"Noobing" around the Shader Room
mazinkaiserzero
Posts: 192
Just a quick question I need to ask because although I haven't read every help or manual yet, so far from what I've read, something tells me I won't find it.
Basically, I'm wondering if it's just me or trying the zoom in the preview while in the shader room is extremely sensitive and a huge pain to get a proper close up on a figure? I find it quite hard to get a feel on the changes in subtle stuff like bump and specularity without spending a while trying to get a good spot every time I change the shader since the preview resets when you do. Is there a way lower down that sensitivity and if not, do you just live with that or go back and forth to the assemble room to see every change?
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Right. Zooming in the preview window in Carrara is disheartening at best!
Use the little magifying glass icon on the tool panel (left edge of the screen)
With that tool selected, click and drag in the preview window to get the proper magnification you want ;)
Tip: I made my own "Blank" scene that I load when I want to create something I want to save to my browser. In that scene I have several cameras. I'll set one of those cameras to a good zoom spot for just such occasions you're mentioning. Then in the preview window's camera selector (upper left corner text) I click the text and use "Set view to:" and select the camera I want to zoom with. Works better for me. Alt + Right Click to Pan, Alt + Left Click to rotate
also, if you weren't aware you can make the preview window bigger by dragging the botom RH corner to what you prefer..
but yeah it can be touchy sometimes .. you can also untick the autoupdate on the preview window as well so you can work away and not worry about it refreshing all the time till your ready.
Oooh... the magnifying glass icon was the thing I needed. For some reason, I just assumed it worked like the mouse wheel xD
I did that in Daz, the blank "character creator" scene, so I thought I'd do that here too. Didn't think at all about using the preview tab in the right pane along with the shader preview window, and you can even spot render there! xD
I never needed it in Daz, I guess that's why I ignored it here, heh.
Oh, again another feature I ignored thanks to me assuming how they worked xD. I thought if I ticked it off it wouldn't update at all, as in, not even being able to move around the character.
Thanks a lot! Now shading is going to be much more fun
Right. Carrara is a bit different. I love the differences for the most part, while some of them are just something that feels kinda neglected development at times.
Still, when it comes to lighting and rendering exactly how I ("I") want to, I cannot quite live without the total control I get in Carrara.
Shader creation and tweaking is a blast to me. I spent a long time coming up with my favorite options for certain things, only to find out years later how much I was missing from this amazing land of shader tools. With DCG plugins being Open Source now, I again realize that I have a lot to learn. But what I've discovered so far still lets me convey materials how I like - so I can learn and play all at the same time! :)
I'd like to offer another fun tip for use with Daz and other content you might be creating shaders for:
When we load content into Carrara, the transition is awesome for a 3d app to load things like this so completely. One area that gets kinda left behind are various shader settings - and some of those that do come across are not good for use in Carrara. Here are some helpful tips:
Windows and other glass or transparent (yet visible) materials
I see this all the time where some of these transparent materials load with a color texture map, maybe a bump and possibly a transparency map in the Alpha channel. A transparency map is white where we need the material to be opaque, black where it should be completely transparent, and shades of gray eveywhere in between. In truth, Alpha in Carrara (and most everything else) actually makes materials disappear as they become transparent. Not what we want for "Visible" transparent items, like glass, for example, or transparent parts of eyes.
You see, Transparency Intensity is opposite Alpha, where White become fully transparent, and Black = no transparency at all. So if we have a Transparency map, click the box for "Invert". If it's just a value, invert it. So if they have 30 (out of 100), change it to 70, for example.
Since the "Shininess" value is often not even close to what we want, check that next. For glass, I compare to the Glass, Clear example shader that ships with Carrara. I think it's a midway number like 36 or something like that. Carrara's clear glass example uses a Reflection value of 4 and a highlight value of a pretty high, but midway number, like perhaps 67 or even higher, I think. But don't be afraid to let your own taste dictate. I like these example shaders because they really offer a wonderful starting point. Blurry Reflections can really sloooow down a render - or sometimes it might not be all that noticeable if you have a powerful enough machine and the shaders isn't too prominent - but it makes the render turn out so much better in many circumstances.
