what do you look for in a room?
Mistara
Posts: 38,675
wall thickness the preferred nowadays or single plane walls and floors?
what do you consider an acceptable poly count?
high on my priority list is doors that open
are the included shaders high importance or do you replace with your extra resource sets?
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usually my purse or reading glasses ...
Doors are useful. Preferably working. Also 2 walls are better than one. A wall on each side is best, that can be hidden depending on camera angle. A hide-able ceiling is good too.
Floor surface at y=0 is good as it makes posing simple. I prefer realistic thickness walls at apertures.
Just because I have opinions on the sublect, it does not mean I follow them! I have done 2 wall freebies, and I only followed the realistic aperture thickness at the doorway on one of them. https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/87514/rigged-wall-and-door-prop-corrected and https://www.renderosity.com/freestuff/items/87563/room-corner-prop
Regards,
Richard
LOL, for me, it''s my keys.
I honestly could care less about opening doors, but i know there is a vocal minority who feel this is a deal breaker.
A door.
a floor could be a single polygon or with thickness, 6. but is it better design to add a bit of tesselation?
it doesnt seem to matter to the texture quality
Thanks.
I prefer all walls to be individual, so I can hide whichever I want. And if there are pictures on the wall I prefer them as props instead of being part of the wall.
Another vote for floor at y=0.
Additinal shaders/materials are nice.
What frustrates me a lot is when the props in the room are not available as individual props.
I appreciate a complete set that can be moved so the main character is kept at 0-0-0 and not have to move a shell, individual bits and bobs and try to align them up again.
Doors are nice. If a single room is done and a PA is going to do a series, I would love the ability to connect the different sets, like the Dream House series.
Size the rooms to fit Genesis adults and say a child, if a home or a school or public area. Otherwise adults.
Walls and other objects that can be closed off for posing or cameras.
Agree that props should be separate props, not part of the set, but a preload scene is nice.
Depth should be realistic for windows, doors, bookcases, furniture, fireplaces...
Electrical switches/outlets as appropriate for the environment.
Toilets with seats, that lift, along with a lid.
Areas that can be customized with shaders later.
Soft furniture that looks like it will depress under a bottom of a person or heavy object (couches, easy chairs, pillows, thick rugs, beds...).
I totaly agree with what @memcneil70 said . :)
Thanks for asking....
I'll echo what memcneil70 said already...
A lot of PAs are good artist/archetects and make great houses.... but often they are not very Daz-able, or daz friendly. Yes, I need a house, but I need it as a set for me to tell a story on. So I need to be able to place figures, props... yada yada and make a render to tell my story.
So for me, I'd love it if the PA making the house would remember how it is going to be used and build accomedation into the design.
I prefer "construction sets" as opposed to full on, fully developed rooms. Partly this is because I dislike being locked into a specific look and feel for a scene, especially if I have to link a group of rooms together to make a believable house, office building, castle, or whatever. You can make one great looking room, but if I can't find other rooms that look like they are part of the same structure, that might not be useful to me. So, I'd prefer a set of floor, wall, and ceiling "tiles" that I can place wherever I want. Some of the wall tiles should come with doors or windows of various sizes. I know this requires a lot of work on my part, and I know it is not everyone's (or even most people's) preference, but that's what I like.
Beyond that, if you're going to give me a full room, make it interesting. Don't just give me a square box with a door in it, I can do that myself. Give it an interesting shape, or vaulted ceilings, or put in columns, or hardwood floors, or a trap door, or wainscoting on the walls, or cool windows that will make interesting patterns of light, or make it look worn and lived in, or abandoned, or creepy, or some combination of things. Inspire me to want to tell a story in that room. Don't rely solely on the props to do that for you, give the space itself character. The world is full of mediocre assets, make yours extraordinary.
Jack
1. I generally keep the camera some distance from the primary figures or objects of interest, so I prefer spacious rooms. Being able to remove individual walls is a nice option. I don't need the walls to have real world thickness. I use rooms like a theatrical/cinematic set, so it's unusual for me to ever shoot four walls of a room. Vignettes can be useful.
2. I don't find door opening to be the most interesting human activity. It can generally be assumed that people usually enter a room through a door, so I'd probably skip door opening in a a narrative render sequence or animation. Functional doors aren't a priority.
3. I'd like the scene to come with a lighting setup. I like lots of windows. (They don't need to open.) Makes it easier for me to light the scene.
