Digital Art Zone

barbult - 13 September 2012 12:25 AM

Thanks for helping. I have a render going now, so I can’t try the CTRL trick. I am familiar with that for the HSS, but I thought that was not necessary for UberHair, because the documentation says (emphasis added):
” SmartPresets
Upgrade existing hair shaders with a simple double click. Texture maps are preserved, and intelligently re-purposed to give you the most out of the UberSurface shader without having to futz with the controls all day. The smart presets do more that just keep your current texture maps—they will also do the following:”

Are you sure the CTRL trick is still needed? Maybe the product was updated to not need it anymore, based on the way I interpret the documentation here http://www.omnifreaker.com/index.php?title=UberHair Anywa.y, I can try the CTRL trick tomorrow after my render finishes and see what happens. I’ll report back.

Nope—that’s it. The same trick you use to apply the Human Surface Shader presets (hold down CTRL, double-click the preset you want, then choose IGNORE from the pop-up dialogue box) is the same trick you use for the UberHair presets. You should see some extra channels and options appear in the Surfaces tab, but not nearly as many as you do with the HSS. I took DS4.5P off my machine a couple of days ago, and I was having to do that with UberHair up ‘til the last render I did with it. (If you’ve been following some of the other threads these last few days, I’m switching to Poser—I love DAZ Studio, just not DAZ.)  Have a good one…

jimzombie - 13 September 2012 12:38 AM

I decided not to buy uberhair because I thought the same results could be achieved with Ubersurface/2. Is this wrong?

I’m sure you could achieve similar results with some experimentation. I’m sorry, but I’m not proficient enough to help you more than that. The UberHair and HSS stuff is something I myself went through just a few weeks ago, so it’s still pretty fresh in my mind.

Gedd - 12 September 2012 02:07 PM

Ostadan - 12 September 2012 01:59 PM

... And: what do these do that I cannot do with ubersurface that comes with DS4.5Pro?

iirc, it is basically UberSurface(2?) without the Ambient Occlusion. the aoc kills render times with trans mapped hair and is unnecessary in said hair I believe.

Uber Hair does use Ambient Occlusiuon and it has a channel with an On/Off switch plus as Gedd said it is a good idea to Turn it off when Applying the Hair shader, makes render a little more quicker.

Nope no need to use CTRL when appling any Uber Hair Presets only the Base requires CTRL to preserve the textures maps. But for me I just select the Hair, select the surfaces and hit one of the Presets, done.

As for the question of Uber Surface or Uber Hair. For me for the price Uber Hair saves me a lot of time settting up colours, specular etc. Uber Hair will read your loaded Hair texture maps and adjust all the channels to suit.

Obviously this one hit approach may not work for every lighting situation but for me it works very well most times.

barbult I see you are using DT’s new HDR product which could the the issue. As I mentioned above presets can work well for most but in some cases you might need to adjust.

To expand on what Szark said, I had just tried UberSurface last night to check this exact thing and found out it’s not as easy to convert UberSurface to a hair product with existing textures as it sounds.. So it appears it comes down to ease of use and speed, ie how much is your time worth vs how much do you want to force yourself to learn a complex product in-depth before getting the results you want.

[Edit] I forgot using Ctl, so I was attempting to rebuild the textures from scratch ;p
Might want to try applying UberSurface and see how quickly you get results you want. The UberHair is basically a set of presets that are tuned for quick results, like many products actually (Render Throttle, etc…)

I have run many tests now, and I see no difference between holding down CTRL or not holding down CTRL with soft, silky, and shiny. I haven’t tried Base; I’m not sure what Base is for. I believe Szark is correct that Ctrl is not needed with the smart presets for UberHair,

barbult - 13 September 2012 05:10 PM

I have run many tests now, and I see no difference between holding down CTRL or not holding down CTRL with soft, silky, and shiny. I haven’t tried Base; I’m not sure what Base is for. I believe Szark is correct that Ctrl is not needed with the smart presets for UberHair,

All I can say is that’s the only way I got it to work on my machine (Win7 64-bit, 2.7 GHz dual-core, 6 GB RAM). Simply double-clicking on the presets left hair looking like plastic; using the CTRL key is what gave the results in the demo render I posted.

