Dark grey floor suddenly gleaming white
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Okay, this is a wierd one. I loaded an old, old scene of mine from 2 or 3 years ago to reuse the same set and characters in a new render. The floor is a plane prim that I had applied some shader onto way back when to make it suitably dark in color. I don't even remember what the name of the shader was, and it doesn't now seem to have any actual graphical images in it I can see that point to a folder telling me what it might have been. Apparently it must have been a 3DLight shader, from the way it's formatted, tho. My hazey recollection is that it might have been a leather shader or something of the sort.
Anyway, the floor showed dark grey in the original render I did (which was in iray), and it shows dark grey in viewport, but when I render it in Iray now, it shows up gleaming white instead. I tried applying iray uber onto it, thinking maybe that would better identify what's up, and suddenly the floor went gleaming white in viewport.
What the heck is going on here? 0o
I recently had to reinstall Daz due to a technical problem that forced me to do a restore-to-defaults on my Windoze machine, such that it kept my files intact but removed all the non-Microsoft-provided programs, but I don't seem to have lost any of the Daz content files or stuff, on the other hand, it made me have to add back in my secondary Daz folder (which I don't think I had that shader on) and that I store some third-party and self-made content on, but I don't think the shader came from over there. Also, it reverted my Daz Studio interface to the straight-from-the-box version.
Would having been reverted to original settings in Daz have made it quietly ignore missing textures in a loaded scene (rather than prompt me to tell it where the missing images are)? If so, how do I turn that feature back on?
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I have noticed that when the roughness is dialed all they way up like you have in the second image, in the viewport the surface looks really bright like that. What's it look like if you render it? Also are you sure the first settings are Iray? they look like 3DL to me.
In iray it was rendering bright white like that in a new scene, with the shader the way I originally had it (i.e the apparently 3Dlight-format one), its why I've now gone back and loaded the original scene and started poking and prodding the shader I have on the floor. I had made NO changes to these parts of the original scene, merely moved some other stuff around and added new things... and was completely surprised when the floor showed bright white this time. I dug the original render out (I can't show it here, because it is very NSFW... so is the new one) and saw that the floor in the original render made 2 or 3 years ago was suitably dark and dull, like it was supposed to be. I then dug back out the original scene from a couple years ago and looked at the floor, and also did an iray spot render... and it rendered gleaming white, even though the floor is showing dark grey in viewport. I then applied iray uber onto it (to officially convert it to an iray shader) and instantly the floor went bright white in viewport.
I don't know if something "broke" in how Daz handles this shader, due to one or more updates to the underlying code over the past couple of years, or if something "broke" with the shader in my recent reinstall of Daz Studio (one of the internal file-paths imbedded in the scene file is different from how Daz now expects it to work, maybe?). all I know is, suddenly the floor is bright white, when it was dark grey way back when.
That is very weird. Something must have changed under the hood then. Maybe try cranking the Glossy Layered Weight all the way to 0, and making the Glossy Color a dark grey?
Okay, loaded the scene again, applied !Iray Uber Base onto the floor plane to convert it to Iray, and from there dialed Glossy Layered Weight down to 0, and set Glossy Color to black. The floor is coming out milky-white in Iray spot render. The fllipping heck?? 0o
Then tried setting the Glossy Color to grey, and it doesn't seem to be making a difference. It's still white in-scene.
edit:
Actually, on further inspection, I think the shader I have on there originally might be ...> Shader Presets > !vMaterials > Design > Leather > Car Leather because when I apply that iray shader, it looks more or less the same format in Surfaces, and behaves the same shows-up-white thing as before, and I can't seem to get the colors to change noticibly in that one either when I try to go dark dark dark on it.. I don't know where this one was from originally. Might have been one of those "Install this free set of shaders from the guys who invented iray" thingies, but I don't remember.
I suspect I may wind up applying ...> DAZ Uber > Rubber - Matte and set it to 16 16 16 or some similar color on both Base Color and Glossy Color.
Check if the 'Draw Ground' is on in Iray render settings.
Draw Ground was set to On (and Ground Position Mode is set to Auto), but if I turn Draw Ground to Off, I don't see any difference in how milky-white the floor is in Iray spot-render. And when I try changing the shader for the floor out to something else, I see the lloor change color even with the existing setting of Draw Ground to On. For instance, if I select the floor plane-prim and apply, say, ...> DAZ Uber > Fabric - Silk - Blue, the floor clearly changes to blue. I can toggle between Draw Ground On to Draw Ground Off, and it makes no difference as to whether I (now) see the floor as blue silk, either: I can clearly see it as such.
