light domes / backdrops?

arcady

In Daz Studio if I want an outdoor scene I pop in something like Light Dome Pro - R and pick one of its backdrop images.

In Carrara, there's usually no point to that as I have atmospheres and such.

In my current project, I've got two figures staged in the '13th floor' prop - with the intent of having them appear to be way up in a skyscraper.

In Daz Studio I can just pick the 'city backdrop' of Light Dome Pro and see what happens.

I know I could get a superior render in the close in with Carrara - especially as regards lighting effects.

Would I be better off trying to get that same backdrop into a sky dome in Carrara, getting a whole stack of back drop buildings into my scene, or is there a good HDRI map that I should look into?

evilproducer

Are the image maps for the product you mentioned mapped to a sphere or a half sphere (dome)?

Do they have an alpha map? For instance, one "dome" would have an image of a city scape mapped to it with a transparent sky, and a second, larger dome encompassing the smaller dome with a sky image mapped to it?

If so, you could use the cityscape image map and put it on a dome, and then use a realistic sky, volumetric clouds, etc. with it.

If it doesn't have an alpha map and has the city images and ky all in one, you could map it to a dome, and have the dome excludes from your lights and set not to cast or receive shadows.

If you do use either of the above methods, you would probably want to copy and paste the image map from the color channel into the glow channel as well.

If you want a city background, I did a couple pretty large spherical renders of the Dystopia City Blocks that I did. There's a daylight version and a night version with clouds. Both are large enough that you could add them to the scene's background slot or use on a sphere.
http://www.sharecg.com/v/64485/view/6/Texture/Spherical-Dystopia-night-with-clouds
http://www.sharecg.com/v/51297/view/6/Texture/Dystopia-Spherical-background-image-map

This little test video uses the nighttime spherical render:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QN6E8ji3oHA
It uses the Vanguard spaceship and one of the Dystopia city blocks. The rest is the spherical render.

arcady

Oh hey I have the Dystopia City blocks. 1 - 20 or something, for Poser... sitting in my product library from an order in 2007...

(ah they're freebies - that's why I have them and didn't realize it... That of course means I should see if I want to pick up the rest at some point.)

Those might do the trick and let me skip all the wonkyness... I'll see what I can come up with. I only need like the upper 10% of them showing so it looks like my figures are high up.

Bunyip02

Hello Arcady

If you head over to ShareCG have a sticky-beak at the work by Herminio.
I don't know what the actual look you are chasing is, but you should find something that at least gets the creative mind going/thinking about the end result that you are after.

There are also some excellent items in the DAZ shop if you have some budget available for them.
(I have been watching the sales with an Eagle eye - if only my bank account was bigger than my wishlist !!!!!!!) >:-(

Regards, Bunyip