Iray blizzard

gcwolfpost

I have very little experience with shaders. I tend to just use what is provided.so it's no surprise I am having a hard time getting parts of iray blizzard to work in my scene. I got the snowfall blizzard part working but for the life of me I cant figure out how to get any snow on the ground or objects like buildings.. I was able to get the buildings in a whiteout state but the lesser accumulations dont seem to ever apply to the buildings. If i could at least get the snow on the ground i would settle for that. What am i doing wrong?

lazarus102

Haven't tried iray blizzard myself, but if all else fails, you could try to find snow props for ground/ledge placement. I been trying to figure out how to get weather placements to work right in my scenes, but the iray fog cameras and such don't seem to have any effect.

NorthOf45

For the shaders, open the Surfaces tab, and with the Surface Selection tool, pick the surface in the scene that you want to modify. These shaders are Iray, so the surface must be using the Iray shader to begin with. The Overlays change only the Top Coat channel, much like a layer of snow or ice on top of the underlying surface. The Standalone shaders replace the entire surface, so be careful which you want to use.

The decals can be tricky. They must be parented to the object (I forget that all the time), and the Z-Axis (the blue one) must be pointing away from the surface. The decal itself is a cube space, so it must also intersect the surface onto which the image is to appear. You can change the projection type to, say, cylindrical if you want to put something on a telephone pole without the image distorting as it wraps around. And, you must have the viewport in Iray Preview mode to see what's happening.

gcwolfpost

Thanks North. I suspect I didn't have it in iray preview mode or the ground and buildings are not in iray. Because I did the surface procedure you described and it acted like it was applying the shader but I saw no change. What I mean is that little box you get when something is applied to something popped up briefly but I didn't see any change.

NorthOf45

The shader type is displayed at the top of the Editor tab of the Surfaces tab pane when you have a surface selected. You can convert the surfaces to the Iray shader several ways, with varying degrees of quality. The easiest (and immediately available) is to select the surface in the Surfaces tab, then navigate to Shader Presets->Iray->DAZ Uber and locate the "!Iray Uber Shader". Hold the ctrl key and double-click (or whatever your "do it now" method is) to get the Material Preset Load Options dialog. This will allow you to keep or replace existing bitmaps used for the texture. For, say, the building surfaces, choose Ignore to keep the existing bitmaps as is. This usually does a decent job, but sometimes needs a little tweaking, but it will get you started. There are scripts to help automate the process, free and paid, with, again, varying degrees of sophistication.

gcwolfpost

Thanks again for help. Will try when I get home.