Bryce scene to backdrop in DS.

David Brinnen

OK, bearing in mind, I know next to nothing about how DS works. So this might not be the ideal approach, but just in case someone was interested in doing this, or perhaps was willing to suggest a better way of using the spherical map I made as a DS backdrop. Here's a short video on the topic.

Bit of an advert for the Spherical Mapper and a short tutorial combined - by David Brinnen

foleypro

Great job...Bout time you come over to the Dark Side(DS)....

David Brinnen

foleypro said:

Great job...Bout time you come over to the Dark Side(DS)....

Yes Brian, I have tried and tried to like DS, but I've come to accept it's just not for me. That's not to say, I'm not interested in what people do with DS, I'm not being dismissive, it's just I don't get on with the interface or the bugs - which seem to inhabit the bits of DS I want to look most closely at - materials, advanced lighting. That's not to suggest that DS is any more buggy than Bryce. Bryce has got it's fair share of gremlins too! But in terms of strengths and weaknesses, I can see that DS and Bryce have a lot that could compliment each other, if the DS bridge was fixed - something else I've been forced to contemplate since I started experimenting with exporting Bryce scenes into Octane. DS bridge fixing is on my mind alot these days.

Here's a quick selection of Bryce v Octane renders that have come about through using the DS bridge.

sriesch

David, thanks for that video.
I purchased the Bryce 7 Pro Spherical Mapper ( http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro-spherical-mapper ) a while back, but haven't had a chance to really look at it closely until today. I didn't have a player that worked on videos included in the product and an attempt to download one wasn't working either for some weird reason and I was getting frustrated with that, so I just decided to jump in and try to use the product without the included video instructions.
Using the above-linked video plus your and Horo's instructions about halfway down page 1 of thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/7800/ , I got a test render mapped onto a sphere in DAZ Studio.
Now I have a question. What have you found to be a roughly appropriate render resolution to use to give nice clean-looking skydomes or scene backdrop domes in DAZ Studio? Obviously a 2010x1005 render won't cut it. I can just find the answer to via trial-and-error but one of you may know the answer already offhand from your own experience.

David Brinnen

Sean Riesch said:

David, thanks for that video.
I purchased the Bryce 7 Pro Spherical Mapper ( http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro-spherical-mapper ) a while back, but haven't had a chance to really look at it closely until today. I didn't have a player that worked on videos included in the product and an attempt to download one wasn't working either for some weird reason and I was getting frustrated with that, so I just decided to jump in and try to use the product without the included video instructions.
Using the above-linked video plus your and Horo's instructions about halfway down page 1 of thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/7800/ , I got a test render mapped onto a sphere in DAZ Studio.
Now I have a question. What have you found to be a roughly appropriate render resolution to use to give nice clean-looking skydomes or scene backdrop domes in DAZ Studio? Obviously a 2010x1005 render won't cut it. I can just find the answer to via trial-and-error but one of you may know the answer already offhand from your own experience.

That is a question that has plagued me. Clearly the answer is also dependent on size of the image you are rendering in Studio. Spherical maps for an entire environment to provide for a narrow FOV need to be huge. The best solution would be to have a low rez spherical map to cope with the reflection within your scene that point out of your scene. And a high rez backdrop to slip in behind your scene to deal with the bit being directly viewed. I'm still working on getting everything calibrated nicely for this. I'll post up my findings when I've got something workable. Otherwise, you need to just render out as big as you can cope with and hope for the best - which I accept is not a great answer. Hence my pondering something better.

Oh and thank you for purchasing our Spherical Mapper!

Cheers,

David.

David Brinnen

Sean Riesch said:

David, thanks for that video.
I purchased the Bryce 7 Pro Spherical Mapper ( http://www.daz3d.com/bryce-7-pro-spherical-mapper ) a while back, but haven't had a chance to really look at it closely until today. I didn't have a player that worked on videos included in the product and an attempt to download one wasn't working either for some weird reason and I was getting frustrated with that, so I just decided to jump in and try to use the product without the included video instructions.
Using the above-linked video plus your and Horo's instructions about halfway down page 1 of thread http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/7800/ , I got a test render mapped onto a sphere in DAZ Studio.
Now I have a question. What have you found to be a roughly appropriate render resolution to use to give nice clean-looking skydomes or scene backdrop domes in DAZ Studio? Obviously a 2010x1005 render won't cut it. I can just find the answer to via trial-and-error but one of you may know the answer already offhand from your own experience.

OK, turns out the solution wasn't that difficult after all - a bit involved, but quite straightforwards once the FOV/scale values were calculated.

Spherical mapping scenes for backdrops and including 2d faces - by David Brinnen