Shader Mixer and Normals

ebergerly

I've been wandering around the awesome Shader Mixer, and I think I've finally figured how to use the Iray/Uber shaders in Shader Mixer. You select Functions/MDL, and there are 26.3 trillion bricks (aka nodes) for working with the Iray shaders. The problem is there are 26.3 trillion bricks, and I can't figure out how to do something simple like take a Normals texture coming out of CrazyBump and apply it to my Iray surface. 

I filled my Shader Mixer up with about 20 MDL bricks which seem to be related to normals and geometry, but I can't get a proper combination of inputs and outputs to connect an input normals image to the final material. Unless you can somehow connect ST's to N's and so on...

Anyone have some insights? 

Thanks.

ebergerly

Wow !!! I just stumbled on something amazing...

If you set up your material/surface normally (without Shader Mixer), and then open Shader Mixer and select File/Import from Scene, it automatically converts all of your settings to nodes (bricks) !!! So you can just set up your material like normal, and if you want to see what that looks like in Brick-land it does it for you automatically. Great way to learn how to configure bricks.

On the other hand, below is what the shader mixer nodes look like for a simple surface with displacement :)

Richard Haseltine

Not every shader will import - the Iray Uber shader does, as does the AoA SSS shader for 3Delight. The Daz Default Shader for 3Delight will import, but there are oddities. Most other 3delight shaders are not in brick form but were written as raw RSL code, so they won't import.