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Marble: as I understand customer service, so long as it renders properly in Iray, you can call it an Iray compatible product.
deleted for redundancy
That's not really the point is it? The product says that it includes 'Daz Studio Iray Material Presets (.DUF).' Marble is saying that it does not. They are 3DL materials that merely look acceptable when auto-converted for Iray.
Mind you, there are times the autoconvert will NOT work, and 3DL will end up looking horrible/blank/whatever in Iray. So presumably at that point a PA would be required to convert and tweak.
There was an architectural product that was like that, where all the glowing surfaces were Iray Emissive and the rest 3DL. Customer service: THAT'S FINE. mutter
As an aside, I find it extremely odd that autoconverting to Iray defaults to PBR Metallicity, when Glossy/Specular seems like it'd be a more appropriate/accurate/easier conversion.
Just as a matter of interest, I took screen-shots of the materials applied to a primitive: one with the DAZ Defaults which are loaded by default when the primitive is created in the scene, the other with one of those NVidia examples applied. I don't know enough to determine from the screen shots what makes one an IRay shader and the other not but someone pointed out earlier in the discussion that IRay shaders have a Material ID and that certainly seems to be the case in this little experiment.
one has Ambient - 3DL the other to me looks Iray
The MaterialID is a mechanism Iray uses with canvas renders to show the image with false solid colors defined for each material. You can use the colors in a photo editing program like Photoshop to mask out those materials. For example, I sometimes use it with a mirror surface when I want to replace the mirror with my own image. (A big girl looking into a mirror and seeing a small girl reflected back, for instance).
I suppose it's possible for an Iray shader to not have the MaterialID node, but it's not a correctly-defined one in that case. Because of this MaterialID is a good basic way (without opening the thing into the shader editor) to tell a surface is for Iray.
Oh wow...I think I will try some canvas renders then.
Excellent information! That alone has made this discussion worthwhile. Your example of the girl in the mirror opens up some interesting creative possibilities that I would never have considered. Thank you.
To my mind there is a difference between "Iray compatible" and "Iray shaders/materials"
The one frustrating thing about materialID canvas is that it doesn't deal with opacity, so it really fails with transmapped hair. Which is annoying.
@marble
My screenshots don't show the Daz Uber shader but rather shaders supplied by the PA in the Iray case. I also tried several other Iray shaders from several shader packs, They all have the same options, which are significantly different than the 3DL shader.
I was agreeing with and expanding your post.
@Tober
I'm not sure what the other poster was actually referring to. As best as I know that argument didn't make any logical or factual sense. The Nvidia MDL inforation does show some code for incorporating Iray into one's product, but I don't think that is relevant in this case. I frankly don't care what term we use. When I use/adjust an Iray shader, I have a number of options/sliders/choices that do not exist a 3DL shader. My personal view is that this issu is a lot simpler than some try to make it. If I have access to the Iray parameters we see e.g. material id, top coat, etc, It's an Iray shader. If I don't, it's not. If the PA just lets it be autoconverted and calls it Iray, I consider that a lie and, for myself, cause to avoid future products from the PA.
Sorry - crossed wires. :)
Exactly. And I mentioned back on page 1, I believe, that I would be fine with the adcopy specifying the product has Iray compatible 3Delight materials. As Will pointed out, not all 3DL shaders are compatible with the Iray Uber Base, so stating the 3DL shaders are compatible tells the consumer the vendor has tested the materials and there is nothing that will cause a problem when converted to and/or rendered with Iray. I find this an acceptable alternative when the vendor doesn't choose to do Iray materials. If the 3Delight materials are compatible, then the product supports Iray, albeit minimally.
So much this! Also, I like it when at least render or pair is the shame shot rendered in iray and 3dl. BUt I think it is reasonable to think iray material files means iray materials not 3dl that auto convert. I am okay with it saying 3dl works with iray. The otherway leaves a bad taste in my mouth. And honestly it hurts the 3dL or iray only PAs and their customers, well maybe not so much the 3dl folks but you get the idea.
Absolutely this.
