How to apply a material not intended for the mesh.

Caxar

I think that unless the material was done specifically for the UVs and texture set DAZ won't allow to apply it, and we are suppose to use shaders. Is there any way to avoid this limitation? I mean, I can simply apply the material, and assign again the correct texture maps but keeping the shader properties, and this is what the 90% of 3d programs do.

Hylas

- Apply the material you want to use to the item it was made for.

- Select the item. Go to surfaces, select only one surface.

- Save As -> Shader

- Now you can apply this shader to any surface you want.

Does this help?

scorpio

Hylas said:

Save as a Shader Preset- Apply the material you want to use to the item it was made for.

- Select the item. Go to surfaces, select only one surface.

- Save As -> Shader

- Now you can apply this shader to any surface you want.

Does this help?

Save as >Shader Preset 

 

Richard Haseltine

The UVs matter, as they determine how the maps wrap around the model, but that is the case whether you apply via a Materials Preset or a Shader preset. The issue that stops a regular Materials preset aplying would be the naming of the surfaces, since the preset is a list of named surfaces and the settings to apply to them. When dealing with Genesis 8 materials on Genesis 3 the names do in fact match - the problem is that a lot of materials for Genesis 8 are Hierarchical Materials presets, since they need to target the lashes 9and possibly the brows) as well as the base figure, and those do require the base figure of the hierarchy to be correct; the fix there is to apply the materials to Genesis 8, then save a regular materials preset for the base figure (which will apply to Genesis 3). The Hierarchical Materials issue can also crop up with clothing sets where a preset for all parts of the set, or a preset for an item with buttons handled as Rigid Follow Nodes, will not work if the set is AutoFitted to a different base (and the fix is the same - save regular materials presets from the items fitted to the original figure, if there are not separate presets for the parts anyway).

Caxar

Thanks to all for this usefull feedback!

SpottedKitty

caxarte_717260bfc4 said:

I think that unless the material was done specifically for the UVs and texture set DAZ won't allow to apply it,

Oh, the material will always apply. It just won't fit properly, if it's being applied to a mesh with the wrong UV setting. This was most often seen on older Genesis figures, before DAZ (thankfully) stopped producing new numbered base characters each with their own unique UV map. If you had a character installed, but not the base, the character textures would almost fit, but the edges of the materials would show gaps and misalignment where the two UVs didn't quite match up.

FWIW, there is a case where DAZ|Studio "won't allow" a material to be applied; if you try to use it on the wrong object. Materials settings include surface names; if the object has different surface names, you get an error message. This doesn't apply to shaders, because they don't include surface names; the shader will go on to whatever surface you select.