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Just came across this daveso....not overdone! It's...Wharhole-esque...but way cooler! I think it's awesome.
Hello all, not sure if anyone will come across this, but I have ColorWerx and have tried it on multiple different hairstyles as per the instructions laid out in this thread, but my hair always renders jet-black. No applications of base, mask or overlay hair will change it from black. I am selecting the hair in the scene tab and also in the surfaces tab....but no success. Any ideas?
Thanks!
Which version of DS do you use? Do you have the latest version of DS default shaders installed?
Also, sorry for the dumb question but are you sure you’re rendering with Iray?
I have the same problem. For some reason, Studio doesn't like applying shaders other than the standard, and anything that isn't Iray Uber Base renders black when I first apply it. The workaround I've found is to save the scene and reload it; then the shaders work as intended, and you can modify the parameters without any issue (but if you apply the shader to a new surface, you'll need to save and reload again).
@Uthgard
You have something else going on with your installation. What you describe isn't standard behavior for Iray shaders.
I know it isn't, but it's an issue tech support wasn't able to help with, As getsupercharged seemed to have the same problem, I told them what my workaround is.
I don't understand why 99% of the people who have enough skills to develop, for months, the most useful and amazing plugins, scripts, etc for DAZ barely ever take the 3 hours it'd take at the end to make a nice video tutorial of how it freaking work. And it's not just meant to be nice, but also to attract potential customers. Damn..
Anyway, thanks Slosh for passing by. Much appreciated.
1) The bulk of people ignore read-me's... heck, they ignore the copy in the product description.
2) Many vendors don't use English as a first language.
3)There is a very large contingent that will not watch videos and prefer a written manual and creator may not have skill and time to do both.
4) There is presumption that more complicated products are require a basic level of skills such as knowing the difference between a shader and a material preset.
I have tried the steps in this disccusion and it still doesn't work no matter what hair I use. It will apply the base color, you see the mask apply in the settings and when clicking the overlay, it again applies in the settings but the hair looks the same in the viewport. When you render it, it is the base color, no blending happens at all. Any ideas? I have tried this on 3 different hair types and on all 3 it does this.
Starting with the simplest problem, are you using the Iray preview? If you use a mode like Cartoon Shaded or Texture Shaded there won't appear to be any change in the Viewport, however switching to the NVIDIA Iray preview will make everything show up.
Yes I have tried the Iray preview which it does not show the blend and it's not there when I render either. It will only show the base color.
Which hairs are you using? And are you trying to get a blend from top to bottom? Does it not show a secondary color at all, or does it appear mixed in with the hair rather than transitioning down the hair length?
Good questions from @AlmightyQUEST. Different hair will result in very different looks depending on how it's put together. I can't really use some of the positioning offset shaders with Nydo Hair, for instance, because there are portions of the mesh where the color picks up in a very odd-looking place compared to the rest.
Could you list point by point what you've been doing, just in case? I get turned around backwards my fair share using pretty much any of the customization-heavy shaders whether they're for hair or anything else, just because of how many steps can be involved when there are multiple surfaces, tiling shaders, etc.
I've tried it on the Bonnie hair, Abigail hair and the Liv Hair. I've actually tried all types of blends on the hairs none which work. It doesn't show the overlay or secondary color at all. It only shows the base color I put on there. So if I do like a blonde base, apply a mask, then say an aqua color for the overlay, it will only show the blonde base color on any hair I've tried.
the way the masks apply to the hairs totally depends on how the uvmaps for the hair are laid out. I've found it best to pick my base color and for for overlay something obnoxious like hot pink and then turn on iray preview and try out differrent masks until it lines up how I want on the hair. Then I can go back and turn the overlay to the colour I actually wanted
The overlay ONLY shows in the iray preview or on render. So it can be a little fussy to get it right, but imo, worth the effort
LM
Hmm, none of those are the new strand based hair or fibermesh hair, which is often a reason for the blend to not show up (as opposed to different direction UV mapping which can lead to blending being visible, but in the wrong places/directions). Unfortunately I don't own any of those three, but for the Liv Hair, have you tried using the blending that came with that hair itself? It's different blending than the ColorWerks, but based on my understanding of how both of them work, if you can get the OOT blending to work on a hair, Colorwerks should work the same.
If you are looking at the surfaces window itself when you apply the overlays, do you see any changes to the settings? I would also try the "mask offset" option at either extreme, to see if at some point you see ONLY the secondary color.
I am assuming that you are using the original ColorWerks and not ColorWerks extreme.
I tested it with Abigail hair and it appears to work ok as shown in the attached image.
The settings I used for this are: base colour pink 01; blend mask 10; overlay colour yellow 3; mask position vertical offset 8.
I don't really like the masks used in this product as the transition for the horizontal blend is too sharp. In this test, I reduced the diffuse overlay weight to 0.1 to try to soften this and get a more natural blend but you can still see the sharp horizontal transition just above the tips of the hair.
.
I cant get any of the blonde hairs to look right with ColorWerks, wether I use sun sky or scene lights, they never look right, They are either too gray or too brown. They never look like the icons. The browns and dyed colors all look fine. I dont understand why.
