Shader Theory 101
simon.fex_03751fa4a4
Posts: 20
Well that didn't take long. Here's my next probably obvious question. So, working with Urban Future 3 in Carrara (8.5), and as you all probably know, the shaders don't exactly show up organized. I *do* have Fenric's Shader Doctor plug, and that made a huge improvement already in one fell swoop. However, there is still some manual clean up needed, and in doing that, I was simply going down through the shader domain list, and dragging in the matching shader. Seemed straight-forward enough. In doing so, I was starting to notice two things. First of all, a lot of the Domains were just repeated Shader names, but I was only using a few, over and over again. For example, in all the "Tiles" domains, it was just pretty much Tiles 1 through Tiles 4, when there are well over a hundred actual Tile-category shaders, as I hope the first pic shows. Initially I doggedly kept dragging the same shaders over and over again to match the domain names... halfway through it became clear that there was no way all of these shaders were going to be used with this method of correction. So now I'm thinking... they don't all necessarily show line up on a one to one basis, right? I mean regardless of what Tile Number is in the domain list, Stonemason likely used all kinds of different Tile shaders to make the set, the important thing being that they still maintained the same shader "family" name... does that make sense? The other issue is that shaders that are clearly meant to have some color or glow or illumination to them come through as pitch black. So shaders like red glow, blue glow, or of the streetlight or lamplight shaders are just black (2nd Pic). Is it ok to go in and just manually change them to what would have to be no more than a best guess? There's no way I could know what settings he used originally so I'm thinking that's just a matter of getting as close as you can to what ever you think he was going for, right? Sorry for the ramble... I tend to over-explain things unnecessarily :-1
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So, you've loaded the the model. Did it come in with the shaders applied? Is it at this point that you used Fenric's plugin? Why do you need to manually apply the shaders?
Some of the issues that we Carraraists get with Poser shaders is usually a multiplier in the color channel that alters the hue, a bright color in the Highlight channel and a low number in the 1-100 numeric slider in the Shininess channel, giving the model a plastic look, and failure to load (usually) specular maps. Not all Poser models have these issues, so I tend to do a test render with the default light to see what I see.
This is my workflow with Poser style models:
I load the model from the Content Browser.
The next thing I do, is go to Edit--> Remove Unused Masters--> Consolidate Duplicate Shaders. Then Edit--> Remove Unused Masters--> Remove Unused Shaders. This step combines image maps, and can help reduce Carrara's overhead.
I then correct the shader issues.
Once that is done, I either save the figure itself to the Objects Browser in an appropriate directory, or I add my own.
The other thing I do is save the multi-domain shader to the Shader Browser. To do this, select the Model (if Genesis, it is Actor), and choose the Shading tab at the top of the screen. Click and drag the multi-colored shader ball to an appropriate shader directory, or one that you've added.
Once the multi-domain shader is saved, the next time you load that figure from the runtime, you just select the Model (or Actor) and the shading tab, then drag the saved shader from the Shader Browser and drop it on the muti-colored ball at the top of the model's shading domain list. All the old shaders will be replaced with the saved ones in one fell swoop.
Right, ok so I load the model... and I set the view in the Assembly room to textured... now usually, after a few seconds or so, the textures slowly show up on the model, some times faster, sometimes slower, sometimes one by one... In the Case of UF-3, I set the view to textured, and... waited.... and waited... for whatever reason, no textures showed up, and the whole thing stayed gouraud shaded. This is not the norm... usually at least *some* textures will show up, but at that point I still (have started to) use Fenric's plug, and that makes pretty much the rest show up... almost everything... not everything but usually close... and then I remove and consolidate the shaders... so... in this example, I waited a long time to make sure it was going to load whatever it wanted, which was nothing... I used Fenric's plug and most of the textures showed up, and if my original theory in that first post is correct, I needn't worry about Tile 1 domain carrying Tile 116 shader, as that looks to be on purpose perhaps, but I'd still like if someone could confirm that. More importantly the second issue... but I guess you're saying to look into the shininess channel but I can tell you already, in that 2nd pic I posted, those black shaders have nothing in the color channel at all, no multiplier, no color, nothing.... In fact here is a pic of one of the shaders in question, after Fenric's plug... nothing red about it at all :-/
There is no problem adding your own color to the glow channel. I would add it to both the color and to the glow channel. Just copy and paste it from one channel to the other.
Somethings just don't translate. The red glow won't show in shaded preview either, unless there is red in the color channel of the shader. In this case, the possible reason that Fenric's plugin didn't work, was that it was not image map based, but rather a Poser version of a simple procedural shader that Carrara didn't know how to translate. I'm only guessing about it though. Fenric could tell you if I'm off base on that one.
The Highlight/Shininess issue is one of the more common issues, which is why I mentioned it. It is not always going to be an issue which I also stated. Sometimes it will be completely different.
The glow is a specialized effect and is geared to Poser's shader engine in the original .mat file. Carrara dose its best to translate, but when it can't it will leave it blank. That is why many times the specular maps won't load. It's handled differently in Poser than in Carrara.
I don't own any of Stonemason's sets, so I can't tell you what should be in which domain. Sorry I can't help you more with that.
