Digital Art Zone

1. I’m trying to recreate a surface preset that a friend uses in Poser via the surfaces tab and UberSurface.  Would I be correct in assuming Poser’s transparency is the same as our opacity setting?  Poser also has edge and fall off values for transparency, are these settings available to us?

2. Is there a fractal sum setting and a scatter setting somewhere? The poser image has it linked to the transparency and a scatter linked to an alt diffuse, but I don’t see either anywhere when I load UberSurface.

3. When I get done editing the surface to my desire, if I use Save As… then shader preset, will I be able to re-apply this same setting to any new surface without having to load Ubersurface on the object first?

1.

I’m trying to recreate a surface preset that a friend uses in Poser via the surfaces tab and UberSurface.  Would I be correct in assuming Poser’s transparency is the same as our opacity setting?

  Yes

Poser also has edge and fall off values for transparency, are these settings available to us?

I think you would need to use shader mixer for that.

2. Is there a fractal sum setting and a scatter setting somewhere? The poser image has it linked to the transparency and a scatter linked to an alt diffuse, but I don’t see either anywhere when I load UberSurface.

Again, I think that would be shader mixer stuff.

3. When I get done editing the surface to my desire, if I use Save As… then shader preset, will I be able to re-apply this same setting to any new surface without having to load Ubersurface on the object first?

Yes

Thank you for the answers.  Guess I’ll finally try to learn the shader mixer.

It is likely that the edge settings for transparency are not vital and that you could sub in some sort of texture maps for the other stuff.

From my experience “edge” doesn’t really matter, it’s “falloff” that counts, this determines how see-through the black parts of the map are, we don’t have that in DS and afaik none of the 3rd party shaders (Uber etc) can’t deal with it either.

The attached image is how I do it in DS3’s ShaderMixer, I haven’t had the heart to look at DS4’s since all the bricks got changed, so I have no idea if it’ll work in 4 or not.

Two of the bricks have had a cosmetic change as what you see here is usually grouped into a “custom” brick, the math2 has had the value 2 section renamed, as that acts as the overall Opacity strength slider for the surface. The “falloff” is controlled by the mix brick, I’ve renamed a couple of things in this one too, Base becomes Black Base and it’s slider Black T-Max, and Layer became White Base with it’s slider White T-max. For most Trans maps I leave White T-Max at 1 and adjust the Black T-Max to control the black color in the trans map (ie if the “falloff” says 0.6 then you set Black T-Max to 0.4), but from time to time you’ll run into a trans map that doesn’t work right with that, for those I set Black T-Max to 1 and adjust White T-Max instead.