UltraScenery - new territory [Commercial]
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Thanks @barbult, I was more thinking of using the props from the Ground Decals or Liquid Decal with these shaders to create a specific look in an area of your US scene. You are correct that if applied to a terrain without limitation they could produce nuwanted effects.
https://www.daz3d.com/ground-decal-materials
https://www.daz3d.com/liquid-decal-materials
Oh, that is a good shader usage idea. I have modified decals from the two packs you mentioned by using image maps from a different shader package. It works. I look forward to seeing what you come up with!
As a follow up to the previous discussion of applying a shader to the entire UltraScenery terrain, it can have a positive effect of giving you access to shader options like displacement, glossy, roughness, reflection, etc. which are not part of the USC custom shader. [Even the normal maps that are part of the USC custom shader are ignored for the most part. Only one is actually used; I think it is Base Layer Normal, but it might be Groundcover Layer Normal, I don't remember for sure.] So there can be a benefit of applying another shader to the USC terrain, as long as you can live with all surfaces being identical. If you choose to use a shader with displacement, you will need to use a fairly high surface SubD to see the results on the huge USC terrain.
test- was experimenting with 360 photos, but it does not work in the forum. Works in Facebook. Not sure where else.
The tropics bundle has been released into the wild!
https://www.daz3d.com/tropical-botanica--bundle
Cheers,
Alex.
And in my cart.
I've fed the latest five ecologies into my tame Excel spreadsheet and there are now barely 67,524 possible combinations of ecology, landscape features and water shaders.
As always, this is if you use the products straight out of the box. If you start tinkering around with the two toolboxes, the hedgmaker or go full @barbult and hack into the json files, the possibilities become almost literally endless.
Cheers,
Alex.
First render project with the new Tropics bundle. It's done strictly for laughs so the cheese factor is high. I don't have any practical use for a tropical setting, but of course I have to make sure my USC collection is complete. (That's a smidge of USXT in the blurry background.)
I gave it a shot. Here's a stock trail through one of the Woodland ecologies:
Here's a version where I draped a plane over part of the trail and applied one of the Woodland Floor Iray Shaders. Objects like the leaves appear on top, just like the stock surface. This shader has numerous variations, but they're all either a bit dark or shiny for my taste - not sure how to tinker with them to tone that down.
@paulawp thanks for testing. I bought it also but have not played with the product yet since the new release of Octane has OCIO and ACES support that became my focus for now.
BTW the new version works great with USXT.
Looks interesting, @paulawp
Would be interesting to find out, how to use trail/road map as a mask for the plane
to use woodland floor shaders only on the trail.
I use ACES support in Unity pretty often.
Would be interesting to see your results from Octane, as well.
I picked up the tropical bundle for completeness also. Neither of my computers could handle it. The scenes loaded all right, but then everything locked up. I'm sending it back and seeing if I can get Alienator Pro to do a jungle for me, maybe on a swamp ecology.
The closest I lived in a Tropical environment was Taiwan, and I am not a fan of humidity plus heat, plus bugs. But I bought the bundle and tried it out on my computer with a 1080Ti, 64Gb, and didn't have any issues. Other than no clue what it 'should' look like it. Not anything wonderful like barbult will post but I was happy.
It has been so long I had been on Daz, I had to remember to check I was on Memory and Iray was off. So I avoided freezing.
That's lovely, Mary.
Thank you @barbult. That means a lot to me.
And after trying the train tracks in UltraScenery, you have my highest commendations! I spent so much time trying to line the pesky things up on a slight curve, to just find the connections were off again when I did a test render. The final render I held my breath on and am still not sure I got it. You are a genius.
Mary
No, I struggled just like you.
Took the tropics for a spin...
Will,
Fantastic atmosphere. And the kitten is quite impresive, too!
Cheers,
Alex.
Great tropics renders, @memcneil70 and @Oso3D! Oso3D, really like the ground fog. What product did you use?
This is a quick render of tropics 5 stream 1.
Thannk you @dawnblade and I think your render is excellent also. Just hope there are no mosquitos.
