring that in as a background picture or animation...then put more stuff in front of it, and so on, and so forth. It's a lot like painting a picture. This may seem like the long way to do things...but trust me, if you are doing a BIG scene, it is the only way to do it without choking Poser (or many other 3d programs for that matter) up. It might take a few hours to do, but if you tried to do it all at once it might take days...if it ever gets done.

I use this layering technique all the time.

Hope this helps :D I'm still planning to try to do a little mini-tutorial on doing this. I've just been a little swamped here.

Some higher resolution car objects would be better. There are plenty of free highish resolution cars for free on the `net that you could import and use.

Thanks for all the suggestions.

Sbertram, you mention "Mason's tree billboards." Are you talking about Stonemason? Are they part of one of his sets?

I guess those would basically be the same thing as what Evanara was suggesting I make... I think I'll give that a try.

Anyway, thanks again... I'll get to work.

as far as the car suggestion goes.. I think its the Honda site that allows you to download LW versions of their cars, motorcycles, etc.. for free... let me scour the archives.. and see if I can find the link. As far as trees go.. the plane idea is definitely viable.. you just need to make sure the plane is facing the camera... for whatever camera you are using... I think there are python scripts that can do that..

Attached Link: http://www.honda.co.jp/WebPlamo/

Here is the link for the Honda site, the problem with that is that you need to download each thing in smaller parts and then put them all together.

thanks for that ... thats what I was talking about.. :D it isn't that difficult to put them together.. I've done it several times myself.. its just a matter of how you import them. You have to leave the size and import information alone.. and they will import into their proper positions. You will also need to texture them.. But a start... nonetheless

Message edited on: 08/27/2005 11:58

Attached Link: http://www.3dcafe.com/index.php?option=com_wrapper&Itemid=38

You can download free models of houses from 3dCafe.com. Scroll down to the Architecture link and click on the link for the thumbnail page. They are low-poly and in .3ds format. You can export them from Poser in .obj format and use UVMapper to correct any problems such as bulging polygons.