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@SofaCitizen, I am tempted with a silly idea, why not use a car image background and put a figure?
When I experimented with some HDRI from polyhaven, I used one of them with an interior picture, then placed the figure into a sofa, it looks like is reclined there.
To my amazement the render took little time, and I saved it.
Now you see there are no free cars anywhere else.
@SofaCitizen, I thought I nailed it.
I have found a place with some cars.
These are individual zip files containing *.obj files, also include some texture file, the problem is not easy to import the later into daz studio.
At first the file went too big, then tried another way but it seems not perfect.
Now, what is needed is some background with some road view, I can put that into the viewpoint.
As you can imagine is bad luck again!
If anyone comes to and read this please help! I am struggling big and I am in no good mood now!
@Halcon Bluesky, yeah I think any free cars out there are gonna be non-Daz native models and so will take some work to use. I have part of an idea so I am gonna try working on that and see if a scene emerges from the chaos.
PolyHaven has a decent amount of HDRIs with streets in them - whether they suit your scene or not is another matter.
@SofaCitizen, I have found some free resources somewhere else, also I got a tutorial on how to import the files.
Now with this at hand, I will try to see if I can conquer this hurdle and get into the contest.
I suppose you may have got some, isn't?
Now, to the drawing board and vroom!
@SofasCitizen, Aaaarrgggghh!
Nothing goes well.
I have downloaded a cool lot of cars in either OBJ and FBX file formats.
When imported the OBJ files, these do not display correctly and while the FBX model is seen, the problem is that some of the elements that are out of place.
The tires are not in place and same happens with the doors.
These models looks good in theory but in the practice is hard to put it back together.
I followed a misleading tutorial on how to import the OBJ files.
By the way this is the most frustrating experience I have got.
Daz should provide at least some more free downloads of usable content, I am not interested in silly cartoons, I want people, transport, and some usable props and environments.
I am getting tired of seeing no results!
@Halcon Bluesky, I feel your pain there. Daz's implementation of FBX is pretty poor as my exploding hamster would illustrate. OBJ files will often be imported "naked" so just white shapes that you then need to apply the textures and all other surface settings to - this is very frustrating, especially when the textures are baked into the OBJ such that you cannot get to them. Blender can extract them I think but I have had mixed success with that - mainly because I havn't had time to learn Blender yet so I just poke around a bit and sometimes get lucky.
I do have some of my own car assets in non-daz format ready to attempt to import. Have to get to work now so that will be a struggle for tonight or later in the week.
Keep going & good luck!
@SofaCitizen, The cars I got from All3dfree.net looks fantastic, BMW, Mercedes, Audi, Toyota, Nissan to name a few these are packed into zip or rar archives.
To my dismay neither formats mentioned before do not work.
A lot of reworking must be done, too complex, and not worth the effort.
As this situation got me extremely tired, I run out of petrol (Gasoline)
Maybe, in the next month could be something more different.
Good luck to you!
@SofaCitizen, How you go?
Have you see the special announcement from Daz in YouTube?
What do you think?
I have not been to that site before so thanks for the link, I'll check it out tomorrow. I have not really had time for any Daz stuff this week as it's been another busy one. However, the plan is to come up with something for atleast one challenge this weekend.
Unfortunately, yes, any non-Daz assets do tend to take a lot of work to get them to display nice in Daz. I did hear about an update to the FBX importing at some point but I am not yet sure if that is in a newly released version or a yet-to-come version. Also, that may still not help with the issues I currently have with FBX files.
Yeah, I did stay up for the into video on Wednesday. Looks pretty good and I am sure will be very beneficial going forward. I'll wait till later to make any purchases tho - I have plenty of other models to use first and currently the scenes I create don't really need the enhanced 8K detail, nor indeed much of any skin/face details at all. I am sure I'll start working on some more portrait style things at some point but I have lots to learn before I can really make much of anything with such an advanced model.
@SofaCitizen, How did you go?
Did you see what cool things are in the place I told you?
Wish I could use it, the most amazing things there are plenty to choose from.
Well I hope you can figure out, share any experience you may have with that, please let me know
@Halcon Bluesky, I unfortunately had the same issues that you did with the models from that site. No matter what I tried they all seemed to have the same issues and I could not import them properly :( They did look nice tho so perhaps I will try another time when I have learned a bit more.
However, in the meantime I have managed to put together a scene that finally has a story to it. I don't know why it was so hard to come up with a concept using cars but I have finally got there in the end. It's only just come together so it will have to wait till tomorrow for me to render it since it's bedtime for me now. Managed to find 3 suitable cars from sketchfab.com which are perfect for the scene and look good in the iray preview atleast. Fingers crossed that the proper render will turn out good tomorrow!
@SofaCitizen, but sketchfab.com need to create an account to get that, isn't ?
I went to some other places but too much info they demand for just a simple file :(
@Halcon Bluesky, yeah, you have to give them an email to download files. Kinda sucks but that is how the internet works these days so I just use a different email address for those things.
@SofaCitizen, How you are going?
The cars competirion is about to close in a day or so.
