Creating Billboards in Daz Studio with Billboard Builder

hello everyone in this episode i'm going to show you how you can create your own billboards with the billboard builder plug-in in das studio i've explained in a previous episode how you can do this from scratch with something like photoshop or any other graphics application that allows you to create an opacity mask or cutout opacity mask with an external graphics tool but if you don't have such a tool then the billboard builder plugin is a really good alternative here's what it looks like it's on the dash store there's going to be a link in the description to this product it's currently on sale as i'm recording this might not be on sale when you watch this video if it's one of those things it isn't actually just one product it's two products so it requires the c66 graphics plugin and that is the underlying library that makes graphics calculations possible so several scripts on the store require it to do enhanced calculations and this is one of them so you need that installed and then you can install billboard builder and then this is going to work let me show you how to do it this is the scene i had going earlier this is the one with the army of bull walks that i've made the photoshop way i'm going to go and delete that whole group of instances and we have only one bull walk left here and i'm actually gonna delete him as well because uh yeah we just we're gonna we're gonna create this guy from scratch in my previous video i had already rendered this guy so i'm gonna use the same picture again all i'm going to do is start the billboard builder plugin if you're using smart content then make sure filter by content is disabled and head over to the utilities section where you can find billboard builder double click on it and it only has one usable icon here which is this one the billboard builder and you double click it and then this little window comes up very very handy little tool it's like a standalone little application inside dash studios it's really really nice and well thought out up here you can load one or two images so the idea is that if you had rendered a png out then this is all you need and that's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna click load and then just go and create just go load up my bulwark number one that's the one that i had rendered out and that is really all you need because it already has transparency we don't need an additional alpha image if you had a jpeg image that doesn't have an alpha channel then you can create your own mask from that and load it in as an alpha so the plugin gives you that option it needs an output directory where to save stuff so you need to set that let's go and put that on the desktop as well in my billboards directory here select that folder and then we're kind of set up here this option here is kind of interesting we talked about the shadow implications and if your image doesn't have a ground shadow at all you can just go disable that my image has a ground shadow and i need this option enabled and what this does is actually really clever it adds this kind of blur mask on the outside here it's a bit like a vignette and that's kind of a soft cut off where this shadow here that we talked about is going to be blurred out you can set how wide the blur radius is so anything that's gray here that'll be blurred out but you can make that wider if you want or less wide if you want so in my case i probably don't want it to encroach on my character because otherwise he will be he will start to blur out where his eyes are and i don't really want to do that so the default is 30 and that works quite well but it really depends on the shadow that you have there as i said before it's probably best to keep that to a minimum so that these lines that we cut off aren't immediately visible and that's really almost all you need to do there is a thing that lets you hear preview the alpha blur result so this is what it'll look like so we can see a little bit of cut off here and i'm okay with it it's just a demo it's fine but the most important point is down here the show anchor pivot point so we had to set up our pivot point manually but billboard bitter lets you do this in this plugin which is kind of cool so that's down here you enable this and then you see that pivot point and then you can see the anchor x and y offset so x is fine in my case but y needs to be moved up a little bit so that it's been kind of between his feet in my case i suppose i could also move it slightly further over to the left or to the right i think i was okay here with the default here so 0 is fine if your image happens to be framed up and it's not centered you can take care of that here with image x and y offset just as a demo as you do that you move the image so if you haven't framed it up perfectly you can just go and do that with billboard builder that's kind of cool and then that's almost all we need there's a type here that lets you create your billboard character as a default there's also botanic and other so if i understand this correctly the characters if you just put the regular render onto the surface as we did in the previous video then they can appear a little bit dark so you can either combat that with color corrections or you can let billboard builder handle that so with this the characters are going to be slightly brightened up and they're going to look slightly more natural botanic is the opposite way around that looks a little bit too bright if you use botanical backgrounds like trees and plants and all that so that makes a little bit darker and other is basically a middle value between the two try them out and see what you think there's also before i forget there is a manual that you can read if you click this button then the browser tab comes open and it explains all these settings to you which is really cool what i find really exciting now is that you go and hit create billboard and it will go and create the relevant images for you but it also goes and creates the image plane for you and puts it directly into the center of the scene this is kind of cool so we can go and close billboard builder now and here is my bull walk pretty much like i had made him from scratch earlier and you can do the same things with him that we did earlier it's called bull walk billboards that's kind of cool and my pivot point is exactly where it needs to be it's all just kind of set up for me which is really really cool in seconds and i didn't even need something like photoshop so it's very cool so once again you can head over to create yourself some instances and make you know an army of bull walks if you like there they are all from that one billboard it's kind of cool that's billboard builder in a nutshell it's an extremely handy super simple plugin that makes your life a lot easier if you're building a lot of billboards and a lot of crowd scenes or anything that requires a lot of objects in the scene that would otherwise be too expensive to render like trees foliage crowd characters buildings all that sort of thing tons of cars and the sky's the limit have fun with it and i hope i will see you in the next video take care bye-bye [Music] you

Channel: The WP Guru

Views: 2,228

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Id: QvKw5PQfXy4

Length: 6min 55sec (415 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 03 2022