Help with L.I.E. Using a Metal Shader

Mr Scott

Hi all, I am tring to add a immaage in LIE to a surface that I had previously applied a metal shader too. That metal shader is Mec4d PBS Shaders for Iray. I am having no luck with this. I tried applying the immage in the Base Color, Metallic Flake, and Top Coat channels and nothing shows up. The most I can get to happen is with the Base Color channel where I can at least get the immage to show up in the Viewport. However, when I go to render, the whole surface turns black and even with a mask layer it does this.  I am not really sure what else to try? Any suggestions?

Thanks!

Richard Haseltine

Metals don't use the diffuse (base) colour, you may need to try adding it to the reflection colour - or use it as a mask to turn Metallicity on/off so that your image is a apinted area (using the diffuse colour) on the metal.

Mr Scott

Thanks Richard! You were right I had to go into the diffuse channels. It was actually pretty complicated yet after that but I finally figured it out but getting on the right channel was a big deal. So all I was trying to do was put some red text on some sheet metal. To get this to work I had to put two immages of the exact same size that I made in GIMP onto the Diffuse Overlay Weight Channal after I set the weight to 1. The first immage was just a white square and that got put in the main layer. The second immage was my text in white on a black background that got put into the mask layer. At this point the text came out white. To change the text color I had to go to the Diffuse Overlay Color Channel, which was white by default,  and change the color to red. I tried putting a red immage first into the top layer but that did not work. It did not seem to care what color that immage was.  Then I tried changing the Diffuse Overlay Color without the png on the top layer and the color was washed out although it was still red.  After doing both the the effect was that the first layer was the right color and then the text came out through the mask layer. 

This was a pretty steep learning curve as I never really messed around with masks that much and I did not find much on how to do this searching the web. So maybe this will help other peoiple too.

Thanks again!