UltraScenery [Commercial]
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I was just looking at those. The olive grove would make a nice "orchard", but that's not enough for a set on its own. The Mediterranean shrubs, they kinda look more like specimen/hero plants, so I'm not sure how well they'd sit in a landscape context. I'd need to think about that...
@Tangoalpha : Add me to the list of people who would love to see a Mediterranean ecology now that some of the required pieces are in place. Of course I'm biased (being from Spain
), but having those olive filled landscapes would be also amazing as a background for any ancient Greek/Roman render.
Hopefully everyone can pardon the pun but... How about a "spice" function?
Ecology with the option of turning on / off a couple of additional test props? The Olive Grove trees being an example of that?
So not a new set of Ecologies, but the option to include these as additional assets to the existing ones?
I know you can do this after the fact with UltraScatter, and I usually do, but it would be nice to have it so that I don't have to worry about the new items intersecting with the old. Or spots of over population.
Just a thought.
Just wondering if the moorland, with a few texture changes, could be changed into a Mediterranean Maquis and the moorland trees replaced with the Mediterranean shrubs and Olive trees. Sort of mix and match with a small amount of new textures creating something quite new.
@TangoAlpha, I've stumbled upon some more errors in the TAO JSON files.
These errors are barely noticeable in the render, unless you have a closeup of a tree. Still, I hope you will do another update in the future to correct this and the missing extended forest issue (since that seems to be an oversight rather than a design decision).
In spite of the issues that have been found with TAO, I am still enjoying the addon. Keep making more.
Maybe if Martin J Frost expands with more packs in the Meditterranean theme there will be enough? I lived in Greece for a while and would love to have some ecologies for that. Cypress tress, fig trees, besides flowers, herbs, vegetables that can be grown there. The biggest thing I remember is really fresh food.
I've just bought the two products listed in FastGrab today and am looking forward to making some scenes. As I am just starting out with the PDF a thought occurred to me - I wonder whether you could use a similar workflow to create Billboards? I'd like to make my own billboards of figures in different clothing and poses but the process seems complicated. Maybe I'm way off base here but I thing that such a utility (for user-created billboards) might sell well. Anyhow, sorry for the diversion - I'll get back to making my first landscape.
You got a bargain! Have fun and post some new images here.
Any way to speed up renders? My first effort has been going for 10 minutes and still on 0% so I have no clue as to how long it will take. The image looks grainy and the water doesn't look like water yet. I don't think this will be for me if the renders take so long as I typically render projects of 60 to 100 scenes and I lose patience if one takes 15 minutes to render.
Nah, sorry - 20% at 30 minutes is just too slow for me.
Render time will depend a lot on your hardware, of course. Here are some things to consider.
Thanks for taking the time to spell out all those tips. Surprisingly, since this was my first attempt, I had anticipated and conformed to most of them. I don't use the IRay denoiser because it is awful - I'm told the Blender Cycles denoiser is better but I'm not skilled at setting up scenes in Blender yet. I have a GTX 1070 8GB GPU which I am itching to upgrade if the new 3070 comes out with more VRAM but this scene was not a problem for my VRAM because it came in at under 3GB.
I tried a few HDRIs for lighting - I usually find them pretty quick in other renders. I settled on a Skies of iRadiance sunny HDRI which looked quite natural. My render size was not too demanding at 1600 x 1200. I did use the option to limit to camera view as you mention in your tips.
Looking back at random through the pages of this thread, I have seen a couple of posts where render times of over an hour are talked about. I'm afraid this is just not going to work for me. Previously, I have used a couple of outside scenes which render quite quickly or I have used HDRIs when I can get the figures to look human-sized in the render. That's the drawback of using HDRIs as scenery - it is really difficult to get the dimensions right.
It is one of my all time favorite products, but if it isn't right for you, you should return it and get something you will get more use out of.
Had this idea on the commute to work recently - not inspired by anything on the drive, just a bored mind.
