I just need a nudge in the right direction - Please, someone help!
Good day,
Though this may seem irrelevant, I am retired (forcibly after 32 years in IT), disabled and have far too many hours on my hands both during the day and at night when this old body decides to keep me from sleeping. To fill those hours I have been looking for something to help me learn 3D art so that I can build things I have had in my mind for decades.
I am an old Tolkien fan and I want to eventually build a couple of complete Dwarf communities, linked by roads, way stations, taverns and the occasional not so nice place. :-) You have to keep Dwarves busy. I realize this is not necessarily animation software but setting up scenes will do it for me.
I have gone through the basic tutorials, even created a fairly realistic looking mountain that even my wife thought was cool. Now comes the hard part.
1) I am working with the edit feature for terrain but I really don't see any way to carve out caves to then build inside or is this even possible?
2) I am having a terrible time with the camera, i can point it at the spot I really want to see when I render but instead I see the same thing I usually see when I render, the "normal" outside of the mountain.
3) Currently I am using mostly Bryce 7.0 for this work but I have Daz3D 4.7 and to be honest I still don't really understand why there are the two products. I have imported objects I bought in packages from 4.7 but why can't I do what I do with 4.7 what I do with Bryce? What is the real purpose of 4.7?
4) Probably because I was in Bryce, it took forever, well 2 days, to find these forums and hopefully some nice folks who won't mind some semi-intelligent questions from an old vet (I hope that does not count against me? Some where I live don't look very kindly upon any version of the military) who will work on his own until he is plainly stumped before he will ask a question again.
5)I want to look at my rendered image from all angles but simply cannot figure out how to do so and I don't remember them showing that in the tutorial. It was more, we will talk about rendering later but I can't find any later videos. That is why I am so desperate.
6) I realize there are products that have complete castles pieces already built but I would love to do my own and am hoping there is some help somewhere about creating your own objects to bring into Bryce or use in Daz3D if I have it all wrong.
7) I also bought Hexagon but don't have a clue what it is for; a friend just recommended buying it to have it ready.
So, here is my ultimate dream. A huge terrain with a pair of very different mountains separated by rivers, forests and whatever I can put between them that would look real. I want space between them. Eventually I will connect them with the roads etc. but that is down the road.
I want to dig inside those mountains and carve out galleries for the Dwarves like great halls, giant forges, temples, housing and all the other things that go with a city. If I have bought the wrong product then let me know what I can do and if I have to I will go looking for something else that will let me build what I want. However, everyone I spoke to about 3D anything suggested I start with this family of products so my hopes run high.
If I have to build the city and then cover it with a mountain then I will do so but I am so hoping that I can do it the other way. Right now I kind of feel it is not going to be possible because when I do manage to zoom in on an area no special editing tools appear that I have seen and no extra dots appear to let me open it up.
In the meantime, I am going to start very small and simply try to build a block house under a mountain and see if that works and play with the tools as much as I can to get much more comfortable with everything.
Without trying to sound too proud or be obnoxious, though I am getting along in years I learn quickly and I am not afraid of technology, I crave it. :-) If you keep using your mind, at least it can stay young.
Any help, links to tutorials, Wiki links or even book suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Unfortunately, I now live on Social Security Disability instead of my normal low 6 figure salary however medical costs, legal costs when my insurance company decided to drop me and some other calamities have eaten my nest egg down to the straw and almost forced me to take the penalties and use the money I had put away for retirement. When you lose 13 years of retirement investing, it really puts a dent in that final amount. :-( Why say all that? I simply cannot afford to put out thousands to do what I hope to do. If that is going to be required then I guess it is back to my Calculus and beyond books and keep the mind entertained that way.
Sorry for all the additional information, I just wanted to give anyone who cares to read this a bit of knowledge about what I know, how I learn and my ultimate goals along with unfortunately my financial limitations.
On previous forums I would say that I am Smaug without the missing scale and that flames do nothing but clear the vermin from my exterior. Being new here, I have no idea of how new people are treated so I will wait and see. I am normally optimistic but on forums, a guarded form of optimism.
Thanks for reading and any possible help you can throw my way,
Richard
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Comments
In Bryce to carve out a cave you can do it a couple of ways. one is to use a boolean operation once you set the terrain to solid, the other is to make 2 terrains and turn on upside down on top of the other one, which is what I did here
The products are simply two separate products. In fact Bryce used to be owned by a different company. While they are both 3D rendering applications, they do things in different ways and have different capabilities and ways of doing things. Ask if you want more specific details, but here are a few obvious major differences:
Bryce is kind of a landscape-generating application. You certainly don't have to make landscapes, but that's what it's good at, since it has options for things like skies, haze, a tree generator, an instancing lab, a terrain editor, etc. Some limitations is has compared to DAZ Studio include that it's a 32-bit application and thus can't use very much memory and you can't pose figures in it.
DAZ Studio is kind of like a photo/movie studio. You can pose figures in it. Some limitations it has compared to Bryce is it doesn't have the wide range of sky, terrain, and tree editing options that Bryce has, although one can still create landscapes to a more limited extent via things like skydomes, appropriate choice of specially-designed shaders, careful arrangement of pre-generated objects, etc.
Those were EXTREMELY simplistic comparisons just to give you rough idea. There are a lot more differences, and a lot more ways to work around them. Personally, I often use a combination of both; for example I pose figures in DS and import them into Bryce, or create Bryce skies and create skydomes for use in DS with it. Note that they aren't totally compatible, there are things that work great and things that don't, that's another subject.
