How do you get your backgrounds for 3D render?

[KiaAzad]

For characters, there seem to be ample supply of ready made models to use, and it's easy to tweak a character till it fits what you need. I wonder how you deal with backgrounds?
A game character usually goes to many locations, that means you'll need lots of place models to render backgrounds from. I don't think every one of us have lots of them laying around, and even if we have, they're not exactly usable from game to game. Can't use the same steampunk city setting for your medieval fantasy game. It's not like you can tweak a bedroom into a kitchen, or park either.
Either I'm the only one who doesn't have lots of free time to model a whole city, or there are shortcuts for solo devs that I'm missing. What's your approach?

 

[anne O'nymous]

I wonder how you deal with backgrounds?

It totally depend on the dev.

I remember HopesGaming saying that he spent hours working on the grass for the scenes where Luna goes to buy some weapons with MC. While it's obvious that some other devs clearly use generic HDRIs for their background.
All depend on how good your are at this, how much time you can spend on building a background, and how much money you can spend to buy the assets you'll need for this.

 

[Winterfire]

Either I'm the only one who doesn't have lots of free time to model a whole city, or there are shortcuts for solo devs that I'm missing. What's your approach?

You don't have to model the whole city, but only a portion of it, then give the illusion of depth. In real time, that'd be impostors or low poly, for rendering billboards are still more than fine.

 

[Turning Tricks]

There's really three ways to address it.

1. Complete outdoor environments like

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or

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complete Neighborhood, for example. I've used both in the past. The problem with them is that so many developers use them and players can see that. Also, many of these huge sets are a major drag on your computer and can slow your viewport down to slideshow levels of speed.

2. Use HDRI's. These are super handy for general outdoor backgrounds. And there's even websites out there where you can download many for free and with no copyright restrictions. But they are almost impossible to modify and it can be tricky setting up the camera angles to use them in the best way. Also, they are by nature very generic. So for any custom content, you still have to find a way to layer in what you want, for example.

3. Finally - and I use this a lot myself - you can use Google Maps and make your own HDRI's of almost any public location that a Google car has driven. There's a

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that, even though it's pretty old now, is still a great place to start learning how to do this.

Here's an example I did for one of my scenes. I needed outdoor locations for jogging around New York city. It literally took me more time just moving the pin around and looking at sites then it did for me to actually make the HDRI from this iStreetview dump.

And these homemade HDRI's are also great for random backgrounds for moving vehicles as well (especially since all google maps images are made from roads).. but I've also used them for large green spaces like parks and lawns.

At the end of the day, it's all about priorities. Do you want to spend hours for a background on a few renders that 99.9% of your players won't really appreciate (even if they didn't just CTRL-skip past it) - or would you rather spend those hours on the characters and the story?

(funny thing about this series of renders I did with my MC jogging around New York - I actually had a player recognize his building in one of them, lol!)

 

[KiaAzad]

All depend on how good your are at this, how much time you can spend on building a background, and how much money you can spend to buy the assets you'll need for this.

I used to model some walls, ground, windows, and put an HDRI outside, but I always thought it takes too long and looks bad. There must be an easier way that looks decent.

You don't have to model the whole city, but only a portion of it, then give the illusion of depth. In real time, that'd be impostors or low poly, for rendering billboards are still more than fine.

Modeling the whole city didn't even cross my mind, but now that you've mentioned it, even cubes with building textures on them take a chunk of time. right?

There's really three ways to address it.

An HDRI works for far away details, but my concern is mostly small details that are close to the camera, the wall, fence, furniture and kitchen sink. They have to be modeled and textured.

 

[Winterfire]

Modeling the whole city didn't even cross my mind, but now that you've mentioned it, even cubes with building textures on them take a chunk of time. right?

