Adding rooms in DAZ

[jh0312]

Hi guys,

I'm just wondering, can I add rooms with doors into my scene? There are lots of room assets and I want to combine them. Like, I want to make a house with x living room asset and there will be a door leading to y bathroom asset, and so on.

And some little questions
1- How can I add weather or city pics to windows?
2- How can I activate the mirrors in the scene? They look grey when I render the scene.

Thank you.

 

[Rich]

Hi guys,

I'm just wondering, can I add rooms with doors into my scene? There are lots of room assets and I want to combine them. Like, I want to make a house with x living room asset and there will be a door leading to y bathroom asset, and so on.

Yes, you can do this. Combining assets from different packages is sometimes referred to as "kitbashing."

The first thing you need to consider, however, is that there's usually no reason to have all the different rooms loaded simultaneously. A scene in the living room isn't going to show anything of the upstairs bedroom, so there's no reason to put them together in the same Daz file - all you're doing is taking up RAM and VRAM without showing anything extra.

But if you have a situation where you have to show one room, and open door, and a glimpse into another, then yes, you can load two different room scenes, and drag them into the relationship that you need with one another. Sometimes this means you have to hide a wall on one of the halves or something like that, but it can be made to work.

And some little questions
1- How can I add weather or city pics to windows?

Several different methods. One is that you can render a scene of what should be outside the window, then create a primitive plane just outside the window and put the scene you rendered on it as a texture. (Think of building a billboard just outside the window.)

Another is to use an HDRI. There are lots of these that show scenery, etc. Any views outside the window would then "see" whatever is in the HDRI. (Basically, the HDRI creates a distant background, so any ray that exits the window will end up on the HDRI.)

2- How can I activate the mirrors in the scene? They look grey when I render the scene.
Thank you.

You need to apply an appropriate shader to the surface of the mirror to make it reflective. One common problem is that many of the interior sets you'll find floating around were designed with the 3Delight renderer in mind, and don't convert perfectly to iRay.

There are "mirror shaders" available, but there's a built-in one that works pretty well.

Assuming you're using iRay, if you go (in the Content pane) to:

Shader Presets >> Iray >>Daz Uber

you'll find a collection of shader presets. The "Metal - Nickel" or "Metal - Silver" presets work well as a mirror. If you apply this to the surface that should be a mirror, that will get you started. Specifically:

1) Click on the mirror
2) Under the "Surfaces" tab, locate the portion of the mirror that is supposed to be reflective (as opposed to the frame around it, for example) and click on it.
3) Double click on the "Metal - Nickel" shader under Shader Presets >> Iray >>Daz Uber

You'll see something reflective, but not perfectly so. Then:

4) Find the "Glossy Roughness" setting, and change it to 0.0
5) Find the "Glossy Reflectivity" setting, and change it to 1.0

Voila - a mirror!

Just as a 'frinstance, here is:

1) The "Brooke" character
2) Standing on a primitive plane that's had the Nickel renderer applied with the two setting changes mentioned
3) With a "woods" HDRI in the background, giving you an idea as to what might be "outside the window"



Be aware that as soon as you put a mirror into your scene, it will increase the amount of time your scene will take to render, since there are additional "bounces" that Daz has to calculate.

Hope that helps!

 

[OhWee]

Rich pretty much covered it. A couple of things...

Be aware if you combine two room sets into the same scene, that this will increase your scene memory, so a lot of people usually just 'show' one room or the other when rendering. This can slow down your render times, and in some cases can result in a scene not fitting in the graphics card memory if using Iray...

You can use primitive planes and cubes to 'attach' two room sets to each other, and then copy/paste the textures from a walls, floor, etc. of one room and apply it to the primitives - essentially you are building new walls, etc. This requires a bit of work, but can look quite nice when you are done with practice. Say if you were attaching a dorm room to an apartment. Sometimes the 'door wall' of a set is a separate item, so you can duplicate and then reposition said door and surrounding wall to make a new 'door wall' , after hiding the original 'non-door' wall of course. Mainly, you'd want to do this if say you wanted to do a 'doorway' shot where you are looking into said dorm room from the living room of the apartment...

And finally, yeah

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has a few 'skies' that you can use for backgrounds. There are some other free HDRI sites out there as well.

As Rich said, the nice thing about HDRIs is that they also provide light, which does tend to look rather natural, so you can make do with fewer or even no other lights. These can look great outside the window or of that room or apartment you are using, and if your apartment, etc. has multiple windows from multiple directions, yeah HDRIs are well suited for that.

 

[jh0312]

Thank you so much for your answers! They are very helpful for a noob like me.

Just for making it clear, I should use primitive planes in white box set (I don't know if the name is correct. I mean room assets without textures,colors etc.) for make my own doors and walls, right? Then simply load the textures on them.

 

[OhWee]

Thank you so much for your answers! They are very helpful for a noob like me.

Just for making it clear, I should use primitive planes in white box set (I don't know if the name is correct. I mean room assets without textures,colors etc.) for make my own doors and walls, right? Then simply load the textures on them.

Ideally, you'll want to re-use a door and doorway that's already in a set, if you are lucky enough to have a set with separated walls. You can also duplicate a set, and hide every other wall using a couple of different methods (geometry editor, or just hide the wall if it has a visibility option) etc. to just get that one wall you need for that new doorway.

Primitive planes and cubes are best used to build basic walls. Cubes may work a bit better, as you can adjust the 'thickness' of a wall using one of the scaling options, using the other two scalars (x, y, z) to adjust the length and/or width of a wall. You can also use multiple cubes to build the wall in sections (say left side of doorway, right side of doorway, and above doorway), and also use them to fill gaps in the floor, etc.

For more involved work, you could always try using Hegagon (i.e. export set, re-import after editing in Hegagon), but I find that this sometimes messes up the texture assignments. Hence why I prefer just working inside of Daz for something this 'simple'.

 

[MaxCarna]

I use primitive cubes, you need at least one door prop to complete your scenes. If the door of the "complete scenario" can't be detached, you better make it invisible and use the same door in the both rooms.

HRDI is the best way, but there is an alternative that is using backdrops like this:

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If you can build your own, if you have any image editor that work with transparencies. It is basically a plane primite with the photo as texture and the "sky" transparent. To make it curved, you can use a cylinder, letting the bigger area transparent.

 

[Rich]

There are also several "Room Creator" packages for Daz that have lots of room components that you can assemble as you please.

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(Most of these are available "in the wild")