Shades of life -- same basic shader?
Oso3D
Posts: 15,094
I'm curious as to whether the three shades of life products use the same sets of shaders, except for presets and textures, or whether there is any difference in the shader design between them.
https://www.daz3d.com/shades-of-life-bark-booster
https://www.daz3d.com/shades-of-life-urban-construct
https://www.daz3d.com/shades-of-life-nature
I mean, personally, I can get textures easily. What I REALLY want is the underlying projection shaders -- so I only want to buy the cheapest one. But if, say, there's something different about the Shades of Life: Nature one... then that influences my decision.
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I own natue and urban construct. How would I check for you to see if they are the same or different?
Um. Good question.
Apply Nature shader, duplicate the object, copy the material.
On second copy, apply an equivalent Urban Construct shader (same projection, I ugess?), paste the material over it.
Then render them both and see if they look the same, or look at the entries for them?
Any help would be appreciated.
I only have the Nature one, in which all the work is done by this file which sets up all the Shader Mixer bricks used by the product:
/data/DimensionTheory/ShadesOfLife/DT-ProjectionShader/DT-ProjectionShader.dsf
Now looking at the ReadMe Filelists for the Bark Booster and the Urban Constructs ones, they shows exactly the same file name and location, so it would overwrite the original if installed, so I presume they must be identical.
Are you by any chance researching for your Iray shader WIP? I saw your posts about that in another thread recently. Good luck with that, I'm looking forward to someone coming up with some projection shaders for Iray (wish I had the skill myself but one look at the shader mixer setup for the basic Iray Uber shader is enough to scare me off!)
Well, actually I've been embracing 3DL lately (I haven't abandoned Iray, just expanding my use of tools).
The thing is, Iray already has a projection shader thing -- Iray Decals. Does the job nicely, except for displacement. The problem THERE is that Iray displacement just... stinks.
When I was working on my Iray shaders, I tried to add an option for procedural Displacement and... holy cow. It's a mess, I couldn't get anything that would ever sync up with the other properties, and eventually just gave up on it.
Iray decals, as an aside, are really awesome. Just add one, move it to about the middle of the body, set to, oh, box front/back two-sided, and change the scale until you see it. Coats the entire object with the new shader.
Ooh, something for me to play with next time I'm at a loose end! (If I can find where the decals go)
Ended up getting Shades of Life: Bark Booster. It's awesome!
I feel bad I won't be getting the other ones, but that is, after all, why I bothered buying FilterForge (and you never know, if they ever go on sale maybe I will do it anyway)
It sounds like MelanieL found the answer in the doucmentation, so I won't bother to experiment, unless you still need that.
Nah, I bit the bullet. Very happy with the results:
http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Slug-Caverns-ShadesofLife-587654198
(Caverns lacks ANY UV map. And while you can map it, you have to then wrangle with seams. But with Shades of life... thumb my nose!)
Yeah, looking neat. I used to use the Shades of Nature set quite a lot (along with the same PA's grass and rock shaders) until I went (mostly) Iray. I liked the way you can make a fairly simple self-made terrain and a few mishapen modelled blobs into fairly decent-looking landscapes, rocks, etc. I still use 3Delight sometimes when I want to use the AoA Advanced lights and then all those shaders are just sitting there waiting for me.
I tried out the decal thing on a prop and was mystified by it's non-appearance in the viewport or after rendering ... until I realised my basic beginner's mistake
of not noticing the bounding box for the decal node on the screen, so I was effectively putting the decals "inside" the prop not on its outside. When I twigged and used the parameters to expand the decal node and move it up the prop to fit, well... it's all going well. Now all I need is to hunt for some interesting effects to apply. Thanks for putting me onto that.
And here's a reprise of an image I was struggling to do before: http://willbear.deviantart.com/art/Flagstone-Moss-Giant-SOL-587693820
(The approach I did before was to UV map each time from the camera's angle... yeeeah)
Ooooh! That is an interesting character.
All of the base shader files for these sets are exactly the same, you won't find different features in any of them only textures and presets.
I know how to make a projection shader for Iray but everything I've seen tells me camera mapping wouldn't be possible. The only options I'd be able to add are cubic, spherical cylindrical etc. None of which I feel would be as useful or interesting as camera mapping.
If you could make an Iray cubic/whatever mapping that works with displacement, I'd be lining up to buy it.
Because that's the ONE thing I really want that Iray Decals doesn't do, and exporting as obj, changing uv maps, and re-importing is a real PITA.
If you can adjust uv maps by angle, then you could sort of strong-arm camera mapping. I did something like that with one of my stone giant experiments -- I exported the giant and, in UVMapper, remapped it with the model rotated a bit so that it was, more or less, facing the camera. But REALLY CLUNKY and annoying. (For one thing, I would have to do the whole process over if I ever moved the camera or adjusted the figure pose)
In the meantime, I've been enjoying the heck out of the Shades of Life thing. ;)
Specifically, it would be very useful to have shaders that ignore UV maps for a number of situations, avoiding seams. My procedural shaders, for example, let me make seamless surfaces on a wide variety of models. However, people often want specific textures, which my stuff can't handle (also can't handle displacement).
I'm glad you like using the shader! I feel like it's one of the more useful things I've made once you get into fine tuning it for specific needs.
The projection shader that comes with Shades of Life is essentially doing what you mentioned by manually re UV Mapping the model, only it does it on the fly through the shader at render time. It relies on some conversion of UVs to normals and editing the normals before converting back to UVs. I can do the same thing more directly through Iray, the options are just a little more limited and exclude camera position. Possibility is there to make it come from a single direction similar to how the camera mapping was but it's uneditable and comes straight from the Z axis, for the effect to work well your camera would have to come straight on from the same angle and that's pretty restrictive. Mapping also doesn't seem to play well with tiling options and default scaling is off. To get anything that looks decent it had to be scaled down to 1% it's normal size but for some reason displacement completely ignores this scale, so once that is changed diffuse and displacement don't line up.
Other options like cube mapping kind of defeat the purpose in my opinion. They remove the seams created by UVs but they just place them somewhere else. Camera mapping doesn't completely remove seams either but the way it works means they are out of view 99% of the time, which is what I think makes the concept legitimately useful for creative purposes. Those options also have the same issues with tiling and scaling that I can't figure out or even be sure if they're functioning properly.