If the product page states there are 3delight materials AND iray materials I expect to see materials specifically for 3delight AND materials specifically for iray. I will return for refund any product that does not do this. I don't care if the 3delight materials will work in Iray - I want and have paid for materials specifically for iray as advertised on the product page.
If the vendor thinks that the 3delight materials will work in iray with no problems at all, then I expect to see "3Delight Materials (will work in Iray)". NOT 3delight AND iray materials.
Here is an example:
Razor ONE Hair by SWAM
Razor ONE hair is a short hairstyle. It comes with:
10 Haircolor Options
02 Hair Transparency Options
09 Scalp Style Transparency Options
03 Scalp Transparency Options
and down the bottom is:
THAT I am fine with. But if it had:
DAZ Studio 3delight Material Presets
DAZ Studio Iray Material Presets
then I'd be peeved.
But you wouldn't normally matte out hair in this fashion. It's way too fine and detailed to create a usable matte for postwork. The MaterialID feature is for when you need to create a hold-back or poke-through matte and don't want to take the time to manually draw it in. If you need to create a matte for hair you could produce a node-based render where the hair is deselected.
If material ID worked in this fashion, it would be enormously helpful in doing outlining and other art passes within Iray.
I mean, I use LineRender 9000 and one of the things I use most often is ColorID... which is essentially materialID with opacity taken into account.
I have to side with Daz Customer service on this one.
How does your final render look??
it is not as though you paid a premium like buying a Rolex watch and upon learning it was fake being told;
"It tells time does it not??"
Though as an aside, this likely explains why many products to which I applied the Iray presets,
Come over to blender via teleblender and render just fine.
People saying that DAZ customers are getting a cheap bargain need to realize that is DAZ's business model and choice. These products aren't cheap from a commodity viewpoint as part of the price of a non-essential hobby, a hobby which has many more costs than just the DAZ models and addons to DAZ Studio. The customers and DAZ both know that these models are priced for volume commodity sales and not bespoke one-off usage prices that big businesses and independent contractors were used to seeing in the days before Poser and still do for bespoke exclusive work.
Is that really the point of 3D art? To render exactly how a vendor designed it? Might as well go back to paint-by-numbers.
If a material uses a 3DL shader, you cannot reliably adjust the shader to make qualitative and artistic changes with any degree of accuracy. For quality and control you simply must work with the parameters of the shader for the engine you are using. Advertising a product as coming with Iray shaders explicitly tells customers they can directly manipulate the surfaces to achieve the result they're after. If the product does not in fact come with Iray shaders, don't say it does. That at least clues users into the need to understand how to directly convert shaders.
Please, people. Stop lumping all Daz users as inartistic hacks. Some of us do this because we want to mix our own paint colors, and not just use what comes out of the tube.
Personally, I wouldn't even favor "Iray compatible," as that's subjective -- Compatible but ugly? Compatible but passable? Compatible with surprising resilts? Who knows. "Works with Iray" might be more accurate, as that doesn't suggest any level of competency in the auto-conversion process. It merely states a bland fact.
It is clear that @wolf359 and others prefer to render using other engines: Blender Cycles or Octane, for example. So for Wolf359, DAZ Default Shaders convert nicely for Cycles and if he wishes to tweak, he understands the Blender node system and can get the results he desires.
I may be one of those inartistic hacks but I also like to tweak the materials, albeit in the IRay settings in the DAZ Studio Surfaces Tab. If I'm presented with DS Defaults instad of IRay Uber then I don't feel I have been given the full range of possibilities. As someone pointed out - what should I do with the Ambient setting for IRay? So I manually apply the IRay Uber shader and go from there. I probably wouldn't buy something that stated - up front - that the so-called IRay materials are actually just auto-converted DS Default. So I'm wondering how many other products are following the same "it-will-look-ok" philosophy?
That doesn't make sense, the only standard the product creator CAN be held up to is whether the material presets included match up with what is in the promos. It wouldn't be reasonable to change the material settings, then say you don't like the final render and it is the fault of the product creator, right?
If you are going to apply your own material settings anyway, then why does it matter what materials are applied by default? Just apply the iray uber shader and make the adjustments you were planning.
