Help! Eye shaders are driving me crazy!
losley7_b7ceb1090b
Posts: 0
I have Carrara 8 Pro 64 bit. I have a scene setup and mostly ready to go and now I am trying to get some eye shaders that work right. I have an odd problem that I do not have a clue as to how I can fix it.
The eye surface shader blocks everything out ( iris, pupil, etc) even if it is set to transparent or even if no shader is loaded at all. It shows whatever shader I put on it and that is it. No shader displays as gray plastic and no amount tweaking the shader will make things behind it visible.
Does anyone know how to correct this?
Thank you in advance from a very frustrated semi -noob.
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Comments
If no shader is loaded, it's probably just going to be the grey default.
In the top shader channel there is a little checkbox for 'no light interactions When Fully Transparent. If you have that checked and the transparency at 100% it should vanish
Also you can set the alpha channel to 0%, this should also make it vanish too.
I actually keep my eye surface on and use it, but I can see why others might want it out of the way, so hopefully this helps.
If not, give us a screenshot of all your settings in the texture room for that shader and we'll try to spot what is going wrong.
The real problem is that when it is completely transparent the model looks like there are no eyes at all... it shows the inside of the head reflecting back. No matter what shader is used for iris it never displays... it's like there is no other layers even though the shading domains are there.
When I first started working with the shaders for the eyes they showed up and after using the eye surface shader they no longer display at all.
Like Jon, I prefer to use the eye surface and eye reflections surfaces - but I'm feeling ya... it's a little different in these new figures.
Sometimes a problem can come due to reflection being set up, with nothing to reflect, effectively making a black-ish looking surface.
I have used Indigone's V4 Skin Shader Kit and Lights to help to sort through issues - when I get them. Yes... it's made for V4, but there are no UV specifics or texture maps used in the shaders, so they work beautifully of other figures - as she just gives you shaders to plop into the appropriate zones. The y do use SSS, just so you know.
So with that being said, I find it helpful that I have that set of shaders in my browser - always ready for the moments notice. So in this circumstance, try dropping the V4 Basic Eye Surface, Cornea, and Sclera shaders from that pack, and place them into their respective slots - but don't yet get rid of the originals so you can compare and use the best of both worlds.
Even though I use her excellent shaders, like all shaders, I simply cannot help myself but to tweak on them!
So, no matter which shape you intend to end up with, make sure that you load in the appropriate version of Genesis or Genesis 2 compared to the character shaders you wish to use. Example being, I really wanted to use G6 shaders - so I load in G6 and shape her however I want - and her maps work.
The shader that has the main iris map on it must be in place for at least Iris and Pupil, and most often also for Sclera and lacriminal too.
Ok are you certain that's what you're looking at here, because like Dart said I suspect it's more likely you've just got a black shader blocking light then that all the parts of the eyes are invisible.
If the eyes really are invisible, double check back in the assembly room to make sure the left and right eyes haven't somehow gotten their visibility setting unchecked (first select the object in the scene tray to the lower right, then in the top right all the properties should show, and make sure both eyes are visible.
If that isn't the problem we're probably going to need to see some quick screenshots from the texture room of the shaders for eye surface, cornea, iris, sclera and even tear.
I may have it all wrong, but since he started out talking about the eye surface shader, and I don't think any of the Genesis characters have an eye surface shader, I thought he was dealing with a V4 or M4 character.
I may have it all wrong, but since he started out talking about the eye surface shader, and I don't think any of the Genesis characters have an eye surface shader, I thought he was dealing with a V4 or M4 character.Yeah, it's tougher when we don't know exactly what's going on, so I'm tossing ideas into the wind for him ;)
Genesis 2 Female brings back Cornea, Surface and a separate surface just for reflections too! :)
If you're really having a rough time with it, I would really suggest getting Ringo's Shader Set for the appropriate character. If he doesn't offer it yet, pop in on one of his shader threads and get his attention. He has offered us (the whole Carrara community) to make shaders for any figure we need shaders for - and he's damned good! He'll do it!
JonStark, you freaking RO C K ! ! !
...and I'm glad to have you back, here in the forums. I always learn a lot from your posts, man!
Thanks for coming back!
I negelected to mention that this is a M4 character. Sorry...
This is a recreation of a Poser scene that I didn't like the lighting on... I moved it to Carrara for better lighting and atmospheric options.
I was able to create the skin shader I wanted (finally and then started on the eyes and whap...
A quick addition... the eye surface shader shows but nothing else will. If the eye surface shader is completely transparent, the whole eye disappears. I've checked to make sure the eyes are set to display in 3d view and they are.
Something happened when I was messing with the eye shaders early on because as soon as I added the eye surface shader the trouble started. Before that I had everything showing.
In that case... Eight wonderful words, my friend:
Indigone's V4 Skin Shader Kit and Lights Kit!
