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./QUOTE]
I admit there is perhaps a bigger learning curve especially as the documentation is somewhat lacking. There is more than there used to be
Shader Mixer [Documentation Center]
and I'm not sure if it's been updated since they added the mdl bricks.
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.
In the shader mixer tab go to Edit/Preferences and you can change that by ticking the boxes. I have both boxes ticked. The two main root bricks for doing textures would be a surface brick either the 3Delight or MDL one for Iray and the displacement brick. The others are from memory for creating things like lights and cameras. The baker one looks interesting...I must have a play with it.
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 don't like the problem with the previews and find it annoying also. So far I haven't had a lot of crashes with it. In fact I haven't had any...but I'm still on 4.8
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.
From the sounds of it you have the basics and know how to use the mixer bricks so my tutorials on that and double sided materials would probably not be useful to you as they're fairly basic. There are some people at Daz who are really good with shadermixer. If you posted to my thread in the DS section for Shader Mixer they would probably see it and respond. It's a sticky from memory.