Went looking to find some nice cars but I di not found anything yet.
Maybe next time there is another challenge that could become more attractive to start, lets cross the fingers and hope it is good.
@Halcon Bluesky, yes there is not long left. I was able to submit an image the other day tho with some of the cars I got to work. Fortunately, the scene I came up with didn't require them to be seen up close which is handy as some of the texture replacements didn't quite work so well.
I was also able to submit an image for the Depth of Field challenge and, if I can sort the lighting, I also have an image for the tiny things challenge.
We shall see what new challenges await next week :)
@SofaCitizen, I have been downloading some free stuff, just recently.
I have been experimenting with that, one of the renders got me the picture size of 10000x10000 px and a whopping filesize of 130 MB.
The render took more than two hours to process.
I tried with both Texture and iray, I got some crashes, and Daz Studio exited abruptly.
Then, I had reduced the picture dimension to 3800x3800 px.
The result was less time for the render to complete.
Later I will borrow a different machine, this one has an NVME drive installed, (is said to be better than an SSD and will work faster with Windows 11).
I will see if that is true or just pure talk.
I hope the next freebie challenge could be more relaxed, the cars was nowhere to be seen.
Some places have beautiful cars, the price for these are outrageously expensive reaching up to $500!. Those who think they deserve to be paid such amount are out of touch.
A model car would cost a lot less if you go to a department store, yet you could find some bargains somewhere else.
Lets hope come October 1, things can get better.
@Halcon Bluesky, yes some of the assets available on other stores are considerably pricey. However, I would imagine that the likes of you and me are not the target audience for such things - those are for people that need them for an actual paid job and I imagine would either include way more detail than we would ever need and/or the appropriate licences from the car manufacturer to be used in commercial projects. I have seen a few videos of people who are experts with Blender and the speed with which they can create objects out of a simple block is quite remarkable. Even so it would still take such a person quite a bit of time to build all the parts that make up a model of a car and so you cannot begrudge them wanting to be suitably compensated for their work - even if they were doing it as a hobby themselves.
I can imagine that trying to render an image at 10000x10000 px would take a long time and probably crash the system if the result was too much for your hardware to handle. It's probably worth sticking to more common sizes first - atleast until you have built up a few renders you are happy with and have gotten to know more about the software. There is an argument for rendering images at maybe twice the size you actually want as when you shrink it down in GIMP or whatever then it can help reduce some noise and smooth out the image a bit. Obviously, it will take longer tho so something to play about with and see if it works for you or not.
@SofaCitizen, Days goes by quickly, I do not see any announcement for the next freebies challenge of this month.
And how went for you? did you got the $1 offer, as others have been raving about?
With a tight budget at the moment, I will have to suffice with what I can get.
Many people want to build a house, the price is agreed, but for some circumstances the materials go high in price, and is beyond the builder control.
Same analogy can be applied when some folks want to buy something, the barrier is the currency exchange, this can be frustrating.
Take care, cheers!
@Halcon Bluesky, there isn't one yet but don't worry I am sure it will be posted before the end of the week. There is still the judging of the last one to be done (and there were quite a lot of entries to choose from) so it will probably be a few days - and the weekends don't really count.
If you haven't already seen it, there is a fresh challenge in the "New Users" forum. This one is for "Atmosphere". So I think there are a few ways of interpreting that so possibly could be something that can inspire you to enter a scene there?
I think I may have missed any $1 offer/sale but I have certainly grabbed quite a bit so far in other sales. I really need to increase my rendering output to actually use the things I buy!
@SofaCitizen, the days goes by quick and I don't think I may enter the latest contest, got a bad luck looking for some freebies.
maybe next month I will try if I can.
How did you go?
@Halcon Bluesky, yes this month has gone by very quick so far and I am not sure where it went :/
It can be tough finding freebies for that challenge. I do have an idea for an entry and have sourced some items for it but I do kinda need quite a few of one particular asset so I may have to get very creative to add some variety and not make it look like a cheap "copy & paste" job.
I hope you are having more luck with the other areas you were working on learning.
@Sofacitizen, not that much.
I wanted to get creative but alas I can't get the 5 freebies items to get started with the contest.
The one thing I am struggling is to install Daz Studio on the SSD NVME and put the rest on a traditional Hard Disk via DIM.
I can't find an answer at the moment. :(
@SofaCitizen, how you are?
I lost interest in the contests, I has tried to get the 5 freebies for this month contest that is already gone.
The minimum should be 3 instead of 5, if there is more, well that is good, but alas I could not gather more to at least start with something.
Still experimenting how can I get around the program with the renders.
So no much progress yet.
Freebies are scarce, few places have something interesting, but being released like an eyedrop.
Have you got the winning formula?
Participating in contests requires starting from the beginning, i.e. learning, asking questions and listening to answers, making mistakes and starting over...
Freebies are not rare, and many people give a lot of their time to create them. Just because you can't find exactly what you're looking for doesn't mean you should be discouraged.
Why not try creating your own freebies, there are so many powerful free programs (Blender, Gimp, etc) that allow you to create beautiful things that you could even share!
