Hair Shaders - Confused, which do I need?

Elgyfu

I have quite a large collection of older hairs, plus some new fitting utilities so I can use them on the latest figures.

I would like to convert them to iRay, plus inject some new colours and effects if possible. Some of them only have 1 or 2 colours included, and the colour expansion packs are still quite pricey - especially as I would need loads of different ones.  If I can change colours for any hair etc with just one pack of shader things, that would be fantastic.

I see a few different products that look like they do this, including some that are on sale right now.

But I am so confused as to what the difference between them is, as they seem to be doing slightly different things.

I am thinking that a "texture" is an image, persumably a PNG. or a JPG with a layered transparency map over it.  And a "shader" is a wee set of instructions that dictate how light interacts with the surface.  Is this right?

https://www.daz3d.com/dg-iray-200-hair-color-shaders-and-merchant-resource

This one says it works with some of the others - so presumably is something different to them,  It is described as " 204 multi hued hair tiles" and "A simple hair surface shader is included" so this sounds like it is textures with just one shader.. but the list of contents is many, many shaders.. perhaps I am misunderstanding what "shader" means?

https://www.daz3d.com/idg-iray-hair-essentials-shaders

This one says it is a "texture set" - so does this mean it replaces the literal texture, the image maps?  Again it is titled "shaders". 

https://www.daz3d.com/idg-iray-selectable-hair-color-shader

This is the third one.

I don't know which one or ones of  the three (if any) is what I want to perk up my hair collection.  Which will add colours and variations to what I have?  If all three, which would be best for a "one click please" newbie like me?  Any help would be very much appreciated. Thank you.

FSMCDesigns

i don't have any of them, so you really don't "need" any for hair to work in Iray. Based on what I see in the forums, this one seems to be a popular one and the one I would go with  https://www.daz3d.com/colorwerks-hair-shaders-for-iray

This one https://www.daz3d.com/dg-iray-200-hair-color-shaders-and-merchant-resource is more a color enhancemnet for existing hair textures and also a merchants resource.

This one https://www.daz3d.com/idg-iray-hair-essentials-shaders will give you new hair textures and new colors, but is limited to vertical uV mapping, so if the UVMapping is differnet you might not get the best resulots. Kinda like how some scalp textures are not vertical.

And this one https://www.daz3d.com/idg-iray-selectable-hair-color-shader seems to be all about color options, some pretty extreme.

 

 

 

Elgyfu

Ah, thank you very much, Michael.

I am slowly learning my way around all this new stuff.  My brain is still in the days of Victoria 3 :)

JonnyRay

Just adding a vote for Sloshwerk's ColorWerks Hair Shaders for Iray that's my go to shader for hair. Loads of color options from realistic to fantasy as well as blending options which do a nice job of making it look more realistic. When I'm using one of OutOfTouch's hairs, I may use his OOT Blending system as that's a true custom shader and does a very nice job, but it tends to be specific to the hair model the package was created for.

FSMCDesigns

Elgyfu said:

Ah, thank you very much, Michael.

I am slowly learning my way around all this new stuff.  My brain is still in the days of Victoria 3 :)

NP, it can be a bit overwhelming with all the options at times. many new users think they need this and that, but lots of what's in the store is just commercial ways of doing things in DS that the user can do themselves, but they either don't want to or don't know how to.

Things were much more simple in the V3 days, LOL.