Step out of the back door into the heart of an old New York block. NYC Tenement Inner Courtyard recreates the closed rear yard - the light well - of an early-20th-century tenement: 10.5 x 13.5 m of concrete slabs with a yard drain, enclosed by four storeys of common-bond brick with segmental brick arches, bluestone sills and 2-over-2 sash windows, each with a dim room behind it. Four fire-escape systems climb the long walls with platforms, stairs, drop ladders and gooseneck ladders over the parapet, and an L-shaped balcony wraps one corner. A basement areaway with ten steps, a railing and a caged lamp, the rear door with its stoop and canopy, rain leaders, steam pipes with red handwheels, an electrical cabinet, conduits and sagging telephone cables complete the scene. Use it for noir and crime stories, period drama, quiet character moments and city nights.
Load one of eight ready scenes - Full (lived-in, 1920s-30s), Empty (bare architecture), Clean, Used, Grungy (open sashes, tipped ash cans, crates, Aged materials), Night, Wet Night (standing water and reflections) or Modern (post-war dressing with window air conditioners, plastic wheelie bins and trash bags). Every scene comes with 16 cameras - from the Courtyard Hero View and Fire Escape Portrait to Window POV, Top Down and Basement Looking Up.
Six lighting presets set everything in one click: Day, Overcast and Golden Hour use the Iray Sun-Sky for New York; Evening, Night and Wet Night use the product's own evening and night skies so the lamps light the brick. Every lamp has an emissive bulb and a real light; light-group scripts switch two groups of lit windows, the basement light, the rear-door light and the courtyard wall lamps on or off. Wall-visibility scripts hide a whole side - wall, windows, fire escapes, pipes and lamps - for an open camera.
Everything is modular on a 1.5 m grid: wall modules, windows and doors, fire-escape parts and props load separately, and 16 sets merge into an open scene in place, so you can build your own courtyard. Three one-click wear scripts switch between Clean, Used and Aged (fire-escape steel from fresh black paint to rust), with surface options Brick Dark, Paving Grey and Paving Wet. Sashes open, doors open, and repeated pieces are DAZ node instances, which keeps memory use and Iray load down.
What's included
- 8 ready scenes: 01 Full, 02 Empty, 03 Clean, 04 Used, 05 Grungy, 06 Night, 07 Wet Night, 08 Modern (Post-War Dressing) - each with 16 cameras, the lights of the four wall lamps and its lighting.
- 16 sets (merge into the open scene, in place): Courtyard Shell, Fire Escapes, Utilities, Wall Lamps, Windows and Doors (Full, Empty, Clean, Used, Grungy, Modern), Props (Full, Clean, Used, Grungy, Modern), Cameras.
- 71 modules and props: wall modules (straight, windows, fire-escape windows, door, utility, blind, corners, base band, roof line), windows and doors, window dressing (curtains, roller blinds, window AC unit, rooms), fire escape (platform, open-end platforms, corner balcony L / R, stair, drop ladder, gooseneck ladder), ground (paving, drain, basement entrance, rear stoop, canopy), utilities, three wall lamps and props (ash can with lid, wheelie bin, trash bags, pallet, crate, broom, mop, bucket, ladder, roadster bicycle, kitchen chair, metal drum).
- Six lighting presets (Day, Overcast, Golden Hour, Evening, Night, Wet Night) plus the same six as render-settings presets; light groups Window Lights A / B, Basement Light, Rear Door Light, Courtyard Wall Light (on / off).
- Three one-click wear scripts (Clean, Used, Aged) and three surface options (Brick Dark, Paving Grey, Paving Wet), also as material presets for selected items.
- Wall visibility scripts (Front / Left / Right / Back Wall Off, All Walls On) and depth-of-field scripts (Portrait, Fire Escape, Basement, Off).
- Movable parts: lower window sashes (Open), rear and basement door leaves (Door Open), wheelie-bin lid (Open).
- Iray Uber materials on 36 surfaces with base colour, roughness, normal and, where needed, metallic maps (up to 4096 px); two procedural sky HDRIs for the evening and night presets.
- Content Library icons for all 138 files, Smart Content metadata and a detailed read-me.
Dimensions and geometry
Courtyard 10.5 x 13.5 m between the walls; four storeys of 3.25 m above a 1.02 m base band, roof line 14 m, parapet coping 15.1 m; basement areaway 4.25 x 1.25 m, 1.6 m deep with ten steps. Wall modules are 1.5 / 3.0 / 4.5 m wide on a 1.5 m grid. A ready scene has about 650 - 680 nodes, most of them DAZ node instances (70,000 - 155,000 unique facets). Texture files total about 560 MB for all looks; a scene loads only the maps of its current look.
Compatibility and notes
Tested in DAZ Studio 4.24 and DAZ Studio 6 on Windows with NVIDIA Iray, installed from the package into a registered content library (scenes, all 16 sets, all 71 props, lighting, material, light-group and visibility scripts). No figure, plugin or other product is required. The one-click presets are plain DAZ Script (.dsa) files and only change nodes that belong to this product, also next to other NYC Tenement products in the same scene.
The lighting presets change your render settings (Iray environment, sky, tone-mapping exposure). Day, Overcast and Golden Hour use the Iray Sun-Sky, where Iray renders no light nodes - the lamps are lit only in Evening, Night and Wet Night. The courtyard is a deep well, so Golden Hour is set to 17:40, while the sun still reaches the walls.
All scene images are NVIDIA Iray renders (DAZ Studio 6 and DAZ Studio 4.24) of the product installed from the package, lit only by its own lighting presets - no extra lights, no postwork beyond the Iray denoiser; cameras render the store's 4:3 frame. The main image uses a slightly brighter exposure than the Wet Night preset (EV 4.3 instead of 5.5). The modules / props and wall tiles are the product's Content Library icons.
Smart Content metadata is included and structurally validated. The product is available through Content Library without it.
Installation
Merge the Environments, Runtime and Documentation folders of the ZIP into a registered DAZ content library (the ZIP has no enclosing Content folder). Find the product in Environments > AuraVix_Studio > NYC Tenement Inner Courtyard.
Software: Daz Studio 4, Daz Studio 6