@Oso3D, wow, the fog is great. You have a story lead framed up nicely there.
Mary
Strictly for atmosphere.
More Tropics, but something with a little more plot than the last one ...
Great renders, everyone.
Anyone grabbed build-your-own-tropical-climbing-plant-bundle and if so, how are they much different from the recent set?
Looks like combining these with the grounds could be great.
https://www.daz3d.com/build-your-own-tropical-climbing-plant-bundle
I have that on my wishlist. I haven't bought anything in a few days, but next time I do, I will get it and I'll try it out.
That was indeed the idea. When i created this and a lot of the other tropical plants in collections i made sure to use simelar textures ( though simplified a bit in some cases) and lower resolution models but based upon the same or simelar so that the palms, climbers and other tropics would integrate in to the Ultrascenery tropical sets. The same applies to the palms and trees in the ultrascenery XT bundle, they should all tone in and blend nicely so that your back ground, (xt) Forground (Ultrascenery) and hero plants from the individual bundles will look like they have been growing together forever.
In fact you can see the tropics bundle in the background ( and tropics xt too for that matter) here using one of the wetland features in ultrascenery
Another couple of bundles of mine that directly integrate but with much higher resolution versions are the Tropical Palm Trees For Daz Studio and the recenmtly released Tropical Palms Vol 2 - Dwarf and small Palm Trees
My Idea behind the selection of, and look of the plants in the Ultrascenery Tropical bundles was to provide lower resolution plants that combined well with the high res ones already in my catalgoue, so that scenes with hundreds or thousands of them could be created without blowing up your computer! Some were based on exisiting plants, some are new species entirley but may well have a bundle of Hero plants added to my catalgue later. Howie then added some new materals for the stones and created some forest giant trees too so that you have a great selection of plants that builds on what is already available and helps you create a fuller scene.
Anyone else run into performance issues with US after the recent update? I haven't actually used it in a while (too involved with other things), but I did download and install an update recently. Previously, with the accelerator, I was able to generate a basic scene in 30-60 seconds. Today, it's taking 6+ minutes, and Daz Studio is never quite right afterward -- almost completely unresponsive. It seems to cycle through stretches of unresponsiveness every 30 seconds or so.
I updated my video driver, restarted DS, and confirmed instancing optimization is set to memory. Still no good. I'll try restarting my computer, too, but I was curious if anyone else started seeing issues where there weren't any before.
Tim
Not really. The only thing that looks a bit unusual is that when USC starts, there are a lot of these repeated....
2022-09-02 14:29:57.272 [INFO] :: Temp Data:
2022-09-02 14:29:57.272 [INFO] :: Location = C:/Users/xxx/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/Studio4/temp/UltraSceneryTmp
2022-09-02 14:29:57.273 [INFO] :: Disk Total: 1.8 TB (1999605067776)
2022-09-02 14:29:57.273 [INFO] :: Disk Avail: 1.1 TB (1302999977984)
Didn't actually count them, but there are certainly more than 50.
I'm using the latest DS 4.20.1.58 Public Build (Beta). I have similar log entries:
2022-09-02 22:14:21.795 [INFO] :: Temp Data:
2022-09-02 22:14:21.795 [INFO] :: Location = C:/Users/Barb/AppData/Roaming/DAZ 3D/Studio4 Public Build/temp/UltraSceneryTmp
2022-09-02 22:14:21.795 [INFO] :: Disk Total: 1.8 TB (1999247101952)
2022-09-02 22:14:21.795 [INFO] :: Disk Avail: 1.5 TB (1693503807488)
If I shut down DS and restart it and immediately build _No Features with Grassland 01, I get 12 of those entries, but the total elapsed time is 3 seconds for them. The whole build was about 12 seconds.
I don't know what those log entries indicate that UltraScenery is doing at that time. It appears that Daz has added a lot of extra logging data in 4.20.
If you build start DS fresh and build _No Features and Grassland 01, capture the log file and see if you can figure what step in the process is taking so much time.