Projection shading in iray?
Oso3D
Posts: 15,085
in The Commons
So there are some clever 3DL shaders like http://www.daz3d.com/shades-of-life-nature that get around some of the UV mapping issues that can crop up.
Is there any (easy) way to get them to work in Iray?
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
No...as long as they aren't pure procedural, you can use the images and mess around with the tiling to get them to somewhat behave, but as a pure projection shader...no.
The decal node utilizes projection mapping, although it does work differently than the way shades of life does, its not projected from the camera, but the node so you have to make sure the node is facing the correct direction, and it works on an an object level, rather than material, so A) you couldnt have it effect the face but not the eyes easily, B) you''ll need to duplicate the nodes for it to work across objects, thankfully thats pretty easy, but if you're doing it across 50 seperate objects, it wont be fun.
Ine penefit is that its really easy to use masks, the bloodstains here were created using decal nodes with a black and white blood spatter texture in the cutout opacity and a simple red material, so you can do all sorts of fun masking things would be hard to do with a shader.
Also there's probably some way to do it properly using shader mixer, but man it is a lot less friendly than blender's nodes. It would take someone a whole lot more competent than I.
You know, there's a reason Pixar continues to use a biased renderer for all their movies. IF we had the latest version of 3DL in D|S, and IF we had shaders that took advantage of the features, we wouldn't need to shoehorn a physically-based renderer to do unphysical things.
I always hated 3DL in Daz Studio because I felt it lacked symmetry with the universe -- or something I could never quite put my finger on. But I understand they've made some improvements in 4.9, and I've been wanting to brush up on customizing some of the shaders to do my bidding. If I could just figure out the lighting...
Pardon my ignorance about this, but can D|S render out to 3Delight Standalone, or is D|S limited to the version built in?
I'm just so torn between the easy lighting and style of Iray and all the fancy cool bells and whistles of 3DL (I'd LOVE to start using LAMH regularly, for example, not to mention PWEffects, grass shaders, grunge, etc)
I'm thinking of putting a bit of cash into things like AoA Lights and Projection shader to see if I the skills I have can translate into making good stuff with 3DL.
As it is, the tools I have NOW mean that if I want a reasonably detailed render in 3DL, I end up taking as long/longer than I would in Iray. Which... makes me grumpy.
Yes, look up Render to RIB. I have never done it and don't know specifics.
DraggonStorm has a RIB product http://www.daz3d.com/batch-render-for-daz-studio-4-and-rib . It can be handy if your doing really long renders or a batch at once.