While I love Bryce, based on what it sounds like you are trying to do (create an entire world), I'm going to point out that you are going to very quickly hit your Bryce 32-bit memory limitation, which may be a problem. I would encourage you to find a way to break up your world into pieces, if that's possible, with each piece being it's own scene so this limitation doesn't interfere with your grand plan.
FYI, there are also forums dedicated to each of the individual applications (Bryce, DAZ Studio, Hexagon), and there may be additional experts lurking in each separate area.
Hi. I am also older, forced retire (RA).
I mostly work in DAZ. I am also driven by a love of Fantasy genre.
Start out by taking snapshots of your world. Smaller slices. You can "fudge" a bigger world with background pictures as well. As Tolkien did, we create the illusion of a big world with tons of small slices. :)
Also on fixed budget. There are many free products for DAZ. The Freepository forum here will get you pointed towards some of them.
To fill time I also play Online MMOs. Everquest2 is free to play and DnD type fantasy. There are others and many are free to play now (with restrictions)
A small slice of my "other world". A lightly guarded entry to Qeynos, in Antonica, on the world of Norrath. I can't show all that, but that is where it is, to me.
Dwarves? I include an image of Marta, my dwarf. Not purchased, created from basic Genesis. All of her items have shader presets I made. There is a ton of room for any creativity you choose.
Keep in mind, none of these applications will work well to create a persistent world you can move freely through. They are better at creating specific scenes from whatever world you imagine.
Ok, here is probably the dumbest question possible but could you build a bridge across that river in the cave or is that not editable.
I don't know how to create two terrains but I am going to figure it out tonight. :-)
Thank you so very much for your response and the beautiful picture!
Richard
Unfortunately I heard that EQ1 is being shut down and EQ2 will likely be right behind it after they were purchased by Daybreak. The news states that there have been considerable layoffs which makes me pretty nervous as I enjoyed EQ2 for a long, long time.
Thank you for your pictures, they really give me some hope. If I can't have a walk about city at least I can have a chain of pictures to show what it would have been like to walk through it, right? :-)
Thanks again!
Richard
Daz does have some animation ability. So once you have an area built up, you could animate a camera moving through the area giving a first person view through it, or follow a character walking through.
At any rate, I think what you have in mind would take a very (very) powerful computer to hold all that info in ram and process it. The best (and probably easiest solution would be (as stated before) create different areas that can be loaded independently. If you do choose the animation route to show it off, you could use camera tricks to blend 2 areas together as you transition from one to another. Or temporarily merge 2 areas together for the camera transition from one to another.
Yes, you can put a bridge across your river. If you have a bridge (a purchased or free object) you would simply load it into your scene at the appropriate location. If you don't have one, you could create one using one or more primitives. (at the simplest for example, a cube that's stretched out long and flattened would be a stone slab, at the most complex you could use many primitives for all the various bridge pieces or create your model in hexagon from scratch.) Of course, since it might not be designed to fit in the exact space created by your terrains, you might have to do some minor adjustments, like stretch/shorten the bridge slightly, or put two in a row to make a bigger bridge, or disguise where part of the bridge sticks under or above the ground, perhaps with a pile of rocks, etc.
To create a terrain, go to the edit Palette (you should see "create> edit> sky & Fog>" sort of near the top of your screen, click on "Create"), then click on the terrain icon, which is the green square with the little stone mountain sticking out of it.
Yes, certainly you can create as many individual pictures as you want. What you may not be able to do (if your scene is too big) is something like animating a walkthrough of your entire world all at once within a single saved scene file (although if you were careful to build your scenes correctly, there's no reason you couldn't make individual animations and join them after the fact.)
You just made my day.
I sometimes have very long nights due to a very old back so I was working through a Bryce tutorial and thought to check if there were any replies. I believe I understand the concept and it actually makes a heck of a lot of sense. Breaking it into pieces, even if there is a perceptible pause as you cross a threshold might work in my favor as the magnitude of what's in front of you would hit like a jackhammer. Sometimes too much to look at is not a good thing as you want people to really look at what is important or at least what you consider to be important. I hope some of this is making sense as I have stuff working in my back brain, my meds have hit and my wife is snoring in the bedroom down the hall like a motorcycle without baffles. :-) It's hilarious when my grandson (3) wakes me up in the upstairs master bedroom and drags me to the railing for the stairs, points to grandma and says "she sounds like cars at paw paw's shop". His other grandfather runs a car repair place. I laughed so hard I woke her up but didn't have the heart to tell her why Niko and I were standing there at 3 in the morning laughing. She falls asleep trying to catch up on all the shows she takes through the week because her crazy schedule means she never knows when she will be there to watch. The part that gets me is I will put my headphones on (when the grandsons are not staying) and some music, everything from country to shred to experimental rock. My son tries to keep me up to date musically. Anyway, she snorted so loud I jumped and lost my headphones. Personally I wonder if sometimes my son's thinking the stuff that would tear paint off the walls might get him the insurance money via his mother. :-) It's terrible being worth more dead than alive so now I have to keep my eye on all of them. :-)
I am going to go play with the terrain but I am also going to look for these primitives you mentioned. I saw the cube, the torus, the pyramid etc. I don't know, yeah I could buy already built bridges but man what I will learn regardless of what 3D software I might be using in the future would not be wasted. Regardless, most of the same processes would have to happen whether it is voxel based or based on something totally new, true?
Sorry for all the additional stuff. I get a bit wordy when it's early in the morning and nobody around but the cats.
Yours respectfully,
Richard
BTW, my Dwarf's name is Utto Lavaforged. You guessed it, he's a weapons smith and an acolyte of Brell the rest of the time.