Can you maybe replace the floor with a primitive plane? And apply the default Iray shader, with these settings, everything else at the default.
Actually, the floor IS a plane-prim. A primitive plane is what I'd put down there originally.
Anyway, I'm wondering now if, because the shader I had originally placed appears it might be one I'd gotten as a freebee... my hazey recollection is that some of those had come from a thing where you needed to go in and install some stuff from another, iray-shaders-related program into another not-related-to-Daz folder, and then go into the folder where some parts of this particular set of Daz content in stored and do some twiddling in there to point part of the system back to that other folder, so that the iray stuff for this particular content works right.... but I forget what the name of the site was, and I think it's something I'd gotten via a link in the Freebies forum ages ago. I'm going to have to go find that thread over there again.
edit: looks like I need the NVIDIA MDL vmaterials stuff from the nvidia website, fortunately there's a link to it in one of the iray free shader sets on shareCG that uses this. Reinstalling it now. (I was trying to find the info from one of the threads in the Freebies forum here, but when I go to the link to the thread for that freebee iray shader set, to find the info on the vmaterials stuff, they took all the instructions and descriptions out and replaced the message with Retired. o0)
edit2: Okay, the ...> Shader Presets > !vMaterials > Design > Leather > Car Leather shader now works, it changes color in iray spot-render when I go in and change the color values in Surfaces... but the shader on the floor in my scene (before or after I invoke !Iray Uber Base on it) still doesn't seem to be working right. That said, I still think the shader on my floor, as loaded from the saved scene, is a 3DLight, not an Iray, from the very-simplified format of it in Surfaces.
Okay, later went back in and actually tried this idea, with those settings. Literally just made a new plane prim to the same size and position as the old one, hid the old one, then sat down and tweaked the Base Color numbers until it matched the number I see above (which turned out to be an RGB of 13.13,13 (Mockingbird Lane?? :D)) and I set the Glossy Color to match yours (which turned out to be the standard, preset grey color, 128,128,128), and then named the new plane-prim Floor (Plane) II: The Replacement.
Didn't even have to apply !Iray Uber Base since, at least for me, lately newly created prims show up pre-configured to Iray shader format instead of the (apparently?) 3DLight they used to arrive as. And it actually looks reasonably close to what I had the floor color looking like in the original render, ages ago.
That said, I am still wondering what in the petunias of heck happened with the original shader, and if I'm gonna have other ancient scenes of mine have similar issues at random. 0o
Sweet! I'm glad it worked out. It is so strange that the original floor just got so messed up. Maybe if the original scene was saved with an earlier version of DS, it might have an older version of Iray that doesn't play nice with newer versions of DS? Ah well, at least it's all good now.
That's the thing, though... if some shader that is from "an older version of Iray" breaks when you load a scene that has it saved in it... wouldn't that also mean that the original shader pack, sitting in my Content Library, would also break in the same way? That would strongly suggest that I have shaders sitting in there, possibly ones that I payed money for 2 or 3 years ago, that might break because of changes in Daz. That is kind of annoying to think about.
My problem here is, I don't KNOW what shader pack this particular shader came from... because there's nothing in the details or settings contained in this applied shader that I can find to determine what shader pack it came from, or who made it, in order for me to go back and check if the shader pack itself is now broken. And going systematically through essentially hundreds, if not thousands of shaders in my Content Library to track it down again is not really an option. 0o
I guess, fundamentally what I'm asking is... how would one determine which shader pack this came from, to see if it was a purchased one (vs a freebee from ShareCG or something), and then if it was a purchased one, thus be able to go issue a trouble-ticket on it so that either the product can be repaired (if it had a hidden flaw that made it uneccessarily break in later versions of iray) or that an undiscovered bug introduced into Daz can be noticed and fixed? Or what if it turns out this is an indication that something got broken at my end? (I.e. I'm now missing some componant from my Daz's files that everyone else has but I now don't? I actually DID have that happen to me once with an old Genesis 1 figure where the skin stopped working right, it eventually turned out, because some related graphics file stuff was missing elsewhere in my system.)
I suppose I could make a scene having JUST the borked floor, with the old shader still on it, and post it here to see if someone else is having the same wierd issue I am.
All right that is weird. I downloaded that, and I'm seeing the same issue when applying the default iray shader. The only way I could get the plane darker was to make the diffuse color pure black. I am using 4.11, mind you, but still. Clearly this is some weird, (I hate to say it) bug. And the original settings must not be a non-default shader because it didn't throw any errors when I loaded it up.
I am at a loss.