4. I prefer to place cameras myself. Preset cameras usually get deleted.
5. I find that I often delete unnecessary furniture and props. They're visually distracting and increase render times. "Realistic clutter" isn't something I want.
6. I don't usually re-texture rooms. If the colors/textures don't look good in promotional renders, I'm not buying it in the first place.
7. I don't have a specific poly count number. I'd say as low as possible without looking awful. I sometimes use DOF shots, so fine details of a back wall may not really matter.
Realistic (real world) scale throughout the room and props, Mr. Gates may have a 1000sqft bathroom, but that isn't the norm
Working toilet lids, and toilet paper rolls that can move. Under and over. Used towel props as well as hanging ones. messy version as a texture set as well as clean and new. I'd pay for additional texture set as an add on pack if it is too much work for one set, or the file gets too big. More options to diversify the look gets additional consideration points for purchases.
Parts that can all be moved and removed (walls, ceilings), to both make a simpler set and allow the shape and size to be changed. Hiding is not the same as they are still there and get in the way
If not removable, individual walls, windows etc should be on different surfaces so one can be hidden without removing the rest
Curtains. Do the model makers not have them at home?
Little details, preferably removable, for close up images- light switches, plug sockets, etc
Lighting. The maker used great lighting in the promo images, so please include it
For external walls, please texture the outside as well as the inside to outside shots
If there is an opening door, a bit of wall and floor to go the other side of it is useful so the doorway leads somewhere
If there are large areas of one colour/pattern on walls and floors (with no darker edges etc), do these as shaders and not as texture images so that the detail can be increased for closeup by increasing the image multiplier
If you have shelves or book cases, please populate them as it is very difficult to find suitable books and other clutter for them.
Don't bother with cameras- they get in the way and are never in the right place
DOORS. Doors, doors, doors. Sometimes I'll do a render where the person is intended to have discovered something, or something is lying in wait behind the door...so to load the perfect room only to find that I have to add a door from another set is a real pain in the tuckus. I'm actually working on a render now that uses the "Breaking the Wall" set from the "Live Architectures Bundle," only to find that one of the interior doors I was hoping to have frame the shot...doesn't open. Not only that, but if you slide the opacity to 0%, there's not even a hole there, just the wall.
The way I see it, if an item is visible in the scene, I should be able to manipulate it the same way I would in real life (barring things like breaking a lamp). If it's a lamp, I should be able to move it to another table. If it's a door or window, I should be able to open it.
That being said, sometimes all you need is a generic room background, so sometimes a singular prop with its own bones (doors/windows have an "open/close" morph) will do, but then you need to make sure each item has its own surface. It sucks when you want to use a shader to change the handle on a door, only to find that it's lumped together with "metal," so that changes not just the handle, but also the hinges, the handles on all the drawers in the room, and maybe even a mirror's frame.
Keep it simple: things should be neatly and accurately labeled (I've seen too many "plaet" instead of "plate" and so on), each item should have at least one surface (more for things that usually have a "rim" to them, etc.), and items you can normally move should be able to move, even if it's only by dial. And like others said, don't bother w/ cameras; I usually delete those and make my own, too, lol.
Hope that helps!
does a little light seepage at the floor seams matter?
It does to me. In real life you don't often see an LED strip causing light at the bottom of a skirting board, so I would expect not to have an involuntary strip on a model.
Regards,
Richard.
Light seepage at the wall-floor juncture? It would be problem. If the floor is, for whatever reason, made of multiple segments, those should join with each other exactly as well. I've never come across a room environment with a "light seepage" problem.
I have bought 3D environments that loaded with breaks in the walls/corners that annoyed me.
My life experience has been varied and WWI wooden dorms were okay, but a pre-fab barracks brought from Vietnam to So. Korea with bullet holes still in them, had a bit too much 'light' seepage and muggy air in high summer and cold in winter. The blood stains were just a bonus for decorating. Or the WWII quonset hut in England, too many opening for buggies to crawl in from. Or a 1950s/1960s-era military track housing, with no insulation where you felt the wind blowing through from the Pacific Ocean.
A secure, tightly contruscted building is a hallmark of an excellent builder.
Unless you are creating an old military single and family housing environment for U.S. military in the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s.
As an add-on to my other list, I appreciate normal homes, not homes for the super-wealthy. Or at least something that is within reach of an average person. This could be projected into the past and into the future. We have a few examples but not enough, and not that representative of regions around the world.
