Make Shader Preset use Previously Assigned Color in Studio?

digitani

I am working on a toon shader for DAZ Studio, and it works the way I want all except for one thing: The color is hardcoded into the shader preset / shader.  I want it to work like the DAZ Toon Shader Presets where it uses the previously existing color as the base color for the toon shader.  Does anyone know how to do this or if it is possible?  I was not able to find a way short of writing a script to apply the shader preset and then alter the color automatically.

Richard Haseltine

A Shader Mixer shader? I think you may have to use the script approach - it's not soemthing I've poked at for a long time, and not in respect to values then, but the bricks as I recall have their default values which - in the old .dsa presets - came in before the check for ignoring maps, so it was impossible (with the base preset) to retain existing maps - I would imagine the same was true for values (such as colour).

digitani

Thanks for your reply, Richard!

Well, if you apply the dzToonMatte shader preset, it does retain the diffuse color of the previous material settings, even if it was a texture map.  Actually any of the DAZ Toon shader presets do.  I checked and they are .duf files, not scripts, so it seems like there must be a way to make that work.  I suppose those are not made with Shader Mixer, though.

Would you recommend making an old style .dsa shader preset script or sticking with the .duf and making a script that applies it and automatically sets the color based on the previous color?

Or perhaps there is a better approach?

 

 

Richard Haseltine

It depends on what they are - and it may be that a ,duf preset, being only data, avoids the issue anyway.