General Daz Studio question

[Ricktor]

Ok , just to start off I better disclose that I have probably only played around in Daz Studio for around 3 or 4 hours doing some tutorials and such. Then I got myself in trouble by looking into the Daz Studio store. I kinda put the cart before the horse and spent a lot of money. But anyway on to my question.... when developing a game, and you are working to create specific scene, I understand how you can make your characters or (buy some out of the box), along with assets to use as backdrops, but how do go about "filling in the holes" where you can't find pre-made assets. Here is my example I was trying to create. I wanted my scene to be a man and a women talking along side of a dented up car(crashed) that just hit a deer. I have the characters, a country road, a car....but not crashed, and I could even find a deer, but it was just a very alive standing upright deer, lol. Hard to create the story I wanted with a "alive" deer, and a bright new car. If this makes any sense at all.

My question is....how do the Developers do such a great job of telling their stories and creating these great looking renders that fit the story exactly?

 

[FeaturedOn]

You could do a few things, but I'm not one who renders often.

Once you place the deer into the scene you could attempt to manipulate it, and any limbs, through posing tools to be partially under the vehicle or obscured by some nearby roadside debris (bushes, branches, etc.).

You could render the scene in stages and then manipulate them in Photoshop. There's a tutorial of what I mean with HDRI here,

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. This would involve posing the whole scene and setting up a camera. Deselecting assets from a render, and then making multiple renders as "slices" of the scene. You could then deform or damage the car or deer in Photoshop. Many stages and lots of work. Not recommended for beginners.

You could also leave the imagination of the audience to fill in the blanks. Render with the damaged section of the car out of view, cut to a low shot from the body of the deer with the expressions of characters in the background, etc. The movie Get Out does this scene very well. Blurry deer body thrown above the hood of the car, fake blood on the headlight, one broken mirror, & a very fake deer.

 

[osanaiko]

Depending on how much damage to the car you want to show, the Mesh Grabber (look in the Asset Releases) would probably let you make some dents.

Then if you used image editor and modified the Diffuse map for the surface of the car to add blood, dirt, and paint damage, it could come out pretty well.

For the broken deer body, the same technique with mesh grabber and the rotate add-on might work. There's blood and guts overlay geoshell shaders for human skin, and many of the animal models are actually morphed from a human base, so you could maybe use that over the deer material. Otherwise just edit the bitmaps as above.

If you feel a bit more confident and want to try learn some modelling, you could also export the model of car and/or deer to an OBJ" file, import into blender (free) and move the vertexes around. Just don't delete or merge any vertexes, because that breaks the UV maps and then it's way more trouble to get the materials skin to work again. Once you've mangled then model enough, export again as OBJ and load into Daz as "updated base geometry". Or import to daz and apply the same materials as the original model - possible would need to copy/paste the materials in the scene.

 

[mickydoo]

You write the story to fit the renders, not the other way around. In your case set up the scene with a man and a woman near a car that has just hit a deer. Because you have not the exact assets to show this you write the dialog to fit the scene assets you do have. You have to insinuate you have hit a deer and/or use clever camera angles. Maybe have them at the rear of the car and lay the deer down and have one leg showing. You can fuck around with pre-made objects, find .obj's you can import, or even make your own, but you just end up messing about all day and never get things done, which is fine for one scene, but not the next 10 then the next 10, etc.