Working with large scale differences

svenm

Hi all, I'm new to Daz 3D, and have been noodling around with some renders.  In some ways (kinematics, keyframe animation, posing controls, viewport handling) things haven't changed that much from years ago when I played with Poser for a while, but in other ways (especially render quality, figure quality, polygon counts, mesh resolutions, dForce, and available props/figures/materials/sets) it's a whole new world.  A good iRay render is a far cry from what I remember producing 10 years ago.

Anyway, it's taken me a few weeks to get comfortable with the interface and viewport controls, with the mysteries of domes and HDRI, not to mention the finnicky nature of lighting, and to figure out some of the quirks of iRay rendering and how to effectively use the content library.  I've put together some test scenes and it's looking pretty good, but for an upcoming scene I'm anticipating a problem I'd like some input on:

So let's say I want to put together a fantasy scene with significant scale differences among figures/objects, where you have a giant and some giant props, and some regular-sized figures and props, together in the same scene.  Let's say a 10:1 ratio, so the giant is about 60ft tall relative to the average 6ft figure.  I foresee issues navigating the viewport around a giant figure, and translations (viewport as well as figure) will likely be very slow and tedious, as it will move only very little in response to large inputs.  Also, given the infamous iRay "black eyes" issue that I've been experiencing and having to deal with by moving all my scenes around to put the eyes near world origin, what happens if the eyes are gigantic and widely spaced?  Haven't actually tried it yet, but I'm anticipating frustration.

One way to deal with it would be to reverse things and just make the "giant" normal-sized and the "regular" figures tiny (around 7 inches), but then the problem becomes that translations on the small figures become hard to handle, as every small movement of the mouse is amplified, and the granularity of available adjustments at the Daz scale (which is in meters, I believe) becomes too rough.

Maybe I could try splitting the difference, and make my "regular" figures something like 2ft tall, and the giant around 20ft tall, to get the same relative size difference and strike a compromise.  Maybe.  Or I guess I could try something using forced perspective, where the figures are actually all normal-sized, but arranged so perfectly that they seem to be different scales (like they did in the LOTR movies).  Seems like a lot of work, though, and in LOTR they had special sets and props to support the illusions.

I can't think of any perfect solution, other than compositing the scenes out of multiple renders (which I'd prefer not to do).  Is there some magic trick in Daz that I'm missing?  Some way to adjust the world scale/units, or set a multiplier at the figure/object level, or to adjust the granularity of translations?  I know there's a multiplier that can be applied to the dome, when it's in finite mode, but that wouldn't seem to apply here.  Any input appreciated!

Griffin Avid

When I just battled this last, I made a group of everything and moved the group to zero.
So in the scene parameters tab for the newly created group, I set all the translations to zero.

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I've also done this to a figure and parented the entire scene's contents (already a group) to that single character. And then moved that character to zero.

The entire set followed and it stopped the black eyes and squiggles on the forehead.

svenm

Hi Griffin, thanks for the reply, but can you elaborate: are you talking specifically about the iRay black eye circles problem?  I do something similar: I group the whole scene and translate the group until the head of the character whose eyes I want to look good in the render are near the world 0,0,0 origin.  To help me, I have a permanent "World Origin" null object that helps me visually align the scene.

I'm not sure yet if this issue will be a concern at the larger scales I was describing, though, where two eyes on a single head to be rendered might be feet apart.  Probably not, as a few feet usually doesn't cause a problem.  I'm more worried right now about having to translate very large or very small figures/objects and their child objects/bones, or having to dolly and rotate the camera around them.  When the whole coordinate system assumes that a unit is 1m, and that the lowest resolution is 0.01 (1 cm), a very large figure becomes unwieldy to translate, and a very small one become impossible to position precisely in relation to its own scale.

codex34_f5f1fb6f55

There is a workaround for the black eye issue, it involves using the geometry editor, using surfaces, hiding or deleting the sclera, merging the cornea with the eyemoisture, applying the sclera material to the eyemoisture, editing the sclera material so there is no base reflection, no bump, and turn thin walled on, set the refraction to 1.3, set the refraction weight to 1 and add G8FBaseEyesTr_1007 to the refraction weight image slot with inverse set to 'on' in the image editor, then use the top coat with fresnel and ior = 1.3.

This gives you a single layer eye that has no issues being used off center, not the best eye solution but better than having black sclera, you can move the figure to >10,000 off center before you start running into issues with black lines on the face. For hair issues - you'll need a push modifier. Personally I've only ever had the hair issue with instancing optimisation set to memory, which seems to reduce the floating point precission drastically.

Griffin Avid

Holy cow, that's a lot of steps.

Someone needs to make a script. lol, not lol.

That moving to origin was exactly as you described.

I think the next step is to experiment and see what happens.

Do a test render.

Good luck.

svenm

All right, thanks, I will play a bit and just see what happens on the "dealing with scale differences" front.  Looks like there are no magic settings or tricks for me to be aware of.

As for the black eyes, my go-to will continue to be translating the whole scene to put eyes/face/hair near world origin, and hopefully I'll never have to resort to the process codex outlined for modifying the eye surfaces.

Sevrin

An alternative is to make your giants normal size, and then use a product like https://www.daz3d.com/z-cute-little-things--shrink-morphs-and-poses-for-genesis-3-and-8 to shrink your normies.