Making the Dance Studio Mirror look like . . . . a mirror. (reflectivity settings?)
RenderNovice
Posts: 56
in The Commons
Just purchased Dance Studio (SKU:9649} -- a Daz Original -- and am finding major problems. First, the studio "mirrors" look more like . . . polished black marble -- scarsely no reflection at all. (see attached screen shot) This is straight 'out of the box,' immediately after loading the set. Thet look NOTHING like what was advertised on the DAZ website. Second, when selecting flourescent light fixtures and attempting to apply the "Lights On" MAT, nothing happens. They remain off. Anybody familiar with this product -- or can you point to the likely mistakes I might be making here?
Comments
That sounds to me like a mixup of 3DL and Iray.
The product is so old it has only 3DL material, and you migth be rendering in Iray, If that is the case you need to convert the shaders to Iray.
Almost everything with an SKU below, say, 22000 is going to be made with only 3Delight shaders and materials (and sometimes Poser as well, but definitely not Iray), and will need to be reworked for Iray.
I'm kind of astonished that you got as much reflection from the autoconversion as you did; I wonder what Iray "thought" was happening?
Technically, I don't think there's a mirror shader in the default Iray shaders that come with Studio now, although I have a vague memory that polished aluminum (I think) works. Otherwise, there's a freebie shader available in this forum thread that works.
As a quick experiment, you could convert the mirrored surface to DAZ Studio's IRay Uber Shader and remove all image maps from it, then set the Diffuse color to white, Metallicity to 1.0, and reduce the Roughness until it pleases you. If the mesh has bad geometry or normals, the reflections may be distorted; but in that case you could probably just cover it up with a new plane and change the same settings to make the plane reflective.
So does the Silver shader that comes in the default set. (Older antique mirrors used to have a very thin silver film on the back surface of the glass, I think modern ones are more likely to use aluminium.)
For mirrors, I've had success using Daz Studio's Iray Nickel shader as per the instructions in this link: https://helpdaz.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/207530543-Getting-reflections-in-mirrors-in-iray
This is my go-to "make a surface a mirror" shader setting. It works well and is easy to apply.
Homestyle 2 Iray Shaders has a mirror shader I've used several times, and it looks like, reflects like a mirror, not polished chrome. Here's an image I found where I used it & link to larger version:
Yup; it shows the edges of the hdri.