Looking For A Daz Partner

[Enchantment]

Hello,

Am useless with daz. So am wondering if anyone who can use daz would like to partner up with me to make character products for both poser and daz.

 

[Seliah (Childe of Fyre)]

Are you working with custom sculpted morphs, or dial-spun characters?

 

[Enchantment]

custom

 

[Ken1171]

I can handle morphs, but I am not very good with DAZ materials. If you make complex shaders in Poser, replicating them in DS, which is completely incompatible shader-wise, can be a pain.

 

[CajunBeauty]

I can work in Daz but all I may be able to help with is Iray materials and Daz presets.

 

[Enchantment]

Am looking for someone who can make poser morph into daz morph and make daz shaders

 

[Ken1171]

The morphs part is Ok, but the shaders are a pain because of the incompatibilities. Even bump maps are different from Poser. The only thing that can be reused are the texture files (diffuse maps). Everything else needs to be redone.

 

[Enchantment]

I can understand the shaders being a pain . I was hoping everything could be redone in daz. Right now my shader for daz are basic they don't look as good as my poser shaders. So i am looking for a partner who could do redo shader.
but everything would be 50%50

 

[Ken1171]

I can do DS materials in general, but I haven't figured out SSS and i-ray MDL shaders yet (undocumented). I have the impression DAZ3D is keeping the MDL documentation locked in private forums that can only be accessed by their own vendors. The current online documentation is a blank page pointing to NVidia's MDL programming white papers, which is useless to us.

 

[Enchantment]

I don't mind if you can't do SSS & Iray i can't Am just happy to have someone who can work daz better then i can.

 

[BMK]

I can do DS materials in general, but I haven't figured out SSS and i-ray MDL shaders yet (undocumented). I have the impression DAZ3D is keeping the MDL documentation locked in private forums that can only be accessed by their own vendors. The current online documentation is a blank page pointing to NVidia's MDL programming white papers, which is useless to us.

MDL has its own official website here, that has everything about it: NVIDIA Material Definition Language Handbook

 

[Pendraia]

Welcome BMK and thanks for the link!

 

[Ken1171]

Hi BMK, and welcome to the HW3D forums! That's the link DAZ is providing for MDL, and it points to NVIDIA's web site, where they present a technical white paper for MDL as a programming language. It's a guide for programmers and technical artists to help them build their shaders through MDL coding. The language structure is very similar to C++, and the object oriented part uses international ECMA Script standard, which I am very familiar with.

The MDL bricks in DS were created using MDL as a programming language, so that info should be very useful for DAZ3D programmers, but not so much for us a artists.

 

[BMK]

Welcome BMK and thanks for the link!

Thank you. I'm still very new to things at Hivewire.

Hi BMK, and welcome to the HW3D forums! That's the link DAZ is providing for MDL, and it points to NVIDIA's web site, where they present a technical white paper for MDL as a programming language. It's a guide for programmers and technical artists to help them build their shaders through MDL coding. The language structure is very similar to C++, and the object oriented part uses international ECMA Script standard, which I am very familiar with.

The MDL bricks in DS were created using MDL as a programming language, so that info should be very useful for DAZ3D programmers, but not so much for us a artists.

Actually, what is in there is the entire secret of the shader. Please check out Playing around with Iray MDL
This covers the basics of how the MDL in the shader file and the brick works hand in hand. I recreated that for myself, and both need to be combined, or you even can write them completely in programming language.

 

[Ken1171]

That's exactly what I was talking about. If the basics of MDL includes programming the bricks with the code from the white papers, then it's not for everyone. I have been a programmer for many years, and when I look at the MDL language, it reminds me of OOP structures from C++, mixed with LISP, which I am familiar with. But what about everybody else who's not a programmer? Wasn't the idea of having visual drag and drop bricks so people don't have to write code?

From what I understood from the NVIDIA page, the power of MDL resides on writing the shaders in code. But if all the basic building blocks exist as bricks, we can do the same with visual drag and drop bricks in Shader Mixer. I have watched the entire 1 hour presentation of the MDL programming language, and it looks quite good. I just wonder if the DS community is willing to become programmers. If DAZ made the MDL bricks properly, we should be able to do the same without coding.

An example of that is how we can create entire programs with drag and drop bricks using UML tools, and this can be applied to any programming language.

 

[Pendraia]

Thanks that thread looks like a good starting point. I remember Yacomo's global illumination thread when Shader Mixer first came out. Let's hope this thread is just as useful.

 

[BMK]

Ken1171, I doubt that the DS community per se wants to become programmers. I know I don't want to programm. I mean, I have to learn the basics for Java, so I can understand the error messages the system throws for work (doing second level support), but that makes my head spin like crazy....
But from what I've seen, "plug and play" (meaning, buy shader presets others made) is what is happening.

 

[Pendraia]

I think the problem for Ken is that he makes content so he needs to be able to create his own presets for items he makes BMK. Shadermixer doesn't need programming skills but it does require some understanding of certain terms and how to use the bricks. It would be nice if there was more documentation.