Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 12
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That is quite an imaginative combo!
Cat burglars?
Wow! Definitely worth grabbing! Thanks. :)
Is this what you mean? (And ignore the archive path; I changed it to a larger drive, but didn't redo all my screenshots.)
They got in through the pet door...
The main one I'd change is Connect Available. Try enabling that.
That was it exactly. Thank you! I hadn't even thought about changing that would hide stuff. (Just changed that setting yesterday.) The New York Store Front and 800 other products showed back up upon checking that box.
Thank you for your quick eye and wisdom!
You're welcome.
I didn't know disabling that one would hide anything, but I left it enabled when I updated DIM last, and I've never had any missing products.
If you purchase older products, it's also possible they are for Poser, and won't show up because you've disabled Poser as well. Once you've downloaded and installed those 800+ products, you might want to change the poser options and see if you're missing any other content you paid for! lol
OK, well here is a review of the old, but still lovely, Faveral's Le Village Bundle.
It's geometry is modeled very well but as with most old product in the days before iRay there are not near enough material zones and the material sets really don't hold up too well in broad daylight at high resolution. The interial details are all textures with is to be expected at this price and especially at the capabilities of computers back when this was modeled. That's pretty common among these old architectural models, eg, the Victorian Shoppes and Northern Terrace are likewise limited.
To use with iRay and have the flexibility to tile high quality modern PBR materials you'd need to spend a lot of time reassigning geometry to new surfaces and maybe (or probably really depending on your perspective) need to save two or three different props/assets of those edited Surfaces so that you can easily create different looking buildings to create 3 or 4 blocks of a neighborhood. Note that you can also mirror the buildings by scaling on the X axis negative 100%. The bummer is then you have to save out the geometry as new geometry and treat as a new piece of modeling because otherwise I was going to create a bunch of new surfaces and mirror the buildings and save those things as presets to share as freebies but the way DAZ Studio works is the actual geomtries would have been included so that's a no-go.
I also tried to make the interior of the building look like they are lit by maying the glass surfaces emissive but that didn't create that effect to my surprise. I probably could get that effect by placing DAZ primitive planes or spheres that would fit inside the rooms , making the cutout opacity size 0.0000000001 (has the effect of making the surface invisible as it's so small but it's there meaning emissive light will be visible), and then making those primitives emissive. However, the included scene doesn't have that.
Still this product was useful for me to learn in a small way what is needed to make something as a game asset, whih is what I consider Faveral's Le Village to be (if one buys the needed interactive license), compared to being a DAZ Studio hobbyist asset which this product doesn't make the grade as there is not enough attention to detail for modern PBR style of rendering. For example, I'd need to save presets for each light option for each window, door, stop light, sign, street light and now you are suddenly talking many presets to make for this product for a hobby DAZ Studio user like myself. Do the PAs make enough profit from us for that level of detail to be feasible? I have no ideal. Some do & some don't I guess from reading in the forums.
The product surprisingly does not come with the sample scene seen in the product's DAZ 3D Store ad copy. A major flaw and hassle to the average hobby customer like myself that buys product based on ad copy.
I did create a reasonable fascimile of the product's ad copy scene and include it as a downloadable DAZ duf scene file on the page where I rendered the product in my gallery. No other product was used in creating those renders so no mention for a review process.
All-in-all, the product was worth the sale price I paid of $20 or at regular price, both as a game asset and as a bit less for as a DAZ Studio asset for hobby still renderers (due to the previous things mentioned) but if you do animation again it is more valuable as an asset.
https://www.daz3d.com/le-village-bundle
There is also a larger bundle called Faveral's Village Bundle that costs a much pricier $99.95 but as the architectural styles were so distinct from each other, one being pre-1800 in origin and the other post-1800 that I decided to buy that bigger set (or the pieces to it) at a later time in later sales. If it needs the same PBR material updates which is certain, it's a bit pricey for my budget but still a value.
https://www.daz3d.com/the-faveral-village-bundle
Adding the Poser options back in adds another 900 products. Wow.
I'm glad L'Adair jumped in - sorry I had to leave just before you posted the screenshots to cook dinner.
This review includes some oldies too. Not many do toon renders so I don't know if there'll be interest in these products.
a) 3DU Toon Frog - https://www.daz3d.com/3d-universe-toon-frog
b) 3DU Toon Croc https://www.daz3d.com/3d-universe-toon-croc
c) Desolation Earth - Gator Joe Swamp Boat https://www.daz3d.com/desolation-earth-gator-joe-swamp-boat
d) Pond Builder Base https://www.daz3d.com/pond-builder-base
e) Little Ones (Mega Bundle) for Genesis 3 https://www.daz3d.com/little-ones-mega-bundle-for-genesis-3
f) Toon Generations Mega-Bundle for Genesis 8 Male(s) and Female(s) https://www.daz3d.com/toon-generations-mega-bundle-for-genesis-8-males-and-females
Thanks again and thank you to all who have offered help over the years, because it's saved me so much time and aggravation! Daz just isn't intuitve to me at times, for sure!
