IRAY or DAZ-MATERIAL glitch... Metal flakes repeating patterns not seamless.
JD_Mortal
Posts: 760
Lately, I have noticed that my "Metal flakes" materials all have a checkerboard or grid-like repeating pattern.
If you increase the flake-size, you can see where the issue is. It is clipping to a cube frame, instead of drawing the vectors across the overlap, like it use-to.
This results in an uncontrollable grid-like pattern on any surface with the metal flakes. (Horizontal and vertical lines).
It was my understanding that the flakes were designed to be 100% uniques per each of these "cells", however, now all cells seem to have lost that unique origin per grid, and just repeat the same pattern over and over, from 0,0 (Leading to the same corner drawn over and over again, instead of one contiguoius vector-pattern.)
Making them smaller helps a little, but defeats the purpose if you make them all so small that they just look like a solid surface when rendered. Anyone have any suggestions for a quick fix?
This is just the !Uber material... Not sure if it is just that material where this is happening... They may have messed with the shader settings and broke the metal flake... (Daz essentials) did just update. I am not sure if that is one thing they updated.
Attached images shows how LOW I have to go, just to make it unseen, with flakes so microscopic, they can't be seen, it just becomes a solid color, essentially.
The next few show the pattern exists on every size higher, which it shouldn't exist at all, it is not supposed to be a repeating pattern at all.
The last two show where the "error" in the pattern exists. You can clearly see the "cut line", where the vectors stop drawing and do not overlap, as they should. If I pulled-back a bit, you would also see the repeating pattern, per grid, which it should also not be doing.
I remember, when I was playing with this before, that there were TWO vector layers. One was large, like this, and the other was small, like the middle one. Each had a setting that could be adjusted, so you could not see any repeating patterns, even when it didn't have repeating patterns. (It was more like a microscopic noise, sub-surface setting.) I am just not seeing that second option anymore. Everything just modifies this single erronious pattern. The pattern doesn't even change. It may as well just be a static JPG or PNG.
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Comments
Which product is it that you are using, JD? Okay, I guess that you may have left. I'm guessing that you are using the Essential Iray Shaders package? From what you have shown, the effect that you are seeing would suggest that you have tiling set for the surface. That would normally only be used where you are using image maps for your channels and those image maps are designed to be seamless. Your screen captures do not show all of your surface settings so I do not know if you are using any texture image maps or not. If you are not, and your screenshots are of the actual object you are trying to apply the materials to, I cannot think why you would want to use tiling. Tiling should be set to the default values (1 x 1) if you are using entirely procedural settings, which it would seem you are. Check under Geometry in the Surfaces tab to see if tiling has been increased from the defaults. If it has, try resetting it back to 1 x 1 and see if that resolves the problem.
It is just the primitive shape, but it happens on all surfaces.
I just select the material, then apply the Uber shader to it. (I don't remember where that exact shader comes from. I just remember someone saying it was part of the update, when they switched to IRAY, to be used as a generic auto-convertion of the old and default daz shaders, to the new shaders.) It is the only way I know of, to get access to the IRAY properties, since there isn't just a simple "select shader properties", to turn things on and off.
Adjusting the tiles has no impact on the display, at all.
I did try adjusting the tiles, but it is not tile-based, it is only orientation/normal based, it doesn't even read the material UV mapping. Seems like it is projection-based, treating the surfaces as one whole surface. Primitives, like unpainted surfaces in sketchup, have no actual UV-mapping, that I know of. I know the metal shader is just a "trick", like "noise"... A formulated stream that is applied to a surface.
For the moment, I am just using a custom made normal-map, which is actually just random noise. It is giving me more realistic and better results, faster... Unfortunately, that IS tied to the UV mapping, which makes the use of the primitives almost useless to me now. (Not like they had much function before.) This isn't happening ONLY on primitives though.
The properties in the Surfaces pane are determined by the shader - there'd be no point in having a way to turn properties on if the sahder couldn't use them.
No.
No, the Daz Uber Base shader does use UVs and the primtives are UV mapped, if you mean the oens created from the Create menu in DS.
Never tried to load an actual UV mapped material onto a primitive, other than the plane. That answers that uncertanty.
Well, turning on a shader, like IRAY or DEFAULT or 3Dlight, should just apply those shaders, and give the available options to select to use, or not. (Talking about just being able to select a surface and simply "select", the material-shader "type"... Instead, we have to hunt for Uber, every time, or use the limited and wonky default shaders, or whatever those oddball "other shaders", are, which sometimes appear. (Older 3Dlight, or just custom shaders that you can't remove for some reason. They just stack onto the othershaders, and some have hidden values you can't adjust. They just don't show in the sliders. I just scrap those items. lol.)
I didn't say Uber doesn't use UV, I said the Metal-flakes (the thing this post is about), within uber, doesn't. It is not altered by tiling or orientation of the UV map, it is only altered by the NORMAL of the surface. (Face direction) At-least on mine. If it was UV-mapped, it would get larger or smaller with adjusting the tiling. It only gets larger or smaller, by selecting the slider that says "Metal Flakes Size". The UV mapping does not alter when you adjust that slider, for the texture... just the texture of the metal-flakes. So it is not UV-mapped. Daz doesn't do "Multi texture-mapping" yet... (Unless you count Iray's Projection-mapping, which is a form of multi-mapping.)
It isn't just the uber-shader... it is everything with "Metallic Flakes". I just checked all the other ones too. They all have the same exact repeating pattern, no matter what the surface is, or what the tiling is, or what the orientation is. On the default settings, with the default rendering settings, it is fine, because daz renders blurry and noisy. But I am rendering production quality renders, and all I see is that pattern, or a solid color, if I go any lower than the default settings. (Thus, no actual "flake" in the render. Just a metalic shine, which I can get without the flake, faster. I needed the actual flake... The shimmer, as light orientation changes. But without the "grid pattern", or the obvious tiled-texture look.)
If I slide it up, so there is no repeating texture... it looks like a 1970's retro art deco piece, nothing like metal flake at all. The last image in the set, a few posts above.
The image below shows that it is NOT UV mapped... {The metal-flake, not the actual object. That may have an actual UV-Mapping.} (Seam still present. Though the noise-pattern is not the same as it was the other day. It is still tiling, but this random patch is not as noticable as the other one, the other day.)
All other settings are just the default settings...
The cube and sphere look exactly the same. Same patterns, same lines, same repeating tiles. (On the cube, it is on the left-hand side, running vertical. and near the middle, running horizontal.)
I've looked at this, and I can replicate the repeating patterns. They occur even on a plane with no subdivisions, and with no tiling specified. However, I suspect that they are a natural part of Iray's underlying noise algorithm and not a new or particularly troublesome behavior.
Instead, I think that the problems are that your particular scene and settings are magnifying what should typically be invisible. I see that you are using a density value nearly two orders of magnitude higher than the default (82 vs. 1). Your size setting in the first (artifact-free) render may not be absurdly small: since the layer uses real-world units, it depends entirely upon how big your object is and how closely you're zoomed in. The "Midnight Blue Car Paint" provided with Daz Default Resources uses a flake size of 1.3mm, but it's designed to be applied to a 4-meter vehicle and viewed from more than a meter away. It's probably worth studying as an example of "realistic" uses of metallic flakes -- it perhaps shows a tiny hint of repetitive patterning when viewed without the top coat, but it totally disappears amongst the reflections when the top coat is at full strength.
It does use the object UVs, because when you scale the object the metal flakes will scale with it. It does not use tiling, however.