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Superbeam material not working

wildbillnashwildbillnash Posts: 756
in New Users

I'm trying to use a weapon's beam from the Superbeam package by Oskarsson.  I have the cursor over the effect I want and what I get in Iray is what you see, all white.  If I go to texture it disappears.  Any idea what's going on?

Screenshot (25).png
1920 x 1080 - 684K

Comments

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    wildbillnash said:

    I'm trying to use a weapon's beam from the Superbeam package by Oskarsson.  I have the cursor over the effect I want and what I get in Iray is what you see, all white.  If I go to texture it disappears.  Any idea what's going on?

    Those are 3Delight mats. I don't have it so not sure, but in worst case they are custom shaders that won't convert automatically. Looks like the opacity maps are missing. Try finding the maps and apply them to the cutout opacity channel. Also there might be ambient maps that would go into the emissive color/strength channel, or you coul probably use the diffuse maps?

  • wildbillnashwildbillnash Posts: 756

    Sorry, Sven, I didn't understand half of what you said.  I'll have to experiment to see if I can figure out the explaination.  Thank you.

  • wildbillnashwildbillnash Posts: 756

    Could someone explain to a novice what Sven means?

  • Sven DullahSven Dullah Posts: 7,621
    wildbillnash said:

    Could someone explain to a novice what Sven means?

    Ok, I'll have a go at it:)

    This is an older product that was made before the introduction of the nVidia Iray renderer. So its materials are optimized for 3Delight. To render with 3Delight, go to the render settings tab and switch from IRay to 3Delight. If you want to use IRay, you will have to convert the material to something IRay compatible. Normally IRay can convert 3Delight materials to IRay on the fly. However, if the material uses a custom shader that IRay does not understand, you will have to do a manual conversion. So, as I said, I don't own that product, so I am not 100% certain it is a custom shader. If you select the beam and go to the surface editor tab, in the upper left corner there should be the name of the shader being used for the material. It would be helpful if you could post a screenshot of that tab, with the shader name visible.

    The product page states that the product uses transmaps, also known as opacity maps. They are greyscale maps that define which area will be visible (white) and which will be transparent/invisible (black). Grey would be semi transparent. Your screenshot tells me Iray didn't load or find the transmaps, therefore the beam is solid. So, to use it with IRay, you first need to convert the original shader to IRayUberBase shader. You do that by selecting the beam prop AND selecting the material in the surface tab, go to your content library/shader presets/IRay/DAZ Uber and double click the IRay Uber icon. Then, in the surface tab, find the cutout opacity channel, click on the little square to open a pop up menu, select browse, browse to the folder where the maps are. (Typically My DAZ3D library/runtime/textures/Oskarsson/superbeam) Find the opacity/transmap and select it to load it into the shader. There are other maps that need to be loaded for the beam to look good. Most likely there is a diffuse map that goes into the base color channel. There possibly but not necessarily is an ambient map. If you want the beam to emit light you need to find the emission color channel, set the color to white and load either the diffuse- or ambient map into the slot to give the light the proper color. Adjust luminance settings for light strength.

     

  • wildbillnashwildbillnash Posts: 756

    Thank you, Sven.  I think I got it now.  I'll check it out.  Thanks again for the explanation.

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