Question on DAZ Big Cat 2
ThatGuy
Posts: 797
in The Commons
Help! Why does my DAZ Big Cat 2 (Lion) load with grey tongue and teeth? When I go to the surfaces, the correct image map is loaded, so I'm not quite sure how to fix this. Any help would be appreciated.
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Just checked and mine is too - renders grey in Iray but OK in 3DL
Edit: Converting to Iray Uber shader, the diffuse map is missing for tongue,teeth, and inner-mouth in the surfaces tab (manually applying it makes it render normally)
If it was released before Iray, they might not feel they have to set up shaders for it - but most other products convert with maps intact, whereas this one is just weird - the maps for those surfaces (only) disappear when converting. You can manually add them back in and it renders fine - just make sure to save it as a new preset (scene sub-section or something) to use in Iray in the future.
A materials preset would be what to save as....
It's not the shaders... the surface is completely different in setup, not using the normal "format". You can easily see if you compare if you look at it and the other surfaces.
What annoys me to no end is the (maybe perceived) arrogance with which the DEV team treats the subject.
ahhh thank you all. I'm glad it's not just me going bonkers here. BeeMKay, yes that is right. The surface set up is totally different and I couldn't figure out how to add the maps in.
3DL makes it fairly easy to come up with custom shaders, which lots of products use. There isn't an easy way to convert them.
The easiest way is to use, say, surface values for a G2M Iray dude, then swap the maps.
DAZ has thousands of older products that were released before iRay arrived on the scene, so it would be a huge effort for them to go through them all to see if they did or did not work properly in iRay. Having said that, where a glaring error is pointed out to them, particularly with what is still their premier "Big Cat" model, it is not unreasonable to hope that they might at least consider making an update.
Well, I brought this up to CS about two months ago, and CS kindly referred it to the DEV team.
The answer of the DEV team was that this isn't considered a bug, as it works in 3DL.
I'll refrain voicing what I think about the DEV team, because I don't wish to get my post deleted again.
But... it's not a bug. I mean, if you had a scene with a ghost shader and converted it to Iray, the ghost shader wouldn't convert properly. That's not a bug. It's a shader that doesn't convert.
It also takes less than 2 minutes to work around -- convert it all to Iray, add the mouth/tongue texture map to Inner Mouth and Tongue surfaces's diffuse channel. Adjust a little to taste, but that's pretty much it.
Given what Will has said (ie the failure is in the shader converter), then the dev team would have create iRay shaders for all surfaces of the Big Cat, which would be a fairly big fix as people would be expecting those shaders to look good in a variety of lighting situations, and would issue bug reports if they did not look good. The alternative fix would be to change the 3DL shader to one that converted OK for iRay, which would change the look in 3DL, and get a different set of people upset. The 3rd alternative would be to enhance the shader converter, but we can only guess how much work that would be. I can understand why they thought the best option was to do nothing.
I seriously doubt that they would have to create a SHADER for surfaces in question. Just like everything else, they'd create a preset for the Iray Uber Base...
And the distinction between shader and shader preset is very important in this case. Because it could very well be that the original 3DL material is a custom SHADER and not a preset for the Daz Default or HSS or omUberSurface (very unlikely to pwSurface or AoA-SSShader) which means it's not likely to fit into what the 'autoconverter' can deal with.
The DEV team, so named, wold be the team working on software. Asking them to fix this would not be practical - a one-to-one conversion between arbitrary 3Delightshaders and iray, or vice versa, would not be possible as far as I know. I think Havos is probably right about why the Content Production team is not updating this figure.
My suggestion would be to save a Shader preset from the teeth and mouth surfaces of a figure with Iray settings and apply that, then switch to the Big Cat maps (some experimenation may be required to figure out which maps to use where).
The person who went to th DEV team was CS, not me. As a customer, I therefore have to assume that the DEV team is the correct group who is respoinsible for having items work properly.