Just outside the city there is a forest
in the forest is a park
and in that park in the forest is a Marvelous Wonder Wheel
Make your way through the forest to the park and ride the Marvelous Wonder Wheel
round and round,
forget your cares,
round and round,
delight in wonderment,
round and round,
ride the Marvelous Wonder Wheel
it is probably faster than Bryce though
I think UltraScenery is sometimes very demanding and rendering times are not that short,
but it is the best addon to Daz Studio and I tend to wait for the render to complete.
Sometimes, I do not wait to the end of rendering, if the image looks good enough for me.
If you do not like to wait so long, try some rendering in game engines.
I am using Unity and with GTX 1080, I get renders in real time of big terrains, like 16 km by 16 km.
The quality of the renders is not yet in pair with iray, but it is getting close.
I tend to render scenes which take a few hours or more at night when I sleep.
I almost never render with Quality enabled. I don't care what the algorithm thinks is "complete." With Max Time set to 0 and quality off, I control the amount of rendering by setting the Max Samples. How long that takes varies based on a number of factors, but I've had many scenes that render fewer iterations/samples per hour than those I've done using UltraScenery.
On the other hand, I tend to set things up to render overnight, while I'm sleeping, and don't really care if it renders 8-10 hours. (And I've found if I leave an image to render longer, little details will show up; This is especially true for caustics and reflections and such.)
I'm also a relapsed perfectionist.
I created a pretty flat UltraScene terrain with a slightly modified Grasslands ecology. Then I manually added a couple of the new olive trees. They look pretty nice. They are very large (larger than the large oak trees I found one of the oak trees that is about the same size). The wide bottom of the trunk will not work well on sloped terrain. I learned that lesson when trying to adapt Willow Creek trees to UltraScenery.
I knew I wasn't alone in my insanity. Those voices have to be coming from somewhere!
I hear them loud and clear. I often can't sleep, because I have too many ideas clamoring for attention.
These are beautiful trees.
I too was very surprised that it took close to 10 min. just to begin rendering with Heath & Moorland add-on.
I see from the many entries in this thread that many people are having fun with UltraScenery. And many have problems running it. I'm in that group.
For me, the very first time I tried to use it, I got an error msg, log attached.
I don't know what Script Error:Line 373 means, but what I do know is that I don't need to know.
If a correctly installed product produces an error like this just from trying to use it, I take it off my system, and go for the refund, along with any add ons, (2 in this case,) that I paid for along with it.
It's such a shame. The promo shots are fantastic, but if it won't run, and I have to resort to forums in hopes of finding out why, it's a waste of my time. Thank you Daz, for having such a great return policy!
@nowefg The product does not appear to be correctly installed. It looks like you installed it by manually dragging the files into nonstandard folders within your library. Folder names with exclamation marks and extra spaces are likely the cause of the problem. Those are not the folders in the zip file. The script might be looking for the folder names that are used in the zip file. If I am misinterpreting the log file image that you posted, I apologize. You could either install to the standard folders, or go ahead and return the products. You will be missing a lot of fun, though, if you give up that easily.
One look at that library structure tells me you're wasting your keystrokes.
Yeah, even I - a diehard my-own-folder-structure user - gave in and put everything for UltraScenery in the standard folders (okay, I did grumble a bit LOL)
I used two UltraScenery tiles for these. Both are the River 2 Feature and the Woodland 5 Ecology. One has spiky hills and the other was default. I added a Lynne's Pig, Wild Boar and three Catalyzer Wolves.
Scavenging a Meal
2020-08-20 21:36:58.040 Total Rendering Time: 18 minutes 52.45 seconds
Click on image for full size.
2020-08-20 20:59:52.635 Total Rendering Time: 12 minutes 28.6 seconds
Click on image for full size.
I'm a bit proud to say that I did not give in and instead edited all the json files :D
It just takes a few seconds using "Replace All in All Opened Documents" in Notepad++.