Sarsifus - 13 September 2012 07:33 PM

barbult - 13 September 2012 05:10 PM

I have run many tests now, and I see no difference between holding down CTRL or not holding down CTRL with soft, silky, and shiny. I haven’t tried Base; I’m not sure what Base is for. I believe Szark is correct that Ctrl is not needed with the smart presets for UberHair,

All I can say is that’s the only way I got it to work on my machine (Win7 64-bit, 2.7 GHz dual-core, 6 GB RAM). Simply double-clicking on the presets left hair looking like plastic; using the CTRL key is what gave the results in the demo render I posted.

What version of DS are you running? I am running 4.5 Pro. I wonder if that makes any difference. I still haven’t managed to get the nice results you showed. I know there are lighting related bugs in 4.5. I wonder if they are causing me problems. If you get those results in 4.5, then it is something else I am doing wrong. Wrong hair product, wrong lighting type, wrong lighting angle, etc.

Sarsifus, I finally see a difference between CTRL an no CTRL on the UberHair!!! Thanks for persisting with your point of view.

It all depends on what hair you use. I was using hair products from Valea - Pure Hair Crazy, Pure Hair Classic, etc. When I switched to Finger Wave Bob hair by goldtassel, I saw a drastic difference. I examined all the surface settings. The difference is that Finger Wave Bob has a Specular Strength Map. The Valea hairs do not. Clicking on UberHair Shiny without the CTRL key deletes that specular strength map. Perhaps that is a bug, since the UberHair docs say it keeps the maps. Without that map, the specular channel went wild. I will post three images (no post work except adding the annotation for settings used). Pardon the garish lighting.

So, you get the benefit of the improved Uber shader system, but without the tweaked settings. I assume this is the same for all other Uber shader products. Personally I think I’m going to stick with surface 2 and just play with the settings myself. Strangely enough I get a lot of pleasure out of experimenting and finding what works best, though it is nice to have the short cut sometimes. I wonder if there is a way I can save shader settings - any one have an idea there?

Yes, Save as > Shader Preset.

Quoting from Mclean in this thread:

A Shader Preset is simply a single material, as opposed to a Materials Preset which is multiple materials. Shader Presets can be applied to any selected material(s), regardless of name, whereas a Material Preset will only apply to materials with the same name(s).

So, for example, if you save a Materials Preset for a human figure, it will only work on another figure with those materials. That’s why I said saving a Shader Preset is better. You can apply it to any materials at all, no matter what names they have, and it will work on human figures, buildings, props, etc.
To save a preset

1. Select any prop or figure.
2. Select any material on it (in the Surfaces pane).
3. Set up the material the way you want it (white or whatever)
4. Go to the Save menu (in the content pane) and choose Shader Preset, then name it.

To apply a preset

1. Select a prop or figure.
2. Select the material(s) you want to affect. (To select more than one material, hold down CTRL and click their names)
3. Apply the Shader Preset you saved

Note that you can also choose to save a Custom Preset in the dialog. That means you could (for example), only choose to affect the Diffuse Color by making it white, but leave all the other settings unchanged. That would leave things like Bump maps in place. To do that, just choose Custom, expand the channels and only check the ones you want to affect.

Folks, please don’t ever take anything I may say to be gospel. I’m just as prone to being wrong as anyone else, and if I am, please say something—I’d rather someone pointed out my mistake(s) than for me to continue making an ass of myself. Anyhow, I’m glad UberHair seems to be working, and to be honest, it never occurred to me that different vendors have different methods of setting up their models, so UberHair’s results may vary. Personally, I like how it works with LittleFox’s and Goldtassel’s models. Have a good one…

I don’t think anyone took it that way Sarsifus. I think you had some valuable contributions to the topic. We all learn through interacting together