Help creating exterior for "Fashion Boutique" product

Banyan

Hi. I am pretty new to Daz Studio and working with 3D assets in general. I have successfully used backdrops to make scenery "out the window" in a few renders, like woodlland backdrops out the windows of cabins. However I recently purchased "Fashion Boutique" (https://www.daz3d.com/fashion-boutique) and this one is giving me problems.

The buillding has an exterior sidewalk that I'd like to place some characters on to take shots of through the store window from inside, and maybe some renders outside on the sidewalk itself as well. Just using an HDRI doesn't look good at all. Its scaled all wrong and even if I got that working correctly it still wouldn't look good. Its almost like the building should be merged into a much larger city set somehow where you could give it an actual exterior. (Litke this, maybe? https://www.daz3d.com/shopping-street)  Even if I didn't want to shoot out on the sidewalk, I couldn't even find anything that looked like a city street to put on a backdrop outside, in the store or otherwise. Perhaps I'm just looking in the wrong places.

Maybe I have the wrong idea about how to approach this. If anyone else has used this set, unless you just kept the camera away from the windows, how did you create your exterior?

Also, I'm a bit puzzled that after installing the product, it only contained one item, the "set" which merges everything into the scene in one click. In everything else I've purchased, the smaller items are split out where they can be used in conjuction with other assets and scenes. Did it install incorrectly? I'm a bit puzzled. 

Thanks in advance to anyone that can help me out with this. - Banyan

Richard Haseltine

An HDRI is taken from a specific point, if the angle you are viewing it from does not match that then the results may look bad as discordnat. You may also need to use soem other elements to blend the foreground models in. What do you current renders look like?

Banyan

This is the best I have been able to do. As you can see, the shadows and areas of light on the ground in the HDRI image stop at the edge of the daz asset, because that's part of the image itself as opposed to the lighting info in the HDRI. (I think. I'm super new at this so there's a good chance anything I say is wrong). Even without that problem though, would there be a better way of blending the edge of the sidewalk with the HDRI?

Also, the figure only has one shadow. Given that there are multiple streetlights, there should be more. Would I use some other light source of my own for that?

In short, how could I improve this? Also, I downloaded the image from polyhaven, and grabbed the 4k version. Should I have gotten the 8k or 16k instead? I will test that on my own, but when should I use which size? If the answer is "use a different hdri image" then what should I look for?

And finally, if there is a helpful tutorial on all of this stuff, does anybody have a favorite they'd recommend?

Chezjuan

One thing you can do to "blend" the asset into the image is to make sure "Draw Ground" is on and then set the ground positioning to manual, then raise it until it covers the sidewalk from the fashion boutique. It will take some tweaking, but will look more realistic as the shadows, etc. will not just cut off.

For the shadow from the subject, it really depends on the lighting and camera placement when the HDRI was taken. If the light source the camera was using was close to it, it could overpower the light from other streetlights so you wouldn't get shadows from them.

For an image like this where the HDRI is a major part of the final render, I would recommend at least 16k. One recommendation I read is to take the width of the planned final render in pixels and multiply that by 7.14 (based on 35 mm film being about 14 degrees of a 360 image). You could also do <width> X (100/14) to get more precision. When working in 1920 X 1080, that comes out to close to 14k for a sharp image. I usually grab both 8k and 16k versions. I'll use 8k when it is out the window or I am using depth of field, and 16k if the HDRI is going to play a major part in the final image. 

WendyLuvsCatz

you could instance the exterior a few times say 3 to make a crossroad or strip as often there is a row of identical buildings 

Banyan

I will try to take both of your advice. Chezjuan, I think I can hide the sidewalk instead of raising the ground. For some reason I didn't even think of that until your suggestion. Thanks for the tips on selecting the appropriate size of HDRI, that was very helpful.

WendyLuvsCatz, I know what instancing is, but I've never done it before and don't know how. I'll find a tutorial and give that a shot; it sounds like a good idea and I'll see what I can do with it.