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Looks really good, KA :)
Thanks guys!
CYBERPUNK CITY
Just in case anyone missed me, i have been hard at work, i promise. A big thank you to anyone who supported my recent releases, as it allowed me a bit more time and flexibility to produce my latest set. i wanted to deviate away from single buildings and interiors to work on something a bit larger, and it has certainly brought with it its own set of challenges..
Never the less, Cyberpunk city is a mixture of neoclassical and industrial architecture fused with sci fi noir "enhancements". Textures are atlassed and packed in as tightly as possible to reduce preload time and the poly range is fairly high but not silly. Iray and 3dl materials will be supplied as always. I can't hang around to long since i want to ship to daz over the weekend, and i obviously have a colossal amount of work still to do.
As usual, the renders below reflect works in progress and are subject to change. If you have any suggestions i might be able to cram in before the weekend, i'm all ears. Thanks for dropping by!
oh yes!!
This could probably be my first purchase from you. Sci-Fi and especially cyber-punk landscapes/settings are a sure shot for me, to buy stuff.
If I may add some suggestions: I`d love to see some more neon/light signs/banners. Maybe as parented props. The picture, that you`ve shown above, is a bit too naked for my taste. In that current state, when I look at the picture, it doesn`t make me immediately pop the word "cyberpunk" in my head. When i think of cyberpunk, I immediately think of a huge amount of flashy lights/lasers/holograms and an overall gritty and filthy look of the environment.
Also, to show the futuristic aspect, many of those signs/banners could be holograms ( like that yellow sign, that you show in your citadel promo pictures ). And I wold like to see some more futuristic lights, like lightstripes as street/walkway markers etc.
I just added a piece of artwork from helix entertainment, to show you, what I am thinking of.
Hi Escobar. Yes i'm painfully aware that the lights are a bit spartan right now. I've had to put a lot of time into the architecture so set decoration is a tad sparse as a result. My final stretch to the finish line however is purely costmetic, so i'll try and flesh out the lighting as much as possible along the way. The holograms are definately on the agenda, i just haven't gotten around to them yet.
How many separate building props will there be as part of the set? It looks huge!
Hey rangler, the short answer is .. one, It's one big rigged set. I know people tend to be a bit divided on this method but i can only explain my position -
When i first started building packs for the store, i was allowed to split environments into parts. However, after a few projects daz asked if my future projects could be rigged together, mostly to ease material editing by consumers. So this pack, like my previous items, is provided as one large set with hideable props and buildings. In terms of actual size, i'd say it's probably as big as stonemasons chinatown. Theres roughly 22 buildings, and several more shops/facades at ground level.
Ah, OK. So each of the buildings will have its own separate bone and can be turned on or off that way, then?
At the moment they are rigged blocks, i.e one side of a street has its own block etc. I broke it up mainly for camera access, but if i get some free time towards deadline, i'll break it up even more for flexibility's sake.
I hope you have the time to break it up a little. I have some sets -- not yours, I hasten to add -- that I don't use as much as I would like because I can't "turn off" parts of the set in ways that let me manipulate through them. Reducing a surface opacity to zero will let you see through it, but it won't let you touch anything on the other side.
Looks interesting. I too favour more separate models, cos it gives a lot more options for kit bashing. There are several sets I have that I would have got refunds on (if I was a refund kind of guy), because although they look nice from the few chosen camera angles, they are what they are and nothing about them can be changed, and that makes them of very limited use to me.
I'm working on promos right now for my own next set, and I've pulled out bits of Stoney's US3 for background duty. Very big, very versatile, and most of the buildings are separate props. (Stonemason's set, that is!)
BTW, I was slightly worried by your last release -- I swear that was the house I grew up in!
I suppose if i pushed the puppy dog eyes i could get the go ahead to publish a pack with seperated pieces but i'm so used to building them in a certain way that it would be tricky do them any other way. i mean you can still pull a rigged pack into a scene and just hide the bits you don't need, the only downside is you'll probably have textures you aren't actually using being loaded into the scene too. I can see why they prefer it this way, if you wanted to edit the glass for example you would have to copy material settings across 22 different buildings rather than editing one big master material. I'll have to try and find a better middle ground for the kit bashers out there.
Me too! Are you a brother from another mother tango?
That's why I like Carrara - separate pieces AND master shaders!
May I add my vote for facilitating kitbashery? This set is a definite buy, but I sure would like to be able to customise it as much as possible.
BTW, I hope European Suburb is selling well because I would like to see some additions to the neighbourhood.
Oh, can we please get some English signage? I have Chinese/Japanese signage in alot of my sets that I have to change for some scenes.
