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Comments
My understanding is that the thing that is flattened into images are things like convex/occlusion maps, etc.. and that there are no public parameters exposed. I haven't exported and disected the results yet so I can only say based on the bit I looked up and what I understand of responses to questions I asked.
It's all a work in progress though so whatever it does today may not be what it does tomorrow.
Susbtance designers main purpose is to create textures and substances so I would be suprised if it did much more code than to correctly place the variety of maps that you can generate. Though you can input things like IOR and so forth so it may include that information but I'm not expecting it to be a good way to get really complex MDL shaders created.
Images alone won't drive the PBR engine, so there has to be some MDL to connect the maps to the functions Iray actually uses to render. That would include settings such as metallacity, roughness, reflectivity, Perlin noise, various math functions, and so on. That alone might be worth investigating, to see how they're pulling off some of the effects. They might be writing a generic file that relies on a more robust MDL library. That's okay, too.
Not all of the input nodes in Uber Iray have maps attached to them, and there are virtually no examples showing how, so everyone is just reusing the Uber shader for everything, and being universal in nature, it lacks some functionality and features. So it would be interesting to see what other people have come up with. (For some nodes you can't use maps -- any input that connects to a scalar in MDL cannot take a map, for example -- includes things like scattering coefficient used for SSS/volumetrics. So if they support these, there has to be some functions they're writing out, or at least calling into a library that provides the full functions.)
I understand they're working on a new beta that fixes the problem they have with exporting MDL. We'll know then, I suppose.