about Muelsfell Multilayer Iray Terrain Shader
Martial
Posts: 431
Bonjour
Someone begins to use this new product
i hesitate because it seems a little complicate use
how are the included terrains?
i use lots of sharamuse3d products ( bought at Renderosity) for construct landscapes Can i use these new shaders on them? thanks
Post edited by Martial on
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You can use the included terrains without worrying about the shader at all. The terrains are very large, one can easily give you a lot of room to place figures, vehicles, etc, and they can tile so if you need more for a scene you can use more.
There's meant to be a full instruction manual in PDF, but it's missing from the final release. I've contacted the Daz folks but it's the weekend so it may be a couple of days before a fix for that is sent out. The manual is English only.
I feel like if you understand the Iray shader, and are willing to experiment with the different settings of the Multilayer Shader, you will very quickly learn how to use it, even without reading the manual.
What really unlocks the power of this shader is using other programs like Mudbox, ZBrush, Substance Painter, etc to create masks for your terrains. That's advanced usage, and you don't have to mess with any of that at all if you want to use the terrains as is, or if you want to use the default masks.
Luckily the link to PDF is on: http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/read_me/index/60675/start
http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/read_me/index/60675/60675_muelsfell-multilayer-iray-terrain-shader.pdf
How might it be not so much an editor, but for bringing in existing terrains more for examining them? I've been migrating Daz scenes over to Lightwave. When I Came across the Streets of the Wild West set https://www.daz3d.com/the-streets-of-the-wild-west ; & had no idea how to adequately translate it's terrrain.
I bought World Creator a while back, hoping to have a cool generation system to use in Daz, only to discover the textures didn't work so great. But this might do the trick...
Among other things, World Creator can create masks based on type of environment, flow plains, and so on which might work great with this.
Whenever I get to it, will be sure to show experiments. ;)
This is for using stuff in DAZ studio
if you want to use textures on a shader in another software you need to use that program’s material system
sorry to get off topic to this product but...
no doubt Lightwave has its own set up where you can insert masks to perform shader operations
with Stonemasons stuff I usually render out the shader on a large plane and create a texture map from that as DAZ studio has no texture baking function for complex iray materials or I examine what I can see of the shader where maps are plugged in and what is doing what, sometimes this involves opening shadermixer and looking at mdl bricks and where they are linked though that’s is often a mess of brick and nodes spaghetti, to see if I can do the same in my software of choice.
bookmark :)
Laurie
I have created a simple terrain in Blender and UV mapped it.
How do I proceed with this Multilayer shader? I could not find any material presets, that works.
Below is just a Daz Studio iray render with simple shader, to show the terrain.
Thanks E-ArkHam , Artini and others
Ii just bought the product which is downloading now
i get the pdf from the link i can read english even i am a french speaking person .So i can using the instructions
I am using Photoshop CC (often for postproduction) and Zbrush 2019 (not so often)
Usualy i use Vue Infinite for terrains and i export caracters ,animals etc from DAZStudio to Vue (obj or dae formats)
... and the same terrain rendered with one of the presets from: https://www.daz3d.com/oso-master-shader1-for-iray
You would, as I undrstand it, need to set up the different materials and paint (or otherwise generate) masks to control which applied to the model where.
This shader doesn't work outside of Daz Studio, sorry.
Use the shaders, not the material presets. Material presets only work with named materials, in this case ones named "terrain." You'll find the shaders in: Shader Presets\Multilayer Iray Terrain Shader\Merchant Resources\
The shaders should apply to any material surface. I'd recommend using the rainbow one so changes are very clear. The parameters will mostly be blank, allowing you to put whatever you want in the various slots. Sample masks can be found in: Runtime\Textures\EArkham\muelsfell\multilayer_shader_terrain\SAMPLE_MASKS\
Once you've applied the shaders, try adding in masks (don't forget to slide the parameter up to 1 to turn it on 100%), then render or use the Iray preview to see the results.
I admit it can seem overwhelming at first, but once you get used to it and understand which parameters do what, you can get some very interesting results.
Please do share your results. Creating masks from high poly sculpts is very much one of the things that this shader was meant to take advantage of.
I have World Creator as well, but I find that I often have to do some tweaking to get a usable lower poly mesh from it, and I usually rotate the UVs as a result. It is however perfect to create high poly meshes and bake masks from those. When I was playing around with it, I was able to get some surprisingly good looking renders off just solid colours.
Looking forward to your experiments!
Ok, thanks for the replies. I have just wanted to see, how this shader looks on the other terrains,
so I have copied the Sample Rocky Hill terrain material and applied it to some other terrain created in Blender.
The rocky hill terrain has some very distinct shapes to it, and the masks follow those shapes, so it's no surprise that it doesn't line up great on a spiky terrain like that.
Give this a try -- in Blender, bake an Ambient Occlusion map for your terrain. I don't use Blender so I don't know the process to do that, but I'm sure you can bake maps in it. Then use the AO map as one of your masks. Either way those spikes are pretty extreme, so you'd almost certainly need to use some masks specifically designed for the shape.
You can also try swapping out the rocky hill masks for some of the sample ones included in the set.
