Sharing my experience of customising Urban Sprawl 3 and The Streets of Utopia.
Fire Angel
Posts: 260
Yes, you read that correctly. Having bought Urban Sprawl 3 I am a happy customer and as usual with Stonemason's products I am highly impressed. There are a lot of subtleties in Urban Sprawl 3 that aren't obvious in the product images, so it's actually better in some ways than you might think from looking at the description and renders on the product page. Some of the benefits are obvious, some really aren't so I'll cover both for anyone who hasn't bought it yet.
- There are five small city blocks that can tile, so by snapping them together at their edges you can make a lot of layouts with it. This alone makes it very flexible.
- Each block can be rotated through ninety degree increments and will still tile, so you can use the same block in a row of four linked together and it will not be obvious from street level that it is the same block, as each side has been carefully designed to look quite different.
- The memory use is optimised to a silly degree for such a large set. It gives you a huge amount of city to use in your renders and still does not use anywhere near as much memory as some single street sets I have bought. I laughed out loud when I realised that.
- The design of the blocks and their contents means that if you rotate and chain them together in the right way you can easily portray a very very long city avenue, stretching off into the distance. However if arranged differently you can make short, more confined looking backstreets from exactly the same set of blocks! This will be missed by some people, but I think it is one of the best features and yet another way in which US3 is flexible.
- There is a lot of scope for customisation of various kinds, from changing the street signs to retexturing the shop signs to make even more variation. Go out and photograph some of your local shops if you want ideas, or maybe import and use the signs from those photos. I am sure you can think of more ideas if you've been using it, and probably even if you haven't.
Yep, another happy customer. Anyway, on to the main subject, I am posting this to see the level of interest and to suggest similar projects to others. I hope other people will join in and post their own customisation efforts. This first post contains no renders but those will appear quite quickly.
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I forgot to mention in my first post that I use all my DAZ content and the 3D content I buy elsewhere in Blender, not in DAZ Studio. The Diffeomorphic script for DAZ Studio is used to prepare and export the figures and then they are imported into Blender using the Diffeomorphic add-on for Blender. This does make customising stuff extra easy, as Blender has a highly comprehensive set of modelling tools in it. However a lot of the customisation I am going to show does not require anything other than an image editor to make custom textures with.
OK, here is my first addition to the set; the sixth block in my Urban Sprawl 3 collection; the park! Off to the right of the cinema you can see it. I took one of the five existing blocks, loaded it in, deleted all the buildings and retextured the paving in the middle using the grass texture used for some of the grass patches in US3. I added some of the benches from a courtyard elsewhere in US3, then loaded in some high quality but low polygon count trees and arranged them to make the park. I will certainly get some use out of this one, and because an open flat space is not exactly polygon-heavy and there are also fewer textures this block uses less memory than the five original blocks. I cannot recall which product I used for the trees but I will work it out and post a link to the product page here on the DAZ site.
Oh, and some of you will note that the US3 police car has also been slightly customised; the lights on the roof are red and blue instead of just blue. Most US police departments use both colours and it wasn't hard to tweak the shaders.
The park was easy! Here is stage one of my next customisation project, and this will be a lot more work. You can see all twelve blocks laid out, the ones in all grey are the orginal, unaltered blocks. You can see where I added the non-US3 trees, those are the green ones, while those that match US3 are instanced from trees already in US3. The blue buildings are from Urban Sprawl 2. Some of them were too big to fit a standard US3 block, but I customised them by remodelling their bases or removing the bases entirely. This has already given me a set of six new blocks, some as yet only suitable for use in the background, but I do intend to bring all of them up to a similar standard to the existing blocks.
Here's a big city scene I made from Urban Sprawl 3 back in 2019. I used UltraScatterPro matrix mode to build the big city from the individual city blocks. I also added a park or two in my city.
Wow... that's a huge city !
Is there a reason the skies are so crowded?
Yes, those are supposed to be news helicopters reporting on the fire. See the flames and fire trucks in the foreground? Actually, I think i was experimenting again with UltraScattterPro and Volume scatter at the time. It is hard to remember what was in my mind 5 years ago.
With instances, you can add a lot of city blocks! According to my image title, I made a matrix of 20 by 20 city blocks.
Yeah, indeed !
Now that is a city. Great job Barbult! Really like the patches of green parks. Make it all the more livable.
Thank you for the compliment.
Thanks for that. One thing Stonemason always does well is optimising his models and offering more versatility in their use. It's fun just to explore his sets sometimes and find new angles.
Looking good
I love Blender but I always seem to go the other way for rendering. I guess I'm just more familiar with DS and Iray now.
That's so big the fire in the title gets a bit lost! I would expect that instancing had to be used to fit that array of blocks in the scene file, is that correct?
Something else happens in Urban Sprawl 3 that happens in real cities that have a lot of tall buildings; it is known as the urban canyon effect. This is where some parts of the city don't get much sunlight at street level except for a short window of time, and for some streets not at all. For these renders I set the latitude and longitude in my sky add-on to the right values for New York, the date to 15th March, and the times to 09:11 for the dark one and 13:20 for the lighter render. All other settings are the same. This really shows the effect perfectly.
I suspect instancing is still the way to go if you want to render scenes that big. I find it interesting that you customised a block the same way I did first, to make a park. It seems we both crave some open spaces and nature. One of the great things about both London and New York is they have fantastic parks in them, which is one of the reasons that they are more pleasant to live in than many cities. There are also a lot of trees in the streets of London even outside the parks. Paris does even better apparently, though I have not been to Paris.
