fantasy cities
SteveM17
Posts: 977
Imagine your fantasy hero is looking down into a valley and sees a bustling walled fantasy/medieval type city possibly with docks that lead to the sea. A place ripe for adventure! That's the kind of thing I'm looking for, probably low poly as it would be for distance/scene setting pictures.
Comments
There is something like this https://www.daz3d.com/pirates-cove
Or some houses like these https://www.daz3d.com/medieval-city-buildings-1 and https://www.daz3d.com/medieval-city-buildings-2
but then you will need to find a harbor.
Deepnding on style there are quite a lot of fantasy buildings - several half-timbered town and village sets, various castles, Muze 3D, Enterables, the Alchemist etc. If you strip most of the maps (which won't have any great effect from a distance) and use some castle walls (depending on the type of settlelment) you could probably build something that wouldn't be too taxing to render.
This is the sort of effect I'm trying for.
If you are planning for your hero to walk into the town, interact with its residents, taking the suggested medieval kits to build your own town to your needs, make subsets so you don't have to load the full set later, then copy it and create one with reduced textures and the other with higher quality textures for close-up shots.
The Alchemist not only has a series of town kits but also a castle kit. With the release of the Notre Dame Interior today, his store is on sale today. I would also look at Faveral who has an extensive library of medieval sets you can use, although many are old and in 3DL and Poser formats, they work fine in Daz Studio.
Yes, I was aware of having missed those two out of my list. Indeed, I used several of the feveral medieval buildings as part of a townscape myself (not a dsitant one, but a bunch of buildings along a street and around a square, with others visible in the gaps or over the roof tops) - but that was ages ago, using 3delight, and I am not sure if the scene file is around or openeable (might be a DS 3 .daz file).
I dont have the Alchemist products mentioned but their stuff is extremely highpoly so likely not what you want
a Heightmap based city would be my suggestion too, I could create one in Carrara and it probably could be done using Bryce too then exported as a textured mesh but it likely would be considered derivative so something you would need to try yourself
(I may create you one if I can find CC0 buildings I can use)
possiby you could create one in D|S too using canvases and instancing but a workflow I am personally less experienced at but recently discovered how to fix the depth pass so may test myself there
basically one would use a heightmap based terrain
instance lowpoly city buildings on it (DryJack shareCG makes good ones)
then render passes from above
Depth map, Normal Map, Diffuse/Albedo
then use those maps to generate a terrain in a program that can and export that terrain as a mesh
an Ai generated option depending on your ethics on such things
not copyrightable as Ai but may be unsuitable for a client commission from you for that reason
I tried using Stable Diffusion to create maps but not getting a prompt that will give a realistic photographic fantasy map, isometric, a top down, satellite view, Google Earth view, aerial view, map view
https://www.facebook.com/share/p/15yerNyUGK/
will share anyway as it could make a nice backdrop with displacement and subdivision
it will make tileable terrains with the same prompts but leaves out the city, even using literally "a realistic photographic fantasy map, isometric, a top down, satellite view, Google Earth view, aerial view, map view a top down, satellite view, Google Earth view, aerial view of a vast highly detailed fantasy medieval city"
every time, no mention of a terrain