Mary
If there are TV sets and picture frames in the scene, make sure the screen on the TV set and the photo area in the picture frame is a separate surface, such that one can easily add whatever image one wants onto the TV screen or into the picture frame without having to adjust tiling and whatnot on that surface. I had to do that once with an LCD monitor in one scene, move the tiling and positioning of the image around until the specially-rendered image I wanted on that screen was in the right place... and also discovered that part of the TV (which was "turned off" in the original, loaded scene) was also part way into the wall it was mounted on, so I had to move the TV out of the wall until it now looked like it was properly mounted ONTO the wall instead of materalised slightly inside it in some sort of transporter-room whoopsie.
Also, I've noticed quite a lot of premade house or apartments that have a kitchen area, none of the cabinets open, the oven door doesn't open, the fridge doesn't open, and whatnot. A LOT of them are like that. Often times, if I'm wanting to have a kitchen in a scene, I'm going for a specific look for the kitchen (say, 1960s-style kitchen, or retro-future kitchen, or something that looks steampunk) so its kind of a nuisance to then discover that every kitchen I find that DOES fit the look I'm going for, the dang fridge doesn't open, or whatever. I've not so far had a scene where I needed to open the oven or the fridge, but I like to keep my options open, particularly since I do a lot of comic-book-narrative stuff, with sometimes-recurring characters, so its theoretically possible that in a future story with that character or that house, he or another character might NEED to open the fridge, or the oven, or whatnot.... so it strikes me as wierd to find that the vast majority of kitchen stufff in these premade kitchen scenes don't open.
If there's a bed with covers on it, make sure the covers and sheets are a seperate object from the mattress, or if they're not, make sure the covers and sheets are a different surface that can then be set to 0 opacity so that I can then place my own covers and sheets as needed.
Basically, never forget that some of us are going to be kit-bashing a scene -- turning the TV on if its off, changing whats on the TV if its already on, changing out portraits on the wall with those of other characters in the story, and so on -- so don't make it hard to do that by, say, making the entire TV set one single cotton-picking surface such that the screen content cannot be changed out without editting the entire TV set image, and don't make it harder on us by baking the entire picture frame in with the photo AND the table the picture frame is resting on... 0o
If there's a clock on the wall or on the dresser, make sure we can easily change what time it is on that clock. I.e. don't just bake the hands of the clock, or the digits of the digital clock, into the rest of the clock image. For a digital clock, if devoting the time to make the digits change with a dial or something (because doing so might push the project out of prophitability) it would at least make sense for the digital display be a separate surface from the rest of the clock so that the end user can readily create their own replacement for the time displayed on it by going into a graphics editor to make one based on an included template, and then apply that onto the surface themselves.
While I do like as much real-world functionality of props as is possible, there are at least two problems with those type of features. As you mentioned, the PA has to spend a disproportionate amount of time adding a feature that most users will never use. Also, movable parts (opening doors, movable clock hands, etc.) and multiple textures require larger file sizes--both of the initial download and the installed size. How many extra megabytes justify features that I probably won't use, or only need to use once in a render sequence?
Some of the time, kit bashing by inserting a special prop with real-world functionality into the scene is a better option. Of course, sometimes it isn't possible.
This... Combined with the look of "lived in" instead of brand spanking new.
a wall with bullet holes? never thought of that lol
There is one set in the store that does have this issue - in the hallway beside a classroom. I recall making some "morphs" to address the matter.
This.I really do like to see an image of the items deconstructed as if they are all ready to just slide into place. Then I know what I'm getting in the set.
Also, I will pass if I spot poor proportion in the details like ridiculously large door handles, chair legs etc. Unless it's a set with some really good-themed props.
one of my peeves with older sets, when hiding a wall would take out a section of floor or ceiling. being careful not to do that.
Yes, we do like modular rooms with hideable walls, in all four corners. And a hideable floor and ceiling too. Also, all items in the room itself should be hideable too.
theres some really nice rooms to decorate in the Elder Scrolls online game. mebbe something like those rooms? and decor selections.
the rooms in the simgs games come with a nice colletion of floor tiling and wall tiling.
actually, just thinking wall thickness makes more sense than double sided polys.
the floor would have to be no thickness to be flush with the ground.
Opening doors.
Realistic rooms geated for realistic people.
Functional rigged props.
Realistic size.
Flexibility for kitbashing.
Hidable walls and ceiling.
Sane texture sizes..