Or you could also do a less extreme terrain, with more rolling hills, bumps, rocks, etc (or just scale the vertical down so they don't spike up like that), and then you'll get nice results from many more of the masks available without having to bake something special for the terrain.
Remember that the shader relies on masks, so the more extreme your terrain, the more likely you'll need to create custom maps specific to the terrain piece.
If you have Substance Painter (which rocks), you can create masks based on position information, Normals, and of course curvature and ambient occlusion.
I think you misunderstood. I know I'll need to build the surfaces in LW by hand. Been doing that for some months now with the "simpler" surfaces. Just wondering how well this product would help in "dissecting" more complex Daz terrains to see what's going where. Or is that just as readily doable with existing DS tools that I haven't gotten into just yet?
I don't think it would help with that at all honestly.
This is a fairly complex shader on its own, but has no correlation to what you'd be doing in Lightwave, and wouldn't help you figure out terrains that don't use this shader. It was intended to bring greater depth, functionality and options for making the most out of maps created in other programs into Daz Studio, not the other way around.
I don't have Substance Painter. So, I'm wondering if E-Arkham or you would consider developing an add-on or script to develop maps based on elevation such that we could specify ranges of elevation to apply the diferent shaders ?
I'd be surprised if Blender couldn't bake things like that to maps.
Thanks E-Arkham I appreciate the feedback.
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Richard already answered, but just to clarify a bit further -- what you're asking for wouldn't just simply be a script or add-on, it'd be a complex shader all on its own. It'd be its own product and would do basically the opposite of what this one was designed for (eg, mesh based rather than map based).
Of course, no problem. I think the main thing that would help you to "dissect" existing terrains is to go through the standard Iray shader and learn everything it does. I don't use Lightwave myself, but there are direct parallels between Iray and materials in 3ds Max so it really shouldn't be too much a hurdle.
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to you, too
Thanks for all of the tips, everyone.
I do have a Substance Painter, but have no idea yet, how to create such masks - any further tips on that, please.
In the meantime, another terrain created in Blender, with material from the set.
I like the look even without the proper masks, so it is worth to spend time to learn the package.
Well, this is a topic all on its own, but here's a basic rundown:
Make sure your terrain is UV mapped. I don't know how Blender's UV tools work, but there should be options to just do a basic unwrap and then relax the UVs a few times. I prefer to clean up the UVs, orient them, and make them fill the full area for the best texture resolution, but for the sake of learning, you don't have to do this right now. Just flatten/unwrap, relax a few times, export the terrain.
If you have a high poly version of the terrain, make sure it's in the exact same spot as the low poly and export it as well. Typically it will already be in the same spot as long as you didn't move it and you created the low poly from a high poly sculpt. If you don't have a high poly terrain, don't worry about that for now.
Import your low poly terrain into Substance Painter. Look for in the texture set options for the "Bake textures" button. That'll bring up a dialogue -- uncheck the ID (unnecessary here), and check the option to use the low poly as the high poly if you do not have a high poly mesh. If you have a high poly, you'll use the dialogue to import that.
You might want to change the size from 512x512 to 2048x2048 to get better resolution. Also uncheck thickness if you don't have a high poly, but keep that checked on if you do have a high poly. Let those bake.
Create a layer. Give it a solid colour, doesn't matter what.
Create a second layer above the first. Give it a solid colour, different from the first. Doesn't matter what. Assign a mask to that layer.
With the mask selected, you can add paint layers, generators, fill layers, etc. Generators will use the textures you baked above.
This is the "how long is a piece of string" part. Do whatever you want here for your mask. Painting stuff in by hand is probably the easiest to start, but as you get more comfortable using SP you can do more advanced things like combining many different generators, fills, etc for a very complex mask that follows the contours of the mesh, or covers just the high or low parts, etc, etc. A high poly terrain will really unlock the potential here.
When you're done creating a mask, right click on the mask layer, and there should be an option to export it. That's the texture you'll use in the Muelsfell Shader for one of your layers.
If you used a high poly terrain, you can use the normal map that SP baked for you as your macro normal in the Muelsfell Shader.
As you can imagine, you can create some very complex results using these techniques and a high poly terrain.
Thanks a lot, for this rundown, E-Arkham.
I have created another UV-mapping for the same terrain and the render looks more interesting to me.
Below is the AO map, I have created in Blender:
I attach also .zip file with the OBJ of the terrain.
Elevation in Substance Painter:
Bake Position map
Make two fill layers, top being one color, bottom being some other color (black and white is best for masks)
On top layer, add a white mask
Click on the mask, 'add generator'
Change generator to Grayscale Converter, use the Position map as input (down near bottom) and select Grayscale type: Green channel (Y dimension)
Tweak balance and contrast, and there you go; easy elevation mask. Blend with other masks and effects.
Thanks a lot for the tips, Oso3D. Looks like, I will be busy, discovering the features in Substance Painter.
I was really happy to find that generator; I had been trying to do similar things in other ways and... grayscale converter works sooo much better
Wow, it really is a nice shortcut... I'd been using either the ground dirt or sun baked smart masks, and you have to fiddle with those a lot to get good results.