Surface Tool?

jake_f

I'm making my way through the User Guide page by page. 

http://docs.daz3d.com/lib/exe/fetch.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/userguide/daz_studio_4_x_user_guide.pdf

Is the User Guide up to date regarding the Surface Tool?  I'm asking because I can't find most of the options they are referring to in the guide.  Diffuse Color for example, where is it? The manual discusses Diffuse Strength at some length, but I see that option no where in the interface.  Have these features been renamed?

Gotta say, the Surface Tool seems a good example of muddled thinking regarding Daz's relationship with new users.  As example, is it really that much to ask that you could select say, the muscle shirt of G8M, and then in the surfaces pane select a clearly named "Change Color" option?  I don't see a single option in the surfaces pane that would make any sense at all to a new user, not a single one.

TIP TO DEVELOPERS: 

1) Confused people don't buy stuff.  

2) Advanced 3D artists are probably using other software.

Ok, so the Presets panel of the surface tool makes sense, is newbie friendly.  I should probably stick to that and forget about the Editor panel.

Richard Haseltine

Property names in the Surfaces pane depend on the shader - Diffuse is used in most 3Delight shaders, in the iray Uber Base the equivalent is the Base Colour.

RobotHeadArt

The guide says it is for DAZ Studio 4.6 which pre-dates Iray and so it does not cover Iray settings.

There is no "change color" because there is no one surface setting that controls the color.  It is a combination of multiple settings that yields the final rendered color and even that can be affected by the lights and other objects in the scene.

Roman_K2

Good initial question and comments and good thread. You do realise that the "surface" of a polygon or group of polygons, as in a T-shirt shirt say, can be governed by a JPEG texture file, but you could also skip the JPEG and just give it a single all-over color, sort of thing... and that color could be further tweaked by, say, a BUMP map. I could add "or a displacement map" but truthfully I am not very knowledgeable when it comes to those.

The same surface or parts thereof could also take a shader. Some Iray shaders have a JPEG as their base but not all do, I don't think. For example there are "procedural" shaders.

Anyway, yeah - in the simplest sense "surface TEXTURE" and the "color of a given surface" can be two different things in the Surface Pane, depending on desired results - again not really one of my strengths, this.

AFAIK it gets even more -- varied -- (I hate to use the word complicated in this context) when the surface is "water" or "glass". You can "apply" an Iray shader to this type of object or area; sometimes you can just click the object or area of the object and then the shader - sort of avoiding the Surface Pane completely. I think.

Anyway you can play with most of the types of... basic color or texture transformations with DAZ Studio, which is nice -- nothing extra to buy.

For what it's worth the first "additional" shaders that I bought were by Jen Greenlees. For example the Nature Shaders set is one of my favorites.

medledan

Richard Haseltine said:

Property names in the Surfaces pane depend on the shader - Diffuse is used in most 3Delight shaders, in the iray Uber Base the equivalent is the Base Colour.

I know this was 3 years ago but your amazing! THIS FiXED MY ISSUE.