Cubes are too costly if you are making a VN. It's not real time, meaning that you only need them from a perspective. Quads (So billboards) for distant objects are more than fine.
However, hardly any shot will need the whole view of the town, most of the "CG" are from ground level, so you'll see cars, hallways, and the next few buildings around you.
Meaning you can get away with just creating a few streets, and not the whole city.

 

[anne O'nymous]

However, hardly any shot will need the whole view of the town, most of the "CG" are from ground level, so you'll see cars, hallways, and the next few buildings around you.
Meaning you can get away with just creating a few streets, and not the whole city.

And when you look at enough games, you see the same 20-30 streets popping out a lot. Not always the same part of them, nor from the same angle but, oh surprise, the shop at the right of that render is the same that the one on the left of this render.

 

[MissFortune]

Urban Sprawl by Stonemason is god-tier for this kind of stuff. Lightweight and looks good:




CityScapes, TruForm has some nice stuff, and some clever use of angles with some of the DimensionTheory HDRIs (especially the 8K futuristic one). The idea is that you want to start with a base. Maybe that's a room with a window, or two characters walking along the sidewalk, or something else. You want to build around that. Camera angles, HDRIs, certain assets. I tend to use very tight, heavy DoF shots for scenes that have a lot of city in them. It looks natural enough, but blurred beyond recognition. The other benefit of tight shots is that moving the camera in 10 degrees either direction changes the entire look of the render. Even lighting can drastically alter the appearance of something players have seen dozens of times.



The only shortcut is to remember you don't have to show everything in a scene, nor should you. When you pose models for a shot that's only showing the chest and up, would you pose her toes? The same applies here. The backgrounds are exactly what their name is. The focus of the shot shouldn't be your background (unless intentional), it should be something that highlights the focus of the render itself.

There's a lot that can go into environments, and it's not always easy. But it's easy to overthink and thus overdo.

 

[Turning Tricks]

At the end of the day, most of us are making VISUAL novels. It's about the characters and the story. The background just provides immersion and some context.

Gaussian Blur is our best friend

I used to model some walls, ground, windows, and put an HDRI outside, but I always thought it takes too long and looks bad. There must be an easier way that looks decent.

Invest in some off-site cloud storage and hang on to all those different assets you custom made. You can reuse them and make small changes very easily. Save them as Scene Subsets in DAZ.

 

[AllNatural939]

An HDRI works for far away details, but my concern is mostly small details that are close to the camera, the wall, fence, furniture and kitchen sink. They have to be modeled and textured.

Nope, there's a reason there's such a thing as depth of field. When applied properly, it's part of an artistic expression and you can easily hide details that don't even need to be there. You want to avoid wasting time (remember that a game can contain thousands of images that you'll be rendering one by one) and depth of field is very useful in that regard. The rule is, if it's not really necessary, then it's not necessary, don't think about it any longer and don't waste your time.

The following images were rendered with a crappy PC and with less than 100 iterations, then external Denoiser was applied and a bit of noise was added to camouflage the flat look of the character. The important thing here is actually the background, which is rendered perfectly after a few iterations and therefore the Denoiser doesn't affect it.



Do you think that wall, that pool table, lacks detail? It's a normal 8K HDRI. It could have been perfectly 24K, no joke:

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In the end, you don't like what you see? You apply depth of field...


Same HDRI from another angle, without depth of field.


Zero lighting or color treatment and a regular HDRI at normal resolution... And the best part is that you don't even need an HDRI. Any image you shoot yourself or find on the internet can be used as a background, or incorporated as part of something else, without even the need to create a 3D object to use as a base. In the images, in the world you create, you are God. Do you want to spend time designing a single image for a couple of hours only to have the image in a game and have someone look at it for 5 seconds?
If a character doesn't actually interact with an object, then the object doesn't need to be "real". When you understand that, your life will be much easier.

 

[KiaAzad]

Meaning you can get away with just creating a few streets, and not the whole city.

A street still seems like lots of modeling, maybe it's better to avoid exterior shots as much as possible.