Here is a link to the product page for the low-poly pine trees I used to make my Urban Sprawl 3 Park: https://www.daz3d.com/nature-trees-pack-1
I did not keep the Ash and Birch trees installed; it's an old product and they were never as convincing as recent products. The pine trees still look good though, so those are in my Blender library.
There's a great thread about building cities here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/120071/creating-big-city-scenes-in-daz-studio
Here's one of the US3 buildings copied from one of the original blocks onto one of the new ones with Urban Sprawl 2 buildings on it. These are needed to fill some of the smaller spaces as the Urban Sprawl 2 buildings are too big. I have customised the textures, following an old tradition of mine which adds in a "Stefan's Delicatessen". Stonemason's real name is Stefan so it's a small tribute to him; in an alternative universe he makes great food instead of 3D models...
^ ^ ^ This reminds me in a way of Danny Lyon and The Destruction of Lower Manhattan. What I really wanted to mention though is that I actually live in one of these things (high rise jungle). The city government here sort of pays lip service to 3-D modelling but coverage is spotty at best with all sorts of wild standards (hard to follow for a newbie) and bogus servers eg. File-1, File-2, File-3 and zero metadata to help you sort it all. Download the average "Tree Plan" PDF file (which is often number 4) and the first item on the agenda is usually cutting down all the trees! And none of these files talk to each other.
This might sound like griping, but there is a 40 storey tower going up NOW beside the four brown towers in this city graphic. But it does not appear in the graphic!!!!!
The largest proposed (orange-brown) tower is a 52 storey family condominium. Those "annual meetings" are going to be fun because the going trend is not toward local home ownership but foreign investors buying up blocks of apartments to rent out in perpetuity. Believe me after 40 to 50 years the projects have lost a lot of their shine and you get water and power issues when everything is packed so closely together.
These pictures are from a phpBB forum that I happen to operate on the subject; I'm posting from the "small" 17 storey building immediately to the left of the proposed orange-brown ones. The hole in the ground beside me is not referenced, nor is a major demolition (and two more towers by Tenblock!) ond the extreme left. And there is a Chicago style "EL" planned on the right. Bang bang bang, klink klink klink. One of the guys who presided over this stuff is now in charge of the MTA. Ridden that one lately?
One of the largest fresh water lakes on the planet is located about 2 miles to the south, but it's Watertown, N.Y. that gets the "lake effect", not us.
Anyway when you say "urban sprawl" and you show, or model lots of rebar in a tiny area this is what I'm personally dealing with. The corollary is of course the world class dustup that's going on re: spreading the city out ever more, eg. at some point you have to start building on farmland.
One last comment: it looks as though the DAZ forums are now allowing GIF files - that's new I think - but they won't play back animation, at least not through Firefox on Windows 10 which is what I'm using.
Cool thread..reminds me I need to finish up some of the expansions I made for this
Expansions!!!??? Oh please, tell us more!
That kept me busy for a while! It is a useful thread, though I will keep this one going as it is specific to Urban Sprawl 3. Now we know that not only am I enlarging Urban Sprawl 3 but Stonemason is going to join in!
Just for future reference, there is no way air traffic control would allow so many news helicopters that close to each other. Even the Police might struggle to get permission to fly two helicopters within a mile of each other. In cities with heliports it happens out of necessity, but even there they have strict air corridors which the helicopters use and the Police have to avoid. Formation flying is generally for air-shows and military operations only.
My pedantic and obsessive brain couldn't ignore that one, sorry...
Hopefully that's the kind of thing you'd want to know.
The other thing I'm reminded of ^ ^ ^ is Metaworlds. Okay so it's a wide-ranging term involving (just as an example) video games but it can also involves real life modelling, right now.
(Scroll down in the link to where it says "Recent...")
I bumped into this guy at a security conference last year. Riyadh (as in Saudia Arabia) is apparently one of his customers, and he has his hopes set on Toronto.
I found it eerily similar to the movie Minority Report - the guy has these little "crime" symbols popping up all over the place, with each symbol representing a reported crime in progress and I guess you hover the mouse or you right-click for details and what? An A.I. prioritizes your action list (or flight response) based on some... as-yet unspecified criteria. Hopefully in Toronto the action options would be different from what is possible in Riyadh, and the tech guy knows how and when to load the different tapes into the system.
OK, it will be hard to even visit this forum for a few days, and making anything worth posting will be essentially impossible. I have a temporary near-complete paralysis of my right hand, and I am (very) right-handed. Typing this is taking an age, so using Blender is just out of the question until this heals.
Good news is that I am told to expect full function of my right hand to return within a week or two, so I should be back soon.
..that is wild.
...oh?
BTW thank you for The Streets of Old Kyoto. Perfect for the story about my namesake.
Sorry to hear that FA. Hope you recover soon.
Thank you!
The doctor was excessively optimistic so there is no way I will recover full function in my right hand in as little time as she stated, though it is slowly but steadily improving. So despite the struggle I am now doing odd bits of 3D to keep from going crazy. As I am right handed it is a real struggle to get anything done with even a partially paralysed right hand, but as there is little else to do I just take longer than usual to get things done.
OK, here's a comparison with the standard US3 and my expanded version; the same camera position looking at the cinema, the first with standard US3 and the second view with my park added in between the furthest block and the one where the camera is. Both images are UHD (3840x2160) but displayed at 1080p, so you can click on the attachements below to see them at full size.