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Fun stuff! Thanks for showing how you use them and posting the renders.
The green sword really does look cool!
Procedurally animated, large bodies of water are in the works :) That is another long term project that is just about finished.
Hi Age of Armour, i need your help, i'm a real novice using shaders, and i don't know how can i get more transparent glass look for a genesis character.
i only got a darker green color you can see the picture. i'd like to get more green color trasnparent glass. thanks ind advance for your help.
The trick could be a couple of things...
First do you have a scene or environment sphere/skydome surrounding Genesis? If not then try adding the one that is included to see if that improves things. You can always change the image on the environment sphere to something more to your liking. it can even just be some snapshot photo.
If the glass still has large black areas, like in the render you posted, try setting the Reflect Ray Depth and Refract Ray Depth values (Under the "Surfaces" tab) one or two higher. Make sure "Max Ray Trace Depth" is set to the same number as the highest of the reflect or refract ray depths.
For example, If your current render had Reflect Ray Depth of 1 and Your Refract Ray Depth of 2 then try setting Reflect depth to 2 and Refract to 4. Then make sure your render settings are at Ray Trace depth 4 or higher.
Let me know if those adjustments help. If not we can try a few more things and see if we can't get it looking how you would like.
Procedurally animated, large bodies of water are in the works :) That is another long term project that is just about finished.
Ooooh...I'm interested for sure. Animated sounds even better! I'll be watching your store with a keen eye. ;)
Thanks Age of Armour for your help, i've got it, check the picture. Thanks a lot, your shaders are AWESOME really.
i'm very happy with this product!
Thanks so much for creating such a wonderful plug-in. The rendering time is pretty fast (less than 10 minutes). Here is my testing image with preset Antique Mirror.
Wonderful! I really like the top image.
One of the real challenges of creating the shaders was trying to optimize them so they were fast rendering. I'm glad to hear they are rendering reasonably quickly. The frosted glass presets, on the other hand, take quite a bit longer to render.
These shaders are great. Used Antique Mirror preset on the plane primitive.
Thanks for creating them, Age of Armour.
I'm too experimenting for a while now with these shaders, very impressive and quick results so far, very fine work AoA, only one thing I'm missing, I really would love to have opacity control (with texture) for the shader, that would make it usable even for my Body Jewels...
This is my new Facebook Header! :)
these shaders look great but how do I apply them in DS4.5? I have been trying the shaders that came with supersuit and don't really understand how they work and how to apply and adjust the settings. I read the posts I could find related to shaders but still don't understand. Is there a link to a beginner tutorial for shaders that I may have missed? Thanks for any help
In studio 4.5 you can use the surface selection tool (looks like 3 little cards fanned out) to select both the object and surface of that object that you want to add the shader to. Alternately, make sure you have the object selected in the scene and then go to the surface tab and select which ever surface you want the shader on. If you want to select all surfaces select the object name on the surface tab. If you want to select some but not all you can hold down th e ctrl (windows, not sure about mac) key and to select a group you can hold down the shift key. You may want to go back to the included documentation for a clearer description of how it is done.
Hey Buddy, these are looking great. Mrs Dz and myself really like them and can't wait to find time to play with them.
I made a bunch of accurate gem objects years ago and plan on digging them out of mothballs to see how they look with this cool feature.
thanks Khory...I will follow that suggestion and see what I get
I played with the shaders and the katana sword I had just to try to figure out how they work...I don't quite understand how the environment works tho. I used the included environment shpere and the HDRI display room. Used the opal red preset on the handle, antique mirror on the blade and chrome tarnished on the collar. Is this how it should look? I never added any lights..do I need to?
Loading an environment sphere ensures that there's always something for the reflective surface to reflect (including from directions where you don't have pieces of set to reflect instead).
Is the sphere picture supposed to show in the background? Do I need to add the HDRI display room?
Only if you don't want to put props in the background. The sphere lets an object reflect what is in front of it (i.e. in the camera's direction) without you having to put a wall etc. there. Teh HDRI Display Room and Studio Paris are textures for the sphere. In my testing either one works fine.
Ok thanks SickleYield..I will try something with a background and see how that turns out :)
Understand that the environment sphere is not required... It is just an easy way to provide something for reflections.