Hey don't be sorry, already your experience and input has been invaluable and enlightening.... I mean the whole image versus procedural shader thing you were talking about in regards to the Fenric plug makes soooo much sense once you hear it out loud, so to speak, although not having any Poser experience to speak of, I would have never arrived at that as a possible reason myself. And I hear you, highlight, shininess, a *possible* reason to look for, but not always the cause, and good to know about how poser handles glow and why it doesn't carry over... learning a lot, so very appreciated!
With Stonemason's sets, I typically do one of two things with the Glow channel depending on what is supposed to be glowing.
A bunch of the shading domains that need to glow are named something like "Red LED" or "Green LED". These usually require nothing more than a simple color. So, in both the Color and the Glow channel, I select Color and set it to the color mentioned in the name.
Other times, a a texture map is required in the glow channel, such as for a computer monitor or other kind of lighted display. In these instances I copy the Color channel (already configured with the texture map) to the Glow channel by holding down the Ctrl key and then clicking and dragging the Color channel onto the Glow channel. This will copy all of the Color channel's settings to the Glow channel.
In both cases, if I want more control over the brightness (or some other quality of the glow), I select Mixer or Multiply to combine the color or image map with some other parameter, such as a value or another color.
Also, as has been suggested, with Stonemason's sets the Highlight channel in every single shader always gets set way too brightly. I usually bring the Highlight channel down to almost pure black (L = 1 to 6% on the color wheel, and 0% for the H & S values). Shininess also needs to be reduced in most cases to somewhere between 1 and 4%. However, your lighting setup and personal preferences may require different values for these. The lower percentages in the Shininess channel create the kind of shine you might find on a rough, matte surface (which describes most of Stonemason's textures), while the higher percentages produce the kind of shine you would find a glossy surface or on highly polished metal.
This is all usually "good enough", but if there are specular maps available, they can be used in the highlight channel to make only parts of an object shiny, such as on a rusty pipe where there will be a little shine on the painted part, while the rusted part should have little or no shine at all. Unfortunately, the specular maps never load automatically when the model is added to the scene.
Carrara definitely requires us to do more work up front just to get to Poser or DAZ Studio's starting point. But what you can do after that makes it all worthwhile.
Yes: a lot of things that are supposed to glow just don't come into Carrara properly because it ignores Poser's ambient shader setting. I don't have a good way to fix that, because the information is lost.
I do wish DAZ would update the Poser file import facilities to read the newer rigging information and do a little better job importing shaders. Our Poser support is stuck back at Poser 4, and it's getting more obsolete every year... unfortunately, I suspect that what we'll actually get is marginally improved Genesis support and this new high-definition morph stuff.
You could load the model in Studio and look what the shader-settings are there, than translate this to Carrara. (I do it all the time with models I don't already have Carrara-specific shaders for.)
well I must say, you guys are crushing it for me, as in the good way, thanks for all the info... redhorse, yeah, I had already gone as far as just adding the appropriate color to the led_red's and the like, although I hadn't added it to the glow channel, but between you and ep suggesting it, that's a given, and peliminary stabs at it so far look promising... now, the whole texture map in the glow channel thing... intriguing, as I was having that very problem... some of the window shaders in UF3 - at least once they get into Carrara - just come up as either a solid color or something resembling some kind of dark grey fractal concrete pattern, although I guess it *could* be glass, hard to tell... so I'll definitely be trying your texture map glow process... Fenric, hey, obviously a fan, thanks for the input - full disco sure, I've been taking occasional runs at Carrara since version 5, and have been reading this forum since then as well, so I *am* aware of adz's general policies and/or priorities when it comes to the feature set for new releases or upgrades... I seem to remember things like 3D paint, negative lights, and soft dynamics were vocally asked for, for a looong time. Ok, so my point in all that is... I know for sure that I'm not, nor is this, the first time the issue of "hey daz, you own both Daz studio and Carrara, and although you bought Carrara so you didn't originate the code and all that jazz... good god how many years do you need to get the whole poser input thing squared away?" - but good god :-p... so what do you think? You *could* argue that eventually... the whining pays off... at least some times, so is there any payoff in keeping up an offensive on that particular front? Seems to me if you could seamlessly import the metric ton of poser content into C, that would be huge, and possibly bring new customers. I know they brought in FBX and Collada and all that, but that doesn't seem to help necessarily in this scenario. Anyway, at long last, Frank, yes... that seems like a plan right there, I shall investigate post haste, again, thanks all!
Fractal glass thing you mention may be that a transparency map wasn't brought in. Usually those go in the Alpha channel. I would look at the domain name and shader name to try and figure it out.
In the case of Stonemason's models, you don't usually need a transparency map because his windows are a separate material from the surrounding wall. It seems that Carrara's interpretation of what makes a good glass material in Poser doesn't translate well - at least whatever settings Stonemason uses don't do it for me. However, because he has all the windows as a separate material, it makes it very easy to cheat a little. I usually start with one of Carrara's procedural shaders, "Blue, Crystal" under the Glass category, which takes care of all the "black magic" of making convincing glass. I just drop this on the window material, then tweak the color from blue to more of a grey to give the window a slightly smokey appearance. I might also mess with transparency and translucency settings to get a specific effect, but in most cases the defaults will produce a very convincing window.
I don't have any of Stonemason's sets, so all I can do is speculate.