Man,
You might not want to even keep the shaders on the character, but the kit is amazingly cool. It has a beautiful tutorial/write-up on character shading in Carrara, and then those completely procedural shaders for each zone... totally a must have!
The tutorial explains very nicely how to then apply your character's texture maps into the shaders to turn the shaders into a custom set to convert your previous Poser person into a professional Carrara figure. Very cool!
While you're there, you might want to download her "Endless Eyes Kit" too.
Oh... Man!
I would totally be remiss if I didn't also point out GK Dantas Skin Shaders for M4 and V4 as well! GK Dantas rocks! And he makes incredible shaders too!
Thanks I'll give those a look and get back with the results... thanks.
I absolutely agree.
It is great to have your well thought out and wonderfully written posts in the forums again.
I absolutely agree.
It is great to have your well thought out and wonderfully written posts in the forums again.
Thanks guys, I absolutely appreciate the kind words, especially from such excellent forum regulars who I consider to be so expert. I'm honestly a little touched. It is nice to be back on the forums, I had a heck of a time when the store and forums changed and I was rendered mute for a while because I couldn't login or make posts. It's actually a great relief to see that I can post and interact again :)
Cloudrunner77, try a couple of things, let's see what's happening. It is possible this is just some momentary hiccup with your Carrara and a closing and restarting might cure it, but I honestly don't think that's it.
Set your iris and sclera shaders with no other channels except the color channel (using the M4 eye texture you want). Don't worry about any other effect, no highlight, shininess, reflections, transparency, etc, except *do* make sure the alpha channel is at 100%
Next set the cornea, tear and eye surface shaders to be invisible by either setting them all at 0% alpha, and/or with the 'no light interactions at 100% transparency' checked and the transparency for those shaders set at 100%
Now see if you can see your eyes, because they should show up (double check to make sure everything is set to be visible in the 3dview again just to make sure). A quick render should confirm.
Waitaminute, also make sure that in the render settings you have transparency checked, and also 'light through transparency' checked down in the middle of the page. Sometimes that 'light through transparency' button is greyed out, but if you check either sky light or Indirect light, 'light through transparency' should be checkable. You can check it and then after checking the bos for it you can uncheck (or leave checked) the skylight or Indirect light (depending on how you want to render).
The more I think about it, I'm thinking it is that second 'light through transparency' checkbox being unchecked that may the cause of the problem...
hi cloudrunner here is my inside information, keep In mind I have no idea what it means and cannot reveal the source otherwise I will be vapourised into small cloud like pistules of ether drifting in an otherwise pristine Ethernet....
That sounds like excellent advice, Headwax. Also very 'manly' advice ;) I hadn't thought of that possibility but yeah, that might be it.
:) yes, it's good to have a 'man' about the house - or forum as it is.
Even as it is Cuius Est Solum Ejus Est Usque Ad Coelum Et Ad Inferos, but not so much on other soil.
I haven't read through every post in this thread but it sounds to me like the "light through transparency" is not checked in the Global Illumination settings.
Yeah, that was my most likely culprit I suggested as well. We haven't yet heard back from Cloudrunner to see if it's resolved and what the problem was yet though. Hopefully Cloudrunner will let us know soon, as I'm very curious.
The situation is, usually, one of two things.
1. You are using AO and the eye surface uses the Transparency channel not the Alpha channel. That will cause the eyes to go black.
2. You took a shader, like the ones included with Carrara 8.5, and applied it in the Assembly room not the Shader room. That also causes the eyes to go black.
Thanks everyone for the advice... just popping in to let you know that it might be tomorrow before I can actually try everything out. Sometimes my life is not my own...LOL
Well that took longer than expected... I ended up going out of town for the weekend... after I had a chance to try all the suggestions.
No dice... I tried everything suggested.. and got partial results. I tried the shaders suggested.. and that didn't work. I got the sclera to kinda of show up... added new master shaders for everything in the eyes and what I ended up with was a semi greyed out iris, faded sclera and nothing else.
I set up the eye with:
completely transparent eye surface ( 0 Alpha, 100% transparency, 0 everything else.
blue plastic for iris ( with and w/o100% alpha)
white plastic for sclera.
and my skin shader for lacrimal and tear.
The white of the white plastic partially shows, the iris looks gray and everything else looks right.
So I was so frustrated I deleted the figure ( don't worry I still have it saved) and tried to reimport it. Aggghhh! The morphs are gone... it will not hold the morphs. And it took a long time to work those morphs... I can't believe what a pain this is.
I upgraded to Poser 2014 since I first created the character. It is in my library and all I had to do before was just add it to the scene. Now it holds the pose but the morphs are all gone.
Is it time to blow my brains out? LOL (sorta)
Cloudrunner, I'm still not sure what's going wrong here, but since you've got me curious, so I want to see if I can go into it a bit deeper.