It doesn't work for me either with the steps I list below.
That updates the Diffuse Overlay Weight (which is where the mask goes) and the Diffuse Overlay Color, but as you can see, there is no effect whatsovever. In order to make it work, I need one more step.
Then, and only then does it work and generally, that's exactly what I need. This is something that galien mentions in the settings used. Are there any hairstyles where the offset is not needed?
In this case, though, it's not perfect, which is why I chose that hair for this illustration. It's a very long style and even offset 8 will not get right to the end as shown in the third picture. It's never caused me a problem in practice and if it did, I guess I'd work out what it was doing in the shader when you choose an offset or perhaps edit the mask myself, but I wonder if anyone can tell me how it's supposed to be done because I'm sure it's not supposed to work like that!
I used this hair:
https://www.daz3d.com/turbulent-long-hair-for-genesis-3-and-8-females
But I also need that extra step with every other style I ever tried it on.
I have changed my mind since my last post, and I now believe that the masking functionality for this product is broken.
I have an open support ticket for it's sister product, Colorwerks X, as the masking system it uses was broken in the transition from Daz Studio 4.11 to 4.12. I now wonder whether this product was also broken by this Daz Studio update.
The masking system works by changing the vertical offset value in the instance tiling of the mask map used in both the diffuse overlay weight and backscattering weight properties. The default value is 0.5 and the presets can reduce this to 0.1 in steps of 0.05. What I have found is that to get it to work properly, the vertical offset value needs to be increased and that values between 0.5 and 0.9 give good results. For example, try changing the value for both of these to 0.8 and you should see a smooth transition between the masked and unmasked parts. (If you are not sure how to do this, you click on the mask image and select "image editor" and then switch to the instance tiling tab and the vertical offset parameter is at the bottom. You need to change this value for both diffuse overlay weight and backscattering weight.)
Thanks! Yes that all makes sense, both how it works and that it went wrong. Although I have used those settings once (for an opacity map), I don't think I'd have found that very quickly without your help, in fact I might not have found it at all.
I think 4.12 was the first version of Daz I used so this has never worked as intended for me. Seems odd there hasn't been a product update in all this time especially as it's been reported.
Thanks also for the mention of the sister product which I'd not noticed. That's gone straight onto the wishlist!
This product has always worked as intended for me. I believe it only works on trans-mapped hair, so if you're trying to use it on strand-based hair or dForce hair, then that's likely your problem.
I've attached an image that demonstrates the issue.
Both renders were done in DS 4.15. The hair is OOT Clasic Bob. This is a standard trans-mapped hair with uv maps that are non-reversed and are well designed to support horizontal hair blend transitions. The base colour was set to brown and the overlay colour to purple.
The portrait on the right uses the "Colorwerks Offset Vertical 6" to set the position of the horizontal blend transition. This sets the vertical offset of the masks instance tiling to 0.2. There are two clear issues: the overlay colour is applying to the roots of the hair rather than the tips, and the transition is sharp with no blending. The other offset presets allow the value to be set in the range of 0.1 to 0.5.
For the portrait on the left, I manually set the vertical offset of the masks to 0.8. This rectifies both issues and I believe that this is how the product should work.
I also have the sister product to this one, ColorWerksX. When DS 4.12 was introduced, I noticed that portraits that worked correctly in DS 4.11 rendered with the overlay color applied to the roots rather than the tips of the hair. ColorWerksX uses a custom shader, but now I think that both use the same underlying method to control the mask positions and that both products have been broken since the introduction of DS 4.12.
(Correction: looking at Colorwerks X today, it appears that the problem may have been fixed since I last used it).
Interesting, there does seem to be something strange going on here. The hair I linked and posted the shader pictures for is transmapped as I believe most (if not all) OutOfTouch hair is. Do you have a few examples that work without requiring the offset to be changed? I have plenty if styles and I've only tried it on about 5 or so (all transmapped), none if which work, but if I have any that you know to work, I'd be genuinely interested to give them a try if I have them, and happy to share the results either way.
This is how the blends are supposed to work, but this is not what I see. I see the portrait on the right.
I'm not entirely clear which portrait on the right you mean (mine or the promo image).
I used blend mask 3 for my portraits, but it would probably have been better if I had used mask 22 (which is the one that I think the promo image uses). I don't have the hair used in the promos, but I tested which values are required (for the tiling vertical offset) to reproduce the effects in the promo image. The results were 0.95 for the leftmost one decreasing to 0.65 for the rightmost one. The values actually set by the built-in presets are, from left to right, 0.45 to 0.15. A value of 1.0, gives a blend for the full length of the hair (for any blend mask other than mask 22).
I have attached a render with the values set to 0.65.
Yes, sorry, that wasn't at all clear. I see exactly what you see, I meant your portrait on the right. I tried 5 styles from different PAs and same every time.
I'll also be reporting this as I don't see that harm it can do. Thanks again for your help.
Sorry you haven't got this working yet. As you say, opening a support tciket can do no harm.
I plan to create a replacement set of "Move Down" presets (sadly, the originals are compressed, so cannot just be edited). If I do this, I'll post the presets here so that anyone can use them.