Digital Art Zone

Simple Dual Material Shader [beta version] uploaded to ShareCG and Renderosity Freestuff

Works in DS3 Free, DS3 Advanced, and DS4 Pro. Don’t forget it’s still in beta though!
Check the readme for more info, and this DAZ Studio Discussion thread for more background (and hopefully further progress!)
Feel free to play around with the shader network if you use Shader Mixer - use it, modify it, dump it, whatever.

This is basically for situations where you have a single surface but want to use two separate materials (e.g. a shiny reflective gold paint design on a stone surface). Yes, you can already do this by creating separate images to plug into the diffuse, bump, and specular channels (and that’s not uncommon). But when you have two REALLY different materials that require separate values for glossiness, specular strength, reflection strength, etc, as well…

Seemed to me that specifying the two materials separately (using a simple greyscale image to define which is used where) was a simple solution. You can already do this in Poser’s Material Room (since Poser 6 at least), and now DAZ Studio has Shader Mixer, which can do this. But many people don’t use Shader Mixer. So I’ve created a simple (but quite big!) shader network, and made all the important stuff accessible from the normal Surfaces tab.

Most things seem to work - normal maps and refraction are the areas that still need sorting out.

A couple more notes:

1) Refraction is okay with the existing network if you change two parameters in each of the two Reflect And Refract bricks (you can only do this in Shader Mixer - I hid the parameters from the Surfaces tab on this beta, sorry!):
-Sample cone: Set this to 0, not 1
-Max distance: Start with it set at 1. If the refraction doesn’t work try 10, then 100, then 1000, etc.
Clearly I’ll need to put these parameters on the Surfaces tab.

2) The render on the promo isn’t straight out-of-the-box: the attached image shows what to expect if you simply create a sphere primitive and apply the shader to it. For the promo render I added an image (Clouds.png*) to the Base Texture’s diffuse color, specular color and displacement, and added tiling (3 tiles each way), ray-traced reflection, and a bump image (Noise.png*) to the Overlay Texture.

3) I’m still trying to get the normals working.

4) Playing around with the shader I realised that some easy way of inverting and/or changing the brightness/contrast of the Overlay Mask image would be rather useful. Any other suggestions while I’m going through this enthusiastic phase?

*Images are in the same folder as the DBM, DUF and DSA files.

This has the potential to be very useful.  Thanks!