PC+ items frequently have both a DS and PS file. If you have the DS version, you won't need the PS version. But there is a lot of older product that is Poser only. It will take more time to sort the poser products because of this. I leave Poser enabled, and then "select and hide" products that have Daz Studio version as well. There are a large number of older products that use the Poser files, and then have DS presets that work with the Poser files. (I may not be saying that correctly for the tech, but you get the idea.)
There are two terms you can search for in DIM that will narrow down the list, I think. PoserCF and StudioCF. I admit I'm not sure about these, but someone who is will udoubtedly post a correction if I've got it wrong. (I'm counting on that.) I believe if a product has a PoserCF or a StudioCF, you still need the Poser files.
Jaderail and I had quite the talk about Poser CF and Studio CF, but that was of course years ago. I thought if I used the Studio CF that I didn't need to use the Poser CF at all. Someone will answer this hopefully.
Aha- here's a post by fixmypcmike stating you don't use the poser cf files if you use the studio ones. Richard agrees. Skim the thread.
Edit- hmmm, does Richard seem to contradict himself then? In the last post he says the studio needs both. Arrrgh. "In order to use Daz StudioCFs DS needs access both to the Poser Format content directory with the Poser files and the Daz Studio Format content directory with the CFs."
Generally speaking, if there's a StudioCF you need it, if there's a PoserCF you don't need that (it means the main file has all that DS needs)
But if there are two files, one marked DS and one marked PS and the PS one is significantly larger than the DS one then you need both. These would be mostly older products where the PS contains all the geometry and the DS only has DS-specific materials settings, for example.
ETA: I think it's this latter case Richard meant in his later post - you need to have the Poser Runtime available to DAZ Studio to actually load the geometry into the scene.
Very good to know. Thanks! I'll have to sort through those. Before, I have always installed everything and I was trying to cut down the size of what I have on my drive.
What he means I think is that those products are actually Poser products and they would work with Poser without any CF files, including the Poser CF files I think but if you use them in DAZ Studio you need the DAZ CF and Poser CF files. I think some products if you have a Poser CF would still work in DAZ Studio but you'd have to navigate to it's cr file in the old Poser standard locations but I'm not 100% sure on that.
The way I handle it is I know developers, PAs, DAZ 3D, and their workers are inconsistant with standards and quality control and so if I buy a product and it has a DAZ installer, a DAZ CF installer, Poser installer, Poser CF installer, a Legacy installer, ..., already there is TMI: I just install it all. Buying a bigger harddrive when they get cheaper is more productive and cheaper than using my time to inspect what those are all about and seeing if they are correct.
The biggest no-no I've done with this whole 3D collecting bit is buy something like 98% of the content that I haven't tried yet so all those legacy, and CF files in my DIM that I've installed have never even been tried on my computer anyway. Despite iRay & these preset helpers in DS, making a scene that I actually like and rendering they scene is still practically unobtainable for me and very time consuming.
No, a CF - Companion File - is a helper file for the named application that accompanies content for another application:
Excellent, thanks! Glad I always install it all then.
None of my Bryce DIM stuff installs anyway. I wish they'd fix that but I guess it's end of development if not end of life for the Bryce products.
If you visited the Bryce forum for advice you would find that we always suggest not using DIM to install Bryce or Bryce products. Horo has written a very useful PDF describing how best to install Bryce.
@richardhaseltine Thanks!
Edit- I added it to the References on page 1, under Tips: Poser CFs and Studio CFs in case anyone forgets the explanation.
Thanks. I saved the PDF
CAMERA- LENS - LENS DISTORTION TYPE.
This is in no way a 'HOW TO' more a 'This is what it does'. It might not be something to use often but I thought it might be of interest to someone. Here is a link to another post I did using the same settings.
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/3593786/#Comment_3593786
Under the camera/lens there is a section in Iray, not sure about 3Delight, that says Lens Distortion Type. I haven't seen many posts about it but I have experimented once or twice using it.
Basically what it does is straighten the verticals when looking from ground level with a wide angle lens, at least that is how I have used it :)
There are five settings that can be set :- Distortion Type, K1, K2, K3 and Scale.
I have only used :-
Distortion Type - Poly 3 and Scale at 1.00
The K1 setting works on the top of the image, K2 on the middle and K3 on the bottom.
In this first image you can see in the left side the view through the camera and the wide angle, the centre is the viewport and how it will render and on the right the settings I used to get that image.
Click on image for full size.
This second image is the finished render.
Click on image for full size.
Very cool! I may have to play with that today!
That's interesting, Fishtales - I'd never even noticed those controls before (I've probably never been into the "Lens" section actually, only "Headlamp" and "Camera")
I've never tried those either but looks very useful!
I've played around with the distortion lenses, but they never did anything. Now I know why!
@fishtales That is SO neat! I'll add that to References (page 1) too.