What figure is it for (V4/M4/V5/M5 etc), what character texture set is it from what vendor, and what is the filepath to the folder that holds the textures in question?
I'm thinking if I have the texture set I can build a runtime that has the textures in the same folder as you, and I can build you a master shader set that would work, and just give you the master shader to put in your shaders and then apply. I was actually working for eye textures for a Genesis texture using V4 shaders today. If you think that is an acceptable look to eyes, then I'm definitely willing to try to assist. Bear in mind I was going for realistic look, not toon, so it may not be what you want, but here's a reference pic to give an idea:
Here is the deal with the shaders. It is an M4 character and the textures from Poser weren't cutting it so I stripped them and moved the figure with no textures to Carrara because I like the lighting options better and it is an outdoor cityscape scene. I intended to create custom shaders for everything. I might use some stock metal shaders but the skin, eyes, and armor would be completely custom. I spent quite a while and got the skin shader very close to what I was seeing in my mind's eye. This is realistic scifi/fantasy. I want it to look as realistic as a 12' tall, glitter gold skinned, azure eyed, elf like being can. It's a tall order but I came close.. just not close enough in Poser 2010.
This is a character from a book I am writing. My grand plan is to present a fully finished product, with artwork and all to a publisher. I have a bunch of work to do but I wanted, needed to create the artwork for the character so I can precisely describe the character in the book. By creating the character art first I can make the details match what the reader sees in the artwork. There is still room for imagination but the idea is to fix a picture in a reader's mind.
So I am creating these shaders from scratch ( maybe a base shader modified here and there ). I have not seen a shader that matches what I want. I was pumped by my success with the skin... very close to what I wanted... very representative. I started on the eyes, didn't like my first attempt and then wham.
I have everything thing in the scene saved. The skin shader especially so I just want to start over. I tried and the damn character lost the morphs ( literally hours of trial and error ) when I put it in the scene. And the morphs available in the modeling room behave differently. I really don't want to have to recreate the character... I really shouldn't have to.
Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can accomplish this? How can I lock the morphs ( for a M4 figure originally created in Poser Pro 2010) so they don't drop off when I place the character in the scene? If I can get that accomplished I should be able to start afresh with the eyes and go from there.
For V4 and M4 characters, after I've built them with the morphs I want, I just drag and drop them into my 'objects' tab (I created a folder there for my 'cast').
Dragging them back out of the objects tab, I can put them into any scene I want, and they load with all morphs in place, no problems, and it's still an M4/V4 character, ready to be posed etc.
By the way, you can also put more than just the morphed figure in your objects tab for storage. You can put together your character, outfit it with hair and clothing and whatever props, and then hit ctrl G to group them all together (name the new group whatever you want) and then you can grab, drag and drop the whole group down in your objects tab.
So you are building your character in Poser and then opening that in Carrara - how are you doing the export / import? You may be better off building your character direct in Carrara, using the Runtime there to apply the morphs directly. I have never had an issue with morphs not appearing when saved in Carrara.
Ok here is the deal with the character. I created the character in Poser Pro 2010... maybe 2 years ago. The figure is complete with body, armor and hair. Hair and armor are conformed to the figure. The Poser is exactly as I want it. I spent literally hours on the facial morphs because no set of morphs I could find looked anything like I wanted my character to look. This is an elf - like character... not goofy ears and big child-like eyes. I worked the dials until it was what I wanted. Magnets, I never got the hang of. So the character is exactly the way I wanted it. I then saved it to the library as a character.
I originally had no problem inserting the character into my Cararra scene at all. The pose and morphs translated just fine. I even re-did the hair with no problems. I added the Poser Runtime to the file browser and double clicked it to add it to the scene.. presto. Now when I do that... the pose is ok but the morphs are gone and a standard M4 figure in armor is what shows up. I upgraded to Poser 2014 a couple of months ago but that should not effect an already saved character should it? The Runtime was saved to a separate location and loads the figure with no problems in Poser. Note: I did also try re-saving the figure in Poser Pro 2014 as a separate character and it does the same thing. What changed?
I even did a complete uninstall/reinstall of both programs and it still does it ( as well as the funky thing with the eye shaders on the original figure in Cararra.) It is enough to drive a guy crazy. Is there any external exporter program or something?
I feel for you, but not really my area of expertise, I hope that someone else can help you out. I don't know why it worked when you first tried it but doesn't now.
Interesting development! I decided after very many attempts to just start over and not liking the idea of having to redo all the work on the facial morphs that I would try a different route.
I'm a computer geek and I started looking at my problem with the eye shaders as a possible software issue. Now I know it isn't Carrara as I have uninstalled and reinstalled it several times. I even rooted out every single reference to Carrara in the registry and it made no difference. So in desperation I rebuilt my user profile. And guess what? It worked. The issue is gone.
Thank you everyone for your advice. Now I can move happily forward on my project.