And when you look at enough games, you see the same 20-30 streets popping out a lot.

It would be great if there was a list of those assets, saves newcomers lots of searching time.

I tend to use very tight, heavy DoF shots for scenes that have a lot of city in them

I used that trick for some comics before, for games, my approach is usually having a background and showing different characters over them. Perhaps my approach is better suited to 2D drawn games.

Invest in some off-site cloud storage and hang on to all those different assets you custom made. You can reuse them and make small changes very easily. Save them as Scene Subsets in DAZ.

These days I'm messing with HS2, but I do have plans to install daz again at some point.

Zero lighting or color treatment and a regular HDRI at normal resolution

I was hoping to render some standing characters and backgrounds to avoid having to render a separate image for each scene, but considering everything I'm seeing, I'm warming up to the idea of a render heavy game, and heavy use of HDRI.

 

[Winterfire]

A street still seems like lots of modeling, maybe it's better to avoid exterior shots as much as possible.

Any kind of background, if you make it yourself, is a lot of work (if you want it to be good). That's why Environment artists are a thing, it takes a lot of practice to make something good, even with assets ready.
It's still not unreasonable.

 

[Turning Tricks]

Nope, there's a reason there's such a thing as depth of field. When applied properly, it's part of an artistic expression and you can easily hide details that don't even need to be there. You want to avoid wasting time (remember that a game can contain thousands of images that you'll be rendering one by one) and depth of field is very useful in that regard. The rule is, if it's not really necessary, then it's not necessary, don't think about it any longer and don't waste your time.

The following images were rendered with a crappy PC and with less than 100 iterations, then external Denoiser was applied and a bit of noise was added to camouflage the flat look of the character. The important thing here is actually the background, which is rendered perfectly after a few iterations and therefore the Denoiser doesn't affect it.

View attachment 4375605

Do you think that wall, that pool table, lacks detail? It's a normal 8K HDRI. It could have been perfectly 24K, no joke:

You must be registered to see the links

In the end, you don't like what you see? You apply depth of field...
View attachment 4375614

Same HDRI from another angle, without depth of field.
View attachment 4375615

Zero lighting or color treatment and a regular HDRI at normal resolution... And the best part is that you don't even need an HDRI. Any image you shoot yourself or find on the internet can be used as a background, or incorporated as part of something else, without even the need to create a 3D object to use as a base. In the images, in the world you create, you are God. Do you want to spend time designing a single image for a couple of hours only to have the image in a game and have someone look at it for 5 seconds?
If a character doesn't actually interact with an object, then the object doesn't need to be "real". When you understand that, your life will be much easier.

The reason HDRI's render out on the first couple of iterations is because they are basically just a image file. They are perfectly smooth (on a dome) and scene lighting doesn't effect them (usually they are the lighting source) ...therefore there's like no calculations that DAZ has to do on them. So when you start a render it's like Daz is just dropping a background image file in without you having to add it in Post.

It's because the of 360 degree dome that you need very high resolution HDR's for good detail. those 8K pixels on your HDRI above are spread around that large dome surface. So there's a limit to how close up or detailed it can be. The example I used above was a 16K HDR and I wouldn't want to make it any closer.

Take your examples above.... you could have just made a Plane Primitive and put any image file on the surface. Go to a local pool hall, take a couple of high res shots with your iphone and then use them as a texture on that Plane. That's how easy it is to make a custom background for an indoor shot. It's the outdoor ones that get a lot trickier... at least if you plan on using more than one camera angle. Polyhaven has some amazing HDRI's but they are only as good as the photographer and the resolution of the camera they used.

The other concern with using a lot of HDRI's is that they are huge files. Like a 4K one is 25'ish MB while a 16K one is like 350 MB. That really starts to bloat your DAZ Studio installation. (My DAZ 3D directory is currently over 300 GB and 500k files!)

Everyone has their own preferences. I like to try as many options as possible first, then pick the ones that work best for my workflow.