Also, all the other surfaces of the DAZ cat have the proper setup; it's just the mouth region that obviously got "forgotten" by whoever created the cat for DAZ to buy. The product therefor, even if it did render in 3DL, was faulty to begin with. It was negligence of the QS team to overlook the discrepancy in the surface setup. And now, everyone is paying the price for that. Especially those who are new to DS, and to who surfaces and conversion is like a book written in a foreign language. You, me, we can work around the problem. Someone who is new will have problems, will be frustrated, and might even return the cat in favour for some othe rmarketplace's cat. It's lost business and lost customers.
For the record, in my ticket, I only asked for them to fix the cat so that it uses one type of surface. I did not ask for Iray surfaces. I just asked for them to use the default 3DL Ueber shader that the rest of the body uses.
But I guess that that is asking and expectging too much, and I'm an idiot for doing so.
Have a nice day.
Yes, gosh how so very true - sack the lot of them for allowing a product to hit the streets that took no notice of a yet to be announced, mentioned, released new render engine. I mean, how dare they not know what was going to happen 2 or more years down the line. And yes, that IS sarcasm laid on with an over-sized trowel.
Now, that said, it does surprise me a little that a bit of the beastie (mouth area) is custom shaders whilst the rest is not. With the obvious differnces put to one side is there a great deal of difference in textures, etc., between the inside of a big cat's mouth and any other mammal's, such as that of a human? Just as I would, and do, look at and adjust the material/shader settings when using a render engine other than 3Delight (Octane. LuxRender and Iray) I also do that for products made for Iray that I wish to use in 3Delight. A bit of work, but hey until the Dev team come up with a proper 'make art' button, some assembly required, batteries not included, this product may contain nuts.
The use of custom shaders is hardly likely to be an error - they need to be deliberately created and applied. As far as I know the custom sahders on the Big Cat, and I think the Dragon and/or the Horse, were a deliberate choice - they did produce comment at the time, as I recall getting them into Lux Render is an issue too.
Just to help clear up; it isn't a "got forgotten" situation, those surfaces use a custom-built 3Delight shader that doesn't work at all in the Viewport (which uses OpenGL, not 3Delight), this is why they're grey when you load the figure. Conversions to Iray, whether automatic at render time or manually using the Uber Base converter, almost always don't play nice with custom shaders and generally need to be gently massaged (in some cases, using a large sledgehammer...) before they'll look right.
Yeah. Other things that don't convert well, in my experience:
Dystopian worker bots (which have a bunch of unique shaders)
Bot armor (same deal, and some of the surfaces require said sledgehammer because you can't even APPLY an Iray shader unless you first go through shader mixer, which is nuts)
Anything with Chrome shaders
Any of the outright unique shaders (grass, rock, ground shaders)
with the dragon 3 when I did it in iray using the iray uber shader (before I got the iray skins btw) it looked pretty good gave the dragon and dinos a sort of shiny/slimy kinda looking skin thought looked pretty cool same with teeth, only problem were the eyes. Probably the only way to get around the Cats after iraying is doing postwork recolouring of the mouth
Just zero out the chrome by applying a 'blank' Daz default to it, then use either one of the 'shiny' presets in the Daz Uber or Nvidia MDL example folders. Or the chrome from Tom's Iray carpaint package
Most of the rock/grass/snow are built on 3DL's microdisplacement...so no, they just won't work the same.
Most of the other stuff...do the out right replace with the default and start building a material from scratch, often it's a lot faster than trying to tweak what was there.
Since I obviously failed to understand that a customized 3DL shader means that the setup also doesn't look like something I'd expect to look like a 3DL shader, I'm also quite obviously the idiot here. Thank you for explaining this to me. It would've spared me quite a bit anger if this had happened at an earlier stage "It's a customn 3DL Shader, which surface tab format has to look like this and only works like this" from those who declared it as a non-bug would have been great.
But now I know, so...
I owe everyone an apology. My anger was quite obviously misplaced, and uncalled for. I hope you can forgive this burst of temper.
No problem...if it didn't happen once in a while, I'd have to check you blood color and the roundness of your ears.