Can Daz3d Create landscapes?

rachelloyd

I notice that Bryce will no longer work on Mac Lion. Can you create landscapes using Daz3d or is that program only for figures? I don't want to invest a lot of time and energy in a program that won't create landscapes. I used Bryce some years ago and enjoyed it. I've looked and searched this forum for the answer, but couldn't find it. It appears as though many of the renders do have landscapes and backgrounds, but I can't tell where they came from or if they were done in Daz.

TIA

wancow

you can, actually. It would be a bit labourious, but you can using a high-poly plane primitive and dforms.

larsmidnatt

I would use something else to create landscapes, especially if you are coming from Bryce. DS is good and all, but not a good replacement for Bryce.

Rareth

for creating terrains within DAZ this is the only plugin I've found

http://www.daz3d.com/infinito-1-0

if you want free third party stuff for making backgrounds there are a few here

http://www.planit3d.com/source/software_files/terrain.html

not sure how Mac Friendly they are though.

Scott Livingston

You can render landscapes in DAZ Studio, but there's definitely much more flexibility in programs like Bryce or Carrara that were designed with landscapes in mind. Most landscape images made with DAZ Studio probably use either modeled elements (props or figures such as those sold in the store here) or backdrop images, or a combination of both.

Here are some varied examples of things in the store that could be used for rendering landscapes (there are many others, too):

http://www.daz3d.com/grass-poppies-and-tall-weeds-bundle
http://www.daz3d.com/parkside-point-ground
http://www.daz3d.com/high-cliff-crossing
http://www.daz3d.com/the-all-new-worldbase-xt-lushlands
http://www.daz3d.com/easy-environments-road-to-hell
http://www.daz3d.com/planet-alpine
http://www.daz3d.com/millennium-environment
http://www.daz3d.com/lisa-s-botanicals-cinnamon-fern

If using sets created by others doesn't appeal to you, note that there is some flexibility in terms of making your own landscapes using these pre-made elements. For instance I once used four copies of the rock from Parkside Point Ground to make a mountain range. If you need even more flexibility than that, and/or if making your own original landscapes is your main goal, you could try the method wancow mentioned, but you might be better served by another program.

bytescapes

There is a plugin for DAZ Studio called Infinito that can be used to create landscapes within DAZ Studio. However, there are some limitations: if I remember correctly, the DAZ scene file format doesn't allow you to save all the settings for a generated landscape, so if you save a file and re-open it, you need to manually reproduce some of the settings that you had before.

Depending on the size of your budget, and your loyalty to DAZ, you might want to look at DAZ's Carrara, which is a powerful general 3D program that also has some pretty good landscape creation tools built-in (and can import and pose figures much like DAZ Studio). Carrara is currently slightly in limbo: owners of Carrara 8 have access to a beta version of 8.5, which supports the new Genesis figures, but the beta program has been dragging on for a considerable time and it's unclear when the final version of 8.5 will be released. Carrara is slightly unstable on Mac, although - in my experience at least - the 8.5 beta is now more stable than the 8.1 release. The learning curve for Carrara is a bit steeper than Bryce, and it's not as optimized for landscapes as Bryce, but I think it's a pretty good program all round. DAZ sometimes offer it at a discount (Carrara 8 Pro is currently on sale for $285, or $171 for PC members; regular Carrara 8 costs a bit less).

Other (non-DAZ) alternatives for landscape generation include the relatively cheap'n'cheerful TerraRay and the much more high-end Vue. TerraRay is inexpensive, but I've found it somewhat limited and slow. Vue is a much more powerful beast - some would argue that the landscapes it produces are generally superior to Bryce's - and there are packages at a wide variety of price points, ranging from lower-priced entry-level versions right up to "I have all the money in the world and I want to make 'Avatar'" versions. My own feeling is that the sweet spot in terms of features is probably Vue Studio, which costs about $399. That might be more than you want to pay.

Terragen 2 is another very powerful and rather expensive landscape modeler.

You can also make landscapes in the free Blender, although the learning curve may be fairly steep.

Finally, if you have Parallels or VMWare and a copy of Windows, you can actually run Windows Bryce on a Mac reasonably well.

Scott Livingston

angusm said:

Other (non-DAZ) alternatives for landscape generation include the relatively cheap'n'cheerful TerraRay and the much more high-end Vue. TerraRay is inexpensive, but I've found it somewhat limited and slow. Vue is a much more powerful beast - some would argue that the landscapes it produces are generally superior to Bryce's - and there are packages at a wide variety of price points, ranging from lower-priced entry-level versions right up to "I have all the money in the world and I want to make 'Avatar'" versions. My own feeling is that the sweet spot in terms of features is probably Vue Studio, which costs about $399. That might be more than you want to pay.

A cheaper (and less feature-rich) version of Vue is also sold in the store here: http://www.daz3d.com/vue-9-frontier

Lindsey

Thanks for the suggestion Scott. I went and investigated Vue at e-onsoftware.com and downloaded the "free" version, Vue 11 Pioneer, to see what the learning curve would be. This version has render size limitations and renders with a watermark for starters, but it was very easy to load the few scenes that came with it, move the camera around and render background images for use with DS4 renders in post. I see a lot of free Vue scenes but they are mostly in .vob format and this version only loads .vue format scenes.

Ostadan

I seem to remember someone saying that the Windows version of Bryce can be run on the Mac (Lion) under Crossover or some other WINE derivative. I have not personally verified this.

Totte

Lindsey said:

Thanks for the suggestion Scott. I went and investigated Vue at e-onsoftware.com and downloaded the "free" version, Vue 11 Pioneer, to see what the learning curve would be. This version has render size limitations and renders with a watermark for starters, but it was very easy to load the few scenes that came with it, move the camera around and render background images for use with DS4 renders in post. I see a lot of free Vue scenes but they are mostly in .vob format and this version only loads .vue format scenes.

Just to explain: .vue are scenes, .vob are vue objects (which you load from the "load objects".

albaricoquero_e2fecfdec9

aa