Of course, it takes a lot of patience and experience, better to start with simple things (for example just modifying existing items, reworking textures, exporting and importing .obj files, understanding and using UV Maps, etc).
The world of 3D is vast, remember it took tens of thousands of years for humanity born in Africa to arrive in Australia and America!
@Halcon Bluesky, yeah it can be tough finding all the right free assets for that but then I suppose if it was easy then it wouldn't be called a challenge :) I personally don't mind the 5 items since I tend to use a lot of different assets in the renders I do anyway but it does make things a little tougher. Unfortunately, I don't think I will be able to submit anything either - but mainly due to the lack of time I have had this month. I did have a few ideas for scenes but none were that great anyway so not a massive loss.
I am hopefull of having a bit more time next month, either for one of the November challenges or just for some personal ideas.
Hopefully November brings better luck for yourself too! :)
@rosseliani, yes this is also very true. While my challenge entries were not always the best images themselves I like to think that I learned something from each one and so none of them were failures at all. Often times having either a restriction or theme that is picked/imposed can really help provide some focus that you otherwise might not have when you open Daz at a blank scene and a list of thousands of possibilities in the Products/Files tab.
@rosseliani, thanks for your words of encouragement.
I wish I could create something to giveaway, I am not an accomplished artist, the 3D world may vast but the learning curve is really scary than the halloween itself.
Barely used Blender to import some content created for this application into Daz Studio.
I would love the idea to create characters, props and something else.
The learning curve is atrocious, not that I am impulsive but using a program should be a rewarding experience not harder to learn it.
What I use most are word processing, previously used Photoshop, as this is too expensive.
Now I use Paint.net which is more intuitive if there is anything else to do, GIMP is my second choice.
I said so many times before, I am no fan of video tutorials, I prefer a written ones with lots of screenshots and better explanations to get the most out of it.
Maybe you are a sesoned artitst, have experienced the hihg and lows of it, but you are in a better position now.
Well I will see how I can go, November is starting up and another contest is coming up, so I hope this time around a better objective should be added.
Powerful programs are difficult to learn, just because they're powerful!
Choosing the easy way will only lead you to low quality results.
Video tutorials are sometimes hard to follow, (especially if (like me) you 're not a native english speaker), but some of them are really useful, (WP guru is the best IMO).
I am not an artist, rather a craftsman who learns everyday.
Keep being brave!
@rosseliani, Craftman or artist you are cool.
Now is not that I want the easy way, just I want to get relaxed and do the things done in a way that I can get satisfaction.
When I started using computers long time ago, it was never easy for me, but my enthusiasm gave me a way to keep going.
Graphics are really nice, it's true that these packages are too poweful and learning them requires time and effort.
HDR files take out the big effort to create a render and its done in short time. only problem is to scale the image to the target, if the image is 1600 x 1600 px the image file should fit that, not all the HDR files I got from PolyHaven fit nicely.
The props looks nice in the promo images, but in theory but some of these use a lot of memory and tend to crash the computer system.
As you can imagine nothing is perfect.
I've been watching this thread for a few months now. I find your journey in 3D (and SofaCitizen's journey) quite interesting.
I get the general impression that you are trying to create fairly intricate/detailed scenes/images. If so, then I might suggest starting off small, and working up (like the first image you posted). For example, first try doing several simple renders, and make them as good as you can. Just as a suggestion to "force" you to do final renders, seriously consider posting your work here and/or the DAZ gallery.
The reason I say this is I played around with 3D for several years, and never had any image that I shared with anyone (well, not with a human figure, I did do some architectural concept images, but that is a whole different skill set). What I finally realized was that by not making a "final" image, I wasn't doing the "difficult" things (tweaking lighting, shaders, poses, etc.) because I had to learn more, and I had to think about what I was doing with the elements, and why I was making the choices. I learned a lot on my first "final" image, and after posting it online (at Renderosity) I realized that others actually liked it as well. The galleries here, at Renderosity, or DeviantArt are great places to start. Unfortunate they are all very busy with a lot of images posted everyday, so it's much harder to get noticed than is was when I posted my first image (2005). That's why I suggested posting to this thread as well, as I would guess there are others that have been watching this thread as well.
I think staring off with simple images is really important for getting comfortable with the software and scene creation while feeling some level of success. If you can focus on doing some simple portraits or single figure scenes with only one or two props, it reduces the complexity and allows you to focus on learning. When things get too comples, there are simply too many factors influencing your results that could quickly make you give up on the image. Doing this repeatedly will only make you less likely to continue.
TLDR - Keep your first images very simple, A single clothed figure is a good way to start. Focus on making a final image that you will share either here or in a online gallery. This will force your to actually finish the image, and work through the little things to make it a finished image. In my experience, it's the details that are the most difficult (the things people tend avoid) but make are needed to make the image good, and to really learn how to create :art" with DAZ Studio.
Oh, I'm more of a technician than an artist. So it's artistic inspiration and creativity that I really struggle with.
Good luck and keep trying. There is a lot to learn with 3D, but DAZ does make a lot of it much easier!!!