Natarthos - Are there sub levels to a scene - Last question for the day, I promise

rlmorgan · January 2015

Good evening,

I am feeling much more comfortable messing things up in Daz3D and having fun in the process.

One thing I will need to do is to create tunnels down to underground rooms for he Dwarf community.

I did a search on the forums and one on bing and got absolutely nothing helpful.

Is it possible to do tunnels? If so, is it possible to give them length so that you just don't go pop! from one scene to another?

I just don't have a real feel yet for what a scene is composed of, is it just a flat plane or can you create it with depth to work underground?

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Nat/Richard

Herald of Fire · January 2015

You could use a variety of things for a tunnel. As mentioned in one of my earlier posts, primitives can fill the gap where conventional props fail. A simple cylinder, for example, with the rock shader can easily become a tunnel for even the largest of dwarven undergrounds. Here's how I would do it.

First, create your cylinder and make sure it has a decent number of length segments. More segments allows more bends and twists, if it's just going to be a straight tube you can ignore this for the most part, but keep segments above 5 so that the rock shader has enough geometry to work with. Move the start to where you need it, and the end likewise and apply your rock shader.

Now we need to delete the ends so that it's a tube rather than a cylinder. Do this using the geometry editing tool (ALT + Shift + G). With the tool in hand, select the polygons on either end of the cylinder. You can hold CTRL while clicking to add to the current selection or press ALT to remove polygons from the current selection, so it doesn't all have to be done in a single mouse drag. With both ends selected, right click and 'hide' the selected polygons under visibility options. Lastly, right click again and remove hidden polygons under the Polygon Editing option. Et voila, one tube.

You could also replace a cylinder with a stretched torus and get similar results, but it also creates more geometry than necessary and I'm all about optimisation! See the image below for the finished article.

But, we're not done yet. Using the DForm utility we can also add bends to the tunnel, allowing you to shape it and mould it to your liking. After all, which rocky tunnel is completely straight? The DForm works by having a radial area it affects and bends. By moving the DForm field you select which parts of the tunnel to bend and by moving the DForm gizmo you bend, move and shape those selected parts.

To answer your other question. Scenes are just big empty spaces. Fill them with whatever your creative mind can dream up. There's no limit to how far they can go, but there IS a limit to how much you can add to a scene. That limit is dictated by your computer system, so add too much and it may grid to a snails pace. For that reason it's good practice to break things up into multiple scenes. Using a separate scene for transitions may ease the burden considerably.

cecilia.robinson · January 2015

HeralfOfFire has good suggestions regarding the primitives-made tunnel. I decided to show you a few free tunnels and caves, perhaps you will find something ready or if not, you can mix and match the sets, rounding the primitives.

Cyclorama textures could be applied onto the beachy background from Genesis 2 Essentials you got from DS. I never tried applying it onto it, but it could work out of the box. If not, apply the texture via Surfaces Tab. It should look pretty much the same. With the technique HoF described and the freebies, you should be able to whip up many tunnels quickly :).

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Natarthos - Are there sub levels to a scene - Last question for the day, I promise

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