CatsEyes for Sora

[Ken1171]

If there is no documentation, so be it - I have spent the whole afternoon on top on this to learn it the hard way. I have built a whole new EZ-MATs for DS, now including a nifty "Color Gain" control that is not in the Poser version. The trick was on the kind of math bricks I was using. In Poser we only have one kind, but in ShaderMixer there are SEVERAL, and which one we use is rather critical. I have figured out by trial and error that the kind of math nodes that match the ones in Poser are the RSL "Binary Operation" ones. The others cause all kind of trouble as described above. For some reason, using binary math has stopped the overblown specularity and also the blackened out textures.

By switching all math nodes to binary, I could reduce the number of bricks and get perfect results that match the ones from Poser, and still add new functionality. This version allows changing texture colors, and also control it's intensity independently.

I have tested this on the eyes, and now will proceed to the lips. I can probably reuse the same setup, since I made it quite genetic.

 

[Pendraia]

Glad to see that you got it to work Ken.

 

[Ken1171]

Thank you, Pen! I have finished the preliminary DS EZ-MATs for eyes, lips, nails, and the special case for eyeliners. The bummer is that the shaders won't show in DS previews like they do in Poser. I've watched a video at YouTube where DAZ explains we can't see the results until we render. I am not sure if DS users will understand things work like this. They will set a color, but it won't show until they render. Is this the normal with DS, or just when we use ShaderMixer?

 

[Pendraia]

This is normal with Shader Mixer...

 

[Ken1171]

I've checked the default Dawn skin material in DS, and it's a HUGE ShaderMixer diagram, and it still show Ok on previews. Mine only shows up to the 1st binary math node, and stops there. I hope people will understand when they see it.

 

[Rae134]

I've seen similar with some Iray shaders (I don't know if its related to the shader mixer tho)

 

[Pendraia]

I'm not sure why that would be without looking at the actually scene that you're talking about Ken. Off to my appointment now...

 

[Ken1171]

Poser also used to be like this until version 7 or 8, not being able to display shader nodes in previews. Now it can display real-time shadows and normal maps in previews, so I've got a little spoiled. I will be doing some test renders with the new materials after dinner. In Poser I could use the same shaders in both Firefly and Superfly, so I am wondering if I will be able to do the same with I-ray and 3Delight. Probably not, since I-ray has it's own shaders. In that case I might have to do it all over again with I-ray shaders. >___<

 

[Pendraia]

Given the relative age of the two softwares that gives us hope that eventually we'll get previews...I'm not sure what age of armor did with his shader it does show up in Shadermixer though and I thought that it had been developed in SM also but I might be wrong.

You could try...I'm not sure how it would work the blocks in shader mixer for iray have mdl on them.

 

[RAMWolff]

Looks really streamlined there Ken... good going. Now did you ever figure out the specular issue you mentioned a few posts back?

 

[Ken1171]

@Pendraia I will have to decide if I want to learn I-ray shaders or work on the new outfit. I now realize we have 4 rendering engines to make materials for nowadays. It was very thoughtful of SMS to make FF and SF shaders compatible, and now I have learned to appreciate that even more than I first realized.

@RAMWolff It was apparently caused by using the wrong set of math nodes. The blackened textures and overblown specularity have both stopped as soon as I switched to RSL binary math operators. Like I've mentioned above, Poser has just a single set of math operators, while ShaderMixer has several, and they seem to refer to different shader languages, as indicated at the brick bottoms. In Poser we have only 2 kinds of root bricks (FF and SF), but there is half a dozen in ShaderMixer. Depending on what root bricks are on scene when we start building a shader, there are some bricks that are compatible, and many others that are not. I think this requires us to understand the particulars of different shader languages like MDL and RSL. This is because ShaderMixer uses low level bricks that require deeper technical expertise on what's under the hood with Pixar Renderman and NVIDIA IRAY. This becomes more evident when we look at the online documentation, and we are sent to very technical white papers on shader programming languages. So not only Iray and 3Delight have incompatible shader bricks, but ShaderMixer also works in a low level environment. Add this to the usual absent or incomplete documentation, and we end up with something quite user unfriendly.

 

[Ken1171]

Enough of ShaderMixer theories and diagrams - let's go for renders! ^____^

From left to right, those are some combinations of EZ-MAT eye colors, lipstick and eyeliners, now in DAZ Studio! The last one on the right was an Iray render with EZ-MATs to see what happens. All shader nodes are ignored, and the materials revert back to the original. At least nothing breaks, but EZ-MATs won't work with Iray until I make a special version for it using its own shader bricks. This is when you will notice the eyeliner is not part of the face texture, but instead added to the face with a mask and EZ-MATs.

