How to Craft, Populate and Detail Big Cities in DAZ Studio

From the artist that presented our dForce tutorials!

With so many urban assets available at the DAZ 3D store, a natural inclination is to build an urban environment or to even create a whole city! But where do you start to generate such a sophisticated environment?

Richard Schafermeyer takes you through the steps of crafting, populating and detailing a big city. He’ll show you techniques, scripts and assets to construct a busy metropolis.

We’ll be creating from a bird’s eye view as well as down at street level, having a particular emphasise on realism and making a “used” look for the buildings and streets.

Crafting

• Build a road network
• Adding buildings
• Main tools: movement methods, instances, various scripts, scene subsets and layer compositing

Populating

• Populate your streets with people and vehicles
• Main tools: instances, scattering, billboards and use of low-resolution figures

Detailing

• Adding dirt, weathering and a used look to buildings
• Adding and scattering debris elements in a street for realism

Issues to Overcome

• Memory limitations (RAM, VRAM)
• Moving around a large scene
• Creating variety (buildings, people, vehicles)
• Lack of sufficient models for specific era or locale
• Positioning numerous objects
• Making it look lived-in
• Showing infrastructure
• Street elements and visual clutter (e.g., mailboxes, benches, light poles, etc.)

General Techniques to Use

• Instances
• Scene subsets
• PNG layers, Iray Canvases
• Billboards
• Foreground vs background resolution
• Scripts
• Kitbashing

Viewing a Big City

• Bird’s eye view – see full scope of a city
• Drive through
• Street scene with big city showing in background
• Vignettes – Implied City

Handling Rendering for the Big City Scene

Just Added! Bonus teaching points!

• How to use Sketchup models that give an increase in building types available
• Animation for vehicles (and groups of vehicles) in the city

About the presenter : Richard Schafermeyer (rgcincy)

Rich Schafermeyer is a long-time 3D artist and programmer. He got his start with the original Poser and Bryce 3D. In 2001, he wrote his first 3D modeler that evolved into the still available Shape Magic. He began to use Daz Studio in 2012. With a research and engineering background, the physics of dForce grabbed his attention! He decided it would be helpful to others if he shared his learnings and has frequently done so in the DAZ forums.