Raytraced, 3d reflections are confusing for most people at first. Understandably so. I know I was baffled the first time I made a chrome sphere and it didn't look like chrome in the render.
Raytraced reflections do work just like real life reflections but the important thing that most of us forget is that there can be nothingness in 3d whereas you can't achieve that in real life... at least not on Earth.
When we hold a real life chrome ball in our hands it reflects the room we are in or the sky and trees. When we put a computer generated chrome ball in an otherwise blank scene, we don't see any reflection because there is nothing to reflect. It is similar to holding a mirror ball in a pitch black room. The result, a pitch black reflection :)
Because curved, reflective surfaces reflect in many different angles, it is often not enough just to put a wall behind the reflective object but rather you should place objects all around the reflective subject and behind the camera. Those scene objects will need to be lit also. The more realistic the scene and lighting, the more realistic the reflective objects will look. This of course can take a lot of time setting up a whole scene and lights just for a render of your reflective subject.
The environment sphere simply eliminates the need to set up an elaborate scene and lighting for reflections. It is just a giant ball with a scene "painted" on it. The sphere glows with the color of the panoramic scene image that is applied it so no lights are strictly needed. Of course you can change the scene image to something else, or add props and lights or anything else you would to best fit your render. The environment sphere just cuts down on the amount of work needed to get good reflections.
I hope that helps with some questions about ray traced reflection and refraction and use of the environment sphere or a skydome. They are difficult to understand so don't feel bad if these, or other 3d rendering concepts, leave you scratching you head at first.
Thanks Age of Armour. that helps somewhat, I am not sure how to achieve the results some other posters in this thread got but will keep playing with the shaders and see what I can do :)
Hi Kharma,
Sorry for the slow reply. I spent the last few days doing paperwork and standing in line at the DMV haha.
If you are meaning the results of the katana render, it may just be finding a good angle for the reflections. Objects with large flat surfaces, like the blade, reflect only a small portion of the background so they may look a little more blah than an object with lots of curved surfaces.
What I will often do is set up the reflective object in the pose I want it in. I'll set the camera to the desired angle then do a small, low quality render to see how the reflections look. If they don't excite me I will rotate the environment sphere 45 degrees or so and do another quick test render. I may do this in 45 degree increments all around the sphere until something catches my eye.
Also changing the HDRI map make a big difference in the look. You can try the Studio Paris HDRI which is more busy, has more colors and has higher contrast lighting than the Display Room Hdri. There are also the Images from Dimension Theory's Urban Recreation set which look great! Some of the renders posted by others in this thread have used Urban Recreation.
There is also one of my personal favorites "Lobby Harvest Church 1" which is available for free at http://www.hdrmill.com/Freebies.htm
That last one is in HDR format so it would need to be converted to a .tif using software like PictureNaut or the HDRConverter script that comes with DAZ Studio. The converter script can be found in the DS content browser under My Library - Light Presets - omnifreaker - UberEnvironment2 by default.
I must say, those shaders are wonderful
Playing with displacements
What am I doing wrong here? I am getting these solid colour blotches appearing.
I have tried using several different colour presets but get the blotches in the same places.
Is it something to do with my lighting?
From my point of view, it might be displacement values conflict, when the lower mesh has displacement too high or upper layer has displacement set way to down so they poke through each other even if in non-render view they are fine
Thanks for the reply.
Here is the same image/lighting but with (ahem) the other glass shaders from RDNA applied. If your diagnosis is correct shouldn't I be having the same problem with these shaders?
Did you check chainmail level too?
I have done a series of renders each time removing another layer underneath the armour until there was just the armour itself and the problem is still there.
I changed the image on the environment sphere and the 'blotches' didn't go away.
It looks like it's reflecting a large white object, possibly a light panel?
Hi luxgabu,
I Just came across a similar looking issue yesterday. The refraction and reflection is calculated slightly away from the surface to prevent self artifacting similar to how shadows are offset by shadow bias. When two surfaces are too close together (inside/outside of the armour) the shader is offsetting the reflections in a way that they are calculated kinda inside out.
Try setting the reflect and refract bias' to a smaller number like 0.1.
Does that improve it? If not let me know. I have another idea of what might be happening.