The concern here is about what is included in the products. Regardless of whether it would be acceptable to have a product with "Iray Materials Settings" that rendered just fine in iray and matched the promos, the main concern in this thread are cases where the "3Delight" and "Iray" presets are identical, not just based off of the same shader. If the product is separating the two out, that either seems like a mistake (one of the two sets was not included properly), or seems deceptive to make people think two sets of presets were included when there was only one.
Besides the whole deception issue, it is a complete waste of download bandwidth and storage space to have two identical copies of each file, just to put one copy in an Iray folder.
Re: first paragraph. I believe the point Tobor was trying to make is the stock reply from customer service when presented with this issue implies we the artists should just use the product out of the box, and not bother to tweak it to be unique. I don't think he is suggesting that we should be able to blame the vendor if our own changes don't work. Trial and error, (lots of error,) is all part of combining a bunch of objects and coming up with a work of art.
Re: second paragraph. I prefer to work with the Iray renderer. So when I load "Iray Materials" I expect to find Iray parameters in the Surfaces->Editor. If instead, I've got 3Delight parameters, I have to take that extra step to convert to Iray. No big deal, right? Wrong. Every single time I load something from that product, I have to convert it to Iray before I can use it, in spite of the that fact it has "Iray Materials." But we're not talking about a single product. Many products have Daz's seal of approval, (by virtue of the fact they passed QA and were added to the store,) in spite of the fact their separate "Iray Material" presets load 3Delight materials that "work okay" in Iray with the autoconversion. How many times should I have to convert "Iray Materials" with the Iray Uber Shader? The correct answer is zero.
Re: third paragraph. And now you've hit the nail on the head. As an analogy, don't sell me a hammer and call it crowbar, and when I insist it isn't a crowbar, tell me it doesn't matter because it has claws like a crowbar and can pry things apart.
ETA: Actually, that analogy is a bit off. It should go like this: Don't sell me a hammer and a crowbar, and when I complain all I got was a hammer, tell me it doesn't matter because the hammer has a handle and claws and can pry things apart like a crowbar.
Well, this is what I've been trying to say too. And right now I am working on creating IRay materials for a garment I bought from Rendo, only that vendor made it clear that only 3Delight materials were included (though he showed promo renders of those 3DL materials rendered using IRay). The task of making my own isn't hard - I'm just applying the Uber Shader and a variety of purchased IRay shaders from JGreenlees and DestinysGarden. However, it has taken some considerable time but then the garment was probably half the price I might have paid in the DAZ Store. I also had to create my own morphs for it - good thing I'm retired with time on my hands :) .
That's a pretty good analogy! I think you hit the nail on the head!
Honestly! if DAZ had advertised it with 3DL shaders that work in Iray, it probably wouldn't have affected sales much at all, if any. Conversely if the PA had included actual Iray shaders, the price would have probably stayed the same.
The biggest difference is they wouldn't have customers who are peeved at being lied to.
I think it is the idea of missed expectations and an ommission... some people consider it lying by ommission, but I don't care about the past, but I would like to see it clarified in the future in about any of the ways we have discussed. At the very least hopefully some of the PAs will become aware that 3dl only is still fine and some of us iray only folks will even buy the product. I just wanna know the level of product, time and effort I will need to render it in iray as opposed to 3dl.
And what exactly does 'Optimized for Iray' mean; the new products, the Futuristic Lab and the Fusion Engine room both have this description.
When I read that I immediately think, O boy! They have created a boatload of Surfaces zones and PBR / iRay materials for all that product's materiel zones with no 2 unlike materiels sharing the same surface. As I don't own either product I can't speak to whether or not that is indeed what they did.
In short, I think of it as them having created iRay materiels similar to MEC4D's Vol 2 IRay Shaders (or Vol 1 or Vol 3...) but for the purpose of applying them to the geometry of the product not as a standalone product.
Others, will say 'optimized' means that they have combined the entire set of materials and textures into one big texture / surface atlas so that all materiels are combined on one surface for the entire product geometry. For customers that like to easily customize the look of a product and materiels being the easiest and most effective way to do that, that is the opposite of optimized as the customer must then use their time creating new materiel zones for they can easily customize iRay materiels for the product.