Any way to use Dirt Shader in Iray?
Oso3D
Posts: 14,888
I have http://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-dirt-shaders and really like it... great procedural way to add complex texture to objects.
It doesn't, of course, work in Iray.
Other than using some of the masks to sort of add dirt to surfaces, anyone know if there is a way to translate the shader into... Irayese?
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I don't think so. If I recall correctly you can't open it in shader mixer so no way to try and convert it over to an Iray primary shader. I would like to hope that it and several other similar types of shaders will at some point (SOON) be converted over by the creators.
As nice as the 'Iray' stuff looks (although, as I understand it, it basically works just like Reality), the fact that it causes so many shader effects to be obsolete is going to be a big problem.
Think it also has the same problems as Reality when it comes to skydomes, too. If so, that's going to be an even bigger problem for those of us who need to do night and space-theme renders.
All you need is good night and space HDRI and to turn on the draw dome. I know I have seen at least one lovely freebie space one out there.
Actually, a night sky dome is easy*. Just make sure all the lighting is inside, and make the dome have no glossy effects and emit for stars.
A lot of regular shaders work fine. I'm actually happy I have my metal/wood shader pack -- the metal shaders aren't quite as useful, but the wood ones are fantastically great.
* Edit to add: It's the daytime/clouds domes that are hard, because you want sunlight and so on and can't really use the sun lighting.
Well, that was the offered solution for Reality, but I could only find one for space - in very low-resolution - at HDR Labs. None for night. Lots of them for day! But many of my own scenes are set at night or in space.
Of course, if all our skydomes do actually function in Iray, then it's got a huge advantage over Reality, that is for certain. :)
EDIT: That sounds like a solution to help make normal skydomes work with it, Timmins? If so, that's great!
Metals do convert over pretty poorly because of the metacity (Is that even the right word?) slider. What I have been doing for metals that have a texture map is simply apply an Iray metal over that and retain the texture mapping. It works reasonably well for most of them till we get some new shaders.
Yes, Khory... I've converted a few and did a few things, like for a 'dinged up' metal surface put the bump map in the metallicity. It works reasonably well -- it's just that maps for metal aren't as 'sexy' or unique as, say, wood patterns.
Xenomorphine: Here's a quick experiment... just took some space image I grabbed online and made it the emission map for a big sphere around the creature (ship, whatever it is)
Mind you, that image doesn't really do much with the space background -- as far as anyone could tell, it could have been just added in post.
But if I had more reflective stuff, it'd be more obvious.
Space images...
https://www.eso.org/public/usa/images/eso0932a/
(the 4k TIFF will work for both lighting AND a background image, but not for really close work).
...or daytime with where strong shadows are desired I tried a number of HDRI's, and not only do the shadows diffuse too quickly with more distance from the ground plane, the"sun" often seems dimmer as if it is being filtered through a high cloud deck. Several I used appeared to have too strong of a blue colour channel for anything that was in shadow.
Another issue, is sun elevation. In HDRI's this is fixed and cannot be changed without having the backdrop "listing" to one side or the other. I would really love (and pay for) a set of HDRI spheres set up similar to the old Azure Skies for LDP2 that worked with UE, where each sky sphere had four or five different sun elevations and the "sun"casts more defined shadows (like the Iray Sun/Sky option) instead of diffuse ones..
...I have the Shades of Life - Urban Constructs which is render dependent (adjustments to the tiling size and offset do not show in the OpenGL viewport, only in the finished render), and it works fine in Iray.
Got a look at the shader at the weekend and it's ShaderMixer, so it will depend on how many of the bricks used in it are dual renderer.
Was there ever a workaround to use this in Iray? Or at least bake the shader into the map to use it as a regular texture in Iray?
I ended up making my own shaders to do this. It's not exactly the same but in the ballpark.
https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-dirt-shaders
Bumping this to see if there's been any update or advance on this.
Been reading a few threads about this shader and trying to get THIS SHADER or something like it over for iray.
I have a bunch of other dirt shaders.
Including this guy: https://www.daz3d.com/a-touch-of-dirt-for-iray
The Stonemason one seems to work a certain way and do a particular thing.
I'm trying to show the quote where it adds the dirt at the seams instead of just covering the whole surface.
I would have sworn I read Stonemason chime in somewhere with a 'how he did it' in a thread discussing various shading techniques.
I could be crazy. Didn't want to make a whole new thread about this.
Any news?
Will(Oso3d)..didn't you have some luck with this recently?
GriffinAvid..found my old comments about it :
"
if anyone wants to try recreating that dirt shader for Iray....
the shader I made uses an occlusion node to place dirt into the corners and an inverted occlusion node to add wear and tear to the edges of models,these nodes act as masks that I then use to blend between different texture maps,there's no LIE involved, I also used another texture map mask to add some randomness to the occlusion masks
good luck
S"
The shader I did was based on an old idea by Ajax at Renderosity https://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/?thread_id=2177495
so the reason it could never work in Iray is because there is no occlusion node in ShaderMixer..or at least wasn't when I was making it
Thank you sir for chiming in.
Hope all is well on your end.
Maybe Richard Haseltine can show up and shed some light. That was/is one of the greatest ideas I've seen in a while.
This is what my life needs right now.
I was working on this, but the problem I ran into was that my clever workaround only really worked on maybe 1 in 3 models. I might try releasing it at some point anyway, but there will be a trick in managing expectations.
The core problem is what Stonemason said: there is no inherent way to generate occlusion or curvature in Iray that I'm aware of. I used a mesh handwave to try to fake curvature, but it fails in alot of cases.
So in the end, your best bet is to use a 3d paint program and add edge effects.
The Shader Mixer brick MDL/Default Modules/state/Normal holds the normal vector, the closest to 0 degrees gives how ocluded the surface is. So, this way you could alter/blend/whatever the texture on the same proportion.
The important thing to understand about both Iray and Luxrender (the engine Reality uses) is that they use a realistic approach to lighting. Light will bounce of walls and objects, refract in volumetric surfaces such as water, and can't go through solid objects without translucency. Once you understand this, it's actually pretty easy to use a skydome. You simply turn your skydome into a dome of light. This technique gives you some beautifully realistic lighting and it also works with other light emitting objects, such as computer screens or fire.
However, it's precisley BECAUSE they're so different that the 3Delight shaders simply won't work in Iray. They calculate things in completely different ways. In 3DL you can have light which never bounces, magically passes through solid walls and never casts a shadow. You can do this, because it's not real light. You can still get some very nice effects in Iray, even some which appear other-worldly, but it takes some tinkering with so until someone releases a shader pack, it'll won't be as simple as drag and drop.
I don't own the dirt pack, but if they ever make an Iray compatible version of it I'll be among the first in the store.