I will make it as flexible i can, hopefully down to a building by building level. It's a bit tricky since some of the buildings have open sides (since they are adjoined to another building). I will also have a chat with daz about tackling these larger packs in a different way, since there are quite a few people who want a tad more flexibility.
The suburb is doing quite well. It actually started off as a personal project since it's a very close approximation of my home growing up, so i thought it might be a bit of a niche pack.. but nope! It's done really well on the store, same with the gastropub, so people definitely like a touch of england in their runtimes. That being the case, i'll keep expanding with similar styles and add ons.
There is actually a fair bit of english signage, mostly hand made renders and advertising i whipped up in daz. I can't really do a full english conversion since i have no idea what any of it says, but there will be english signs in the mix. I'll snap some renders of the signs and ads etc when i've packed up.
Thanks for popping by xyero, always appreciated.
This will be a must purchase for me.
Thanks for the feedback and hard work, KA. You are definitely filling holes in my Dazworld.
KA, I see that Cyberpunk City is in the store already. Were you able to add bones/rigging to any of the buildings, or is it basically a few very large buildings with a lot of surfaces? Or something in between?
It does look spectacular, either way.
Sorry guys, completely forgot to update here. Yes, every building is now rigged to a bone, along with signs, wires, puddles, the ground and the checkpoints. As i said, hopefully i can move to singular building props in the future, but i hope that will do the trick for now.
This is the kind of dedication to users that deserves support. Congrats on a great looking set. Happily added to today's cart.
Thank you, i appreciate that. I can't always bend to everyones request, but listening to the community can only assist me in creating more useable & justified content in the future. If you guys are happy, i'm happy. :)
How do you making those lights so that they bleed / bloom into a surrounding area? It that possible with the iRay Emissions style lights? Or do I have to use point lights although that would seem to make the neon tubing not possible using point lights.
I used a bit of bloom filtering, you can find it Under Render/filtering. You'll have to play around with the values since there's no one size fits all solution with it, it's quite dependant on your light set up. I also used photoshop to add screen based bloom, which is probably the bigger player in this case. Here's how i usually do it -
Duplicate the layer for higher intensity, or bring down the opacity for less intensity. This obviously assumes you're using photoshop, but i don't think the process is too dissimilar in GIMP.
On top of that i use lens flares and vignetting, which is totally up to you. That's pretty much it i think, i don't recall doing anything out of the ordinary with the emissives. You could try pushing the emissive value higher if you're not getting enough bloom, but i purposely avoided that due to fireflies popping up. If you use the methods above though, we should be pretty much on par. Let me know if you need any more help.
Cheers!
Thanks
Honestly, that's great!. If you can strike a balance between what Daz prefers, what you prefer, and what your customers prefer that works for everyone to at least some degree, that seems a reasonable compromise.
Congratulations on your new set, KA. I got it last night, and I had some time to look through it. It does the job very nicely, and the buildings are tall enough that no background image is necessary. However, I wanted more room to play; so, I increased the scale to 150% on the Z axis and moved the LampPosts +/- 18 units, and the signs still look believable. Thanks for adding the buildings bones, too. The cyborg guy on Building 13 was hogging too much attention (even though it was in the background), so I just clicked it off. Voila!
If you're inclined, I would like to see a futuristic utopian city square (like what is envisioned for Earth in Star Trek). That's one area of the market that is empty.
Hey xyero, once again, thank you for the support, it's always appreciated. In hindsight i probably should have separated that sign out to a different bone, it is a bit overpowering in the scene. Tackling scene scaling however, i found another way to do it is - load two identical scenes, rotate the second set 180 degrees on the Y axis and shift it to the end of the street. Hide building 10 on both sets and line them up in unison. The roads are a bit tricky to match up convincingly, but if it's scale you're going for, this could do the trick. I've posted an example image using this method below.
As for a utopian scene, i'm very much on board, in-fact i get this suggestion quite a bit. It might take a while to get around to it, but hopefully somewhere this side of christmas.
Thanks for going to the trouble to make that image. It certainly gives some depth. For me, the street is long enough, but I needed some width to fit in all the action I wanted to see. Of course, for a seamy, late night stroll on the darkside, it's plenty wide in its original dimensions.
I was wondering, is there any way for me to split the signs out? I wanted to keep the street wide banners, but I needed to move one of the side banners for action's sake. The only option I found, however, was show/hide. I could not translate the position of the group or anything. Now, I'm a virtual novice; so, my first suspicion is always my own ignorance or pilot error.
Thanks also for a tentative date on the utopian scene. That will shake things up a bit around here. I'm still exploring, but I love the building facades. There's a lot of character here.
PM'd you.