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CatsEyes for Sora
- Thread starter Ken1171
- Start date
It's the parts/pieces which make up a DS shader. I never really got into it when I was using DS all the time, and the only time I WAS successful at it, was for a shadow catcher.
If you've ever seen a screenshot of a Poser shader setup, each of the node palettes would be akin to DS shader Bricks, though they don't necessarily look at all alike.
If you've ever seen a screenshot of a Poser shader setup, each of the node palettes would be akin to DS shader Bricks, though they don't necessarily look at all alike.
I was going to show you a screen grab. Got caught up playing around and it froze my DS. So had to start it over. Now I know why I never mess with that... it's buggy... STILL, at least on my system. Can't even figure out where to put an image. Looked under that area in the interface, clicked on the Tile and couldn't find. Then messed with the Shader Builder... crashed my DS so it's a no go for me! lol
I just looked it up and my head exploded (like it does when I've seen people attach screen shots here, which kinda scared me off poser because I though it was it was showing the materials settings, you know where you see the diffuse texture and change glossy etc now I know that its something different maybe I'll give poser a go 
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It seems like Shader Mixer is an early attempt to make a Material Room inside DS, but the sheer size of the interface seems impractical, and the node connections seem less intuitive. There doesn't seem to be a connection between what material is selected in the scene, and the one we are editing in Shader Mixer. It's really confusing.
I know there is a tutorial covering this somewhere, and I remember I tried it before, but got discouraged in the 1st try. Got discouraged on the 2nd try too. It's cool that we can zoom in and out the nodes, but if we do that, the nodes become unreadable, which kinda defeats its own purpose.
I wonder if I will be able to replicate the Poser shaders in DS using this.
I know there is a tutorial covering this somewhere, and I remember I tried it before, but got discouraged in the 1st try. Got discouraged on the 2nd try too. It's cool that we can zoom in and out the nodes, but if we do that, the nodes become unreadable, which kinda defeats its own purpose.
I wonder if I will be able to replicate the Poser shaders in DS using this.
I'm hoping in DS 5 there will be some good improvements. I just stick to the Surfaces tab and accomplish allot more there. I think, if your using iRay you can do more there than in 3Delight. Of course if you load up one of the 3Delight advanced shaders it reveals allot more nodes to work from too!
Honestly, I don't think DAZ would shoot themselves in the foot doing drastic changes. I know that all the plugins and scripts will have to recompiled but other than that hopefully, aside from added functionality and new shiny toys, DS should work as expected.
Hi Pen, I am trying to learn Shader Mixer first. Most of my documentation for SM are referring to how it used to work in DS3, which is the typical from DAZ. DS3 tutorials for SM have proven useless, since bricks have changed. I have now managed to understand the basics and even managed to replicate EZ-MATs, but it takes MANY times more bricks than it does in Poser. For example, a simple color math in Poser contains all the possible color operations in a single brick, while in DS we have to create separate bricks for each one. Another example is that a color math node in Poser already contains built-in color nodes, while in DS we have to create them separately. This alone increases considerably the number of bricks necessary to do the same operation, and the SIZE of the Shader Mixer interface is SO LARGE that it's like solving a jigsaw puzzle while looking at it from a telescope.
I also find the SM bricks design counter-intuitive. In Poser and 3DSMAX, the root node is on the right, and we build shaders to the left. In DS, Shader Mixer's root node is on the left, and we build shaders to the right. The very notion of a "root" node is different in SM because it uses different roots for colors and bump/displacement/normal maps, which is different from what I have seen in ANY other 3D applications.
Not to mention Shader Mixer seems unstable. Building shaders with SM takes longer because we need so many more bricks, and the more we add, the more difficult it is to look at the shader because of the giant interface. Yesterday I was accomplishing something with a complex shader, when at some point DS crashed and everything was lost. So working with SM takes longer, and the longer it takes, the more likely DS will crash (Rich had already warned me about it). There is also the fact that SM brick previews are disabled (blank) if rendering is set to iRay.
I think I understood how SM works, and I have been able to do what I want so far, except that the graphs can get large pretty quickly, and DS keeps crashing for no reason during the process. DS has been stable for rigging and morphing in general, but SM has proven quite unstable.
I also find the SM bricks design counter-intuitive. In Poser and 3DSMAX, the root node is on the right, and we build shaders to the left. In DS, Shader Mixer's root node is on the left, and we build shaders to the right. The very notion of a "root" node is different in SM because it uses different roots for colors and bump/displacement/normal maps, which is different from what I have seen in ANY other 3D applications.
Not to mention Shader Mixer seems unstable. Building shaders with SM takes longer because we need so many more bricks, and the more we add, the more difficult it is to look at the shader because of the giant interface. Yesterday I was accomplishing something with a complex shader, when at some point DS crashed and everything was lost. So working with SM takes longer, and the longer it takes, the more likely DS will crash (Rich had already warned me about it). There is also the fact that SM brick previews are disabled (blank) if rendering is set to iRay.
I think I understood how SM works, and I have been able to do what I want so far, except that the graphs can get large pretty quickly, and DS keeps crashing for no reason during the process. DS has been stable for rigging and morphing in general, but SM has proven quite unstable.
The one thing I learned about DS is that you don't have to do it that way. I was very confused by that as well when I was trying to figure out some materials there recently. In the Shader Mixer, go to the Edit menu and Preferences. There's an option there that will let you put the workflow in the opposite direction so it will match what you are used to from Poser.