Lady of War in Iray
thistledownsname
Posts: 1,336
Has anybody had any luck converting Lady of War to use in Iray? I'm trying various things, but can't get the metal parts to really come together.
Post edited by thistledownsname on
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It would be sweet if someone did. That is a gorgeous piece of armour.
I like the Celtic Dragon & Geometrical doodles.
Doesn't sound like it should be hard. First thing I would try is to adjust the color of the metal parts of the armor in the base texture map if needed, and set the Metallicity to 1 (or can try a little lower from some products I've seen)
This site is a good PBR reference, look under "Finding Material Values" for the chart.
http://www.marmoset.co/toolbag/learn/pbr-practice
It doesn't have normal maps, so it's going to be somewhat problematic in Iray. Depending on which parts of the armor are texture and which parts are geometry, you might wind up wiping out the detail you're trying to preserve.
You can try sticking the bump and/or displacement maps into something like http://cpetry.github.io/NormalMap-Online/ and see if that helps.
Or maybe @Valandar has some idea about how you might manage it. It's a Daz Originals buyout, I guess, but his name is on it as the designer, so he might have some suggestions. Or maybe Daz customer support might.
There's several problems, some easy to solve, some not.
The first is that it looks too dark. Quick solutions to this are replacing the diffuse map with the specular map, or editing the diffuse map to double (or more) its brightness. This still leaves it flat though.
Displacement is the bigger problem. The embossing doesn't POP like it should.
If it can take subd without turning into abstract art, try giving it Subd 3. That can sometimes be enough to allow decent displacement in Iray.
Thanks Will. That Subd thing seems to be exactly what was holding me back. I think it will help on some other conversion problems I've been having. It seems to roughly translate as "Displacement Resolution" or how densly to apply the displacement map. Is that a correct interpretation of it?
In Iray, displacement affects the vertices of the mesh. The finer the mesh/more polygons, the more 'accurately' displacement will affect it.
The best way to do this is with the object's resolution. 3 will be enough in most cases, 4 might be warranted... if that still doesn't seem enough, I'd consider one of the other methods, like turning the displacement map into a Normal map. The problem is that each step of SubD is 4x as many polys, and that can go up really fast. I've occasionally gotten SubD 5 to work, but most of the time my computer locks up.
If adding subd turns the mesh into garbage (some mesh just doesn't get set up right), then you might want to try changing the Displacement Subd (Under surfaces) to 3. This used to be my go-to thing to adjust, but apparently it doesn't work as cleanly as working with the mesh subd.
In 3dl, displacement affects pixels on the surface or something, so all of these issues are mostly unimportant.
Doing little in-window previews SubD 3 seems sufficient for things like the bands around the lower segment of the pauldrons, but the knotwork on the pauldron cross needs SubD 5 to really be legible. Haven't tried a full render yet.
Ok, I managed to get some renders out. Took about 15 minutes each.
The pants and the main part of the boots just have the diff map doubled in brightness. The rest of the boots was converted to some leather shaders. The buckles are the default Iray Nickel metal.
The dress is just Iray Uber converter. The collar has 0.17 metallicity.
The armor starts by applying the Iray default Iron shader, then using the material's specular map as the diff map. Then put the displacement back in, match the original displacement settings, and turn SubD to 5 on the shoulder, 4 on the waist and main part of the gauntlet, and 3 on the lower pauldron and hand guard.
One further suggestion is to invert the specular map in an image editor (so white becomes black and vice versa), and put that in the Specular Roughness channel. This will tone the shine down to more realistic levels and in the appropriate places (for example shinier on the edges where wear and tear would smooth them down, not as shiny in crevices where gunk would build up).
The idea of putting the specular in the diffuse, then doing this to the specular roughness, works for many metallic things. Sadly, I don't have the time to do full Iray conversions, especially for products that are no longer mine.
In Iray I don't see a Specular Roughness channel - only Diffuse Roughness and Glossy Roughness. Which should I be putting the inverted specular map into, and at what percent?
A lot of work, but the results look great.
And people say Daz doesn't need some sort of manual, (or manuals on specific tasks). It would be nice to know how to begin to do stuff like this if you're still a newb, and it would facilitate the sale of a lot of items people skip over because they simple can't get the most out of them the way they are.
Glossy roughness, with it set to 1.0 (full).
Thank you for your help. Here's the update with the inverted specular map.
I find PBR Metallicity 'glossy reflectivity' and PBR Specular/Glossiness 'Specular' allow for a lot of very significant changes.
I mean, I've taken, in PBR Metallicity, to changing everything to Glossy Weight 1, Glossy Color pure white, and then play with only Reflectivity and Roughness.