The way EZ-MATs work in DS is the same as in Poser, and I have simplified the dials interface to hide all the naughty bits people won't use. In the image below you can see the 2 EZ-MAT dials for the lips: one for the color, and one to control the color gain (brightness). It shows the purple lipstick I have picked for the first example on the left. Just pick a color - it can be anything you like, and it will blend nicely with the textures. No need to be tied up to fixed textures anymore!

The default material only includes the EZ-MAT eyeliners. I have included presets to add it to the eyes, lips, and nails separately. This is because EZ-MATs will NOT show in DS previews. You have to render to see the effects. It does show in Poser previews, but not in DS, so I didn't include it in the default DS materials. It looks better on previews, and people can add it where they need it. ^^

 

[RAMWolff]

Well that's kinda sad that the iRay EZ Mats don't work. You would think with it being the Shader Mixer node set up it would work under any rendering engine. Have you tried simply converting the node set up to iRay within the Surfaces to see what happens using the !Iray Uber Base.duf?

 

[phdubrov]

Things doesn't works this way. In ShaderMixer you can't mix Iray(MDL) and 3DL(RSL) nodes, even math nodes are different.

 

[Ken1171]

@RAMWolff I haven't tried Iray shaders because I can't make sense of them yet. I can't even figure out how to load a texture file with MDL bricks. I am sort of familiar with RSL bricks because they look like the ones from Renderman we use in Poser. It's a different implementation, but the same shader language. Now Iray is completely different, and there is no documentation as usual. When I looked at the DAZ docs online, only Renderman shaders are mentioned, while Iray MDL doesn't exist.

@phdubrov I was thinking the same thing, until I looked at the materials that ship with Dawn SE in DS4. Take a look, and you will see RSL and MDL bricks all mixed up in the shame shader, and we CAN render it under either 3Delight or Iray. Give it a try and see for yourself. I did it this morning.

 

[RAMWolff]

Ah, Now I get it. So MDL is iRay and RSL is 3Delight. OK. Still sucks that there is no way to auto convert!

 

[phdubrov]

@phdubrov I was thinking the same thing, until I looked at the materials that ship with Dawn SE in DS4. Take a look, and you will see RSL and MDL bricks all mixed up in the shame shader, and we CAN render it under either 3Delight or Iray. Give it a try and see for yourself. I did it this morning.

Oops Interesting.
We will see (MDL, RSL) nodes for work with textures if we speak about default Iray shader. And yes, we can more or less successfully render anything both in Iray and 3DL, question is in quality of results. But we can't connect pure MDL with pure RSL node — ShaderMixed doesn't allow it.
But! We can do almost what we do in P11 - we can have 2 surfaces in one shader, and with renderer change one or other will be active. (Added Iray surface in AoA DawnSE shader successfully, but can't connect pure RSL image maps with it.) Promising!

 

[Ken1171]

@RAMWolff Yes, RSL = Renderman Shader Language, and MDL = NVIDIA Material Definition Language. They define the programming languages used to create these bricks. RSL is used in Firefly and 3Delight, since they both share the same Renderman open implementation. But MDL is completely different and I am not familiar with it.

@phdubrov I am not familiar with MDL, but in my experiment above, MDL has just ignored the RSL nodes when it finds them. But it does go through the entire nodes network until it finds something it understands, which in this case were the texture maps. Everything else was silently ignored, which is good, because it doesn't break anything. This means we can put a zillion bricks in between, and MDL will ignore everything until it finds a node it recognizes.

 

[Pendraia]

I've been saying for a while that many of the shaders for Iray have probably got more nodes than they need. I had a play with the uber shader one day simply changing things and removing things trying to work out what did what and many times nothing changed.

So far I haven't seen any videos or documentation for using the mdl bricks. At least with the 3dl bricks we did. I initially got interested because I thought we might get some curve bricks for fur and eventually we did via LAMH get curves but the only thing that we got for curves was for shaderbuilder which I've never fully understood.

Could you replace the rsl bricks with their equivalent MDL ones?

It's only a small network that your using it should be relatively easy to try...

 

[RAMWolff]

Really should be a switch like Poser has to make content creation a little less techie for those of us that are more pron to that sort of brain melt down stuffs!