Normal Maps in 3DLight

JOdel

Okay, I've used Soulless Empathy's Castle Room in renders before. It's not a new set, I think I got it in 2011 or even earlier. But I do not remember the normal maps being anything like so strong in earlier versions of Studio. In fact the normals are now so overwhelming that they make the model practically unusable.

And the normals don't have a slider in the surface tab. 

Now, I *suspect* that in DS3, which is the first version of the program that I used this in, the program simply didn't recognize the normal maps at all. But I have used it, or pieces of it in a number of other renders well into *some* way through the various versions of DS4 and it's never done this.

I know I can just turn them off. I'm pretty sure that the earlier renders that used this set probably didn't do anything about the normals at all. But I would like a *little* bit of the additional depth.

Does anyone know of any way to dial down something that doesn't come with a dial?

nattaruk

The AoA_Subsurface shader has a 'Normal Map Strength' slider so you could try converting, (presumably from Daz Default shader), the surfaces and using that?

Richard Haseltine

Most of the Soulless Empathy sets use custom shaders, rather than one of the stock shaders, so you may not be able to simply apply the AoA shader - I can't recall if that's true for the Castle Room set - you can check by looking at top-left of the Editor tab of the Surfaces pane with the model's surfaces selected.

JOdel

Thanks, will give that a try. Like I say, I can just turn them off.

Richard Haseltine

Richard Haseltine said:

Most of the Solless Empathy sets use cistom sahders, rather than one of the stock shaders, so you may not be able to simply apply the AoA shader - I can't recall if that's true for the Castle Room set - you can check by looking at top-left of the Editor tab of the Surfaces pane with the mdoel's surfaces selected.

Have some typos. I will fix.

JOdel

Well, not much joy in mudville. It turned out that I could apply the AoA shader and that did indeed give me a slider. However, there was no way to change the lighting model back to Matte. Not surprising, since that's not a setting used in subsurface. So instead of overwhelming shadows, I had bolown out highlights which made it unusable in the other direction. Lowering or greying the diffuse didn't correct the problem. I didn't think to turn off reflections or whatever.

Hunting in the texture folder revealed that the set does come with bump and displacement maps (which somehow hadn't applied by defaut), so I turned off the normals and used those. I seem to have everything back to the way I'm used to seeing those surfaces in a render. Which is good enough. But... sheesh.

Richard Haseltine

If you have the Lighting Model setting it is using the Daz Default Shader - that is a switch that determins which shader code to use for specularity. You'd need to edit specular/glossy settings in the new shader to adjust it.