Oh... and if the look of your transparent material keeps turning out looking just freaking wrong, remember that Carrara's clear glass example shader has a color value of "None", 0 (out of 100), or Black. It relies on reflection and transparency along with highlight and shininess for it's color and overall look. It also uses a Common Glass refraction but if the material is a single plane with no actual mesh thickness, refraction might hurt your render more than help. In these situations, I often opt for no refraction and try for blurry reflections instead. Another way to get blurry reflections without such a massive hit on render times is to remove any object (that might reflect) behind the camera and use a blurry image either on a plane or in the background of the scene to reflect in the material. Filmmaking is a cheat on its own - so don't EVER be afraid to so-caled "Cheat" to get your image the way you need it to look!
Questions?
I know I get wordy. If any of this interests you and you'd like some more words... just let me know! ;)
Content in Carrara Continued
Always get to know how and where your content is installed. It's very important to know where to find the Texture files for your content because the artist who has perfected your new (or not new) product has likely included everything you need to make your material truly look spectacular!
As a continuation on what I've written above, another channel that gets completely ignored in translation (since Daz Studio or Poser never had this channel) is "Glow"
Poser has a very powerful node-base material system and Daz Studio's system has evolved beautifully. Each handle materials differently. They should, they use different render engines. To help with this, many artists create a map for things that must glow unless they just make the glowing things have their own domain (texture slot) in which case they can just give it a color in whatever channel worked best to make it Glow.
In Carrara we have a Glow channel. Increase that to anything above Off to get whatever material to glow in the scene.
Products that have SciFi control panels often have a map so that the various buttons, dials and displays can be easily mapped with a simple image. Black = No Glow, everything brighter than black glows as it brightens.
With a lot of the products I've been working with, these image maps will have some sort of different suffix to the name. Color maps often have no suffix but with modern PBR materials they're often now suffixed with "_base". Bump maps have often been "_B", and Specular maps would be "_S". Many times I've seen maps for glowing materials being "_Illum" or simply "_IL"... either way, it's often something other than the usual, and it's often just black with some color shapes on it. Drop that in the Glow channel.
If you have glowing materials in your scene, you can make them "bloom" by using the "Aura" effect, either on the figure itself, or on the whole scene:
Scene > Filters > + > 3D Aura
Edit the Aura and put a check into "Distance Attenuation" It says it's much slower, but that's just old wording from when computers had MegaBytes of RAM, I think.
The radius controls how far the effect blooms from the glow, intensity controls how strong the effect is, with an option to alter the color, and Turbulence can dirty up the effect.
It shouldn't be too long before I get my tutorial section online with a lot more info on all of this stuff. Shaders are everything in 3d rendering. A good light setup and some good materials make it easier to achieve a good image. Replacing any of those "Good"s with "Great" makes it easier to do even better!
Some of the folks around here are Amazing! I strive to get to that level one day. In the meantime, I just have fun honoing my skills and sharing what I learn! ;)
Nice! Thanks for the info.
Currently, I'm sticking to character shading first and yeah, I'm used to messing around with the textures because it's quite important in Daz to optimize them for effective rendering since 4k textures are not always needed (rarely, actually, unless doing a lot of close-ups on huge renders), and they eat a LOT of the vram. So, it wasn't too hard getting the bump and specularity maps in there which Carrara apparently doesn't like to do, at least with Lilith 6 and Aiko 6, the characters I've tried out.
Still, I was already wondering how I'd do to make clear and shiny materials but I was just planning on using the default Carrara shaders to learn the basics, as you mentioned, and now I also got the info you just posted
SSS is also not included so I also messed a bit with it in my Aiko 6 render, and I liked the result I got, the skin looked less "dead".
There I just messed around with the character's shaders. Clothes, hair and the environment are just there so I could render something xD. I'll get to tweaking it more soon, but for some reason, the file is extremely heavy and saving takes a lot of time. Apparently it's the huge amount of morphs Genesis 2 has but I tried Alvin plugin and it didn't seem to shave too much. Maybe I also have to reduce the size of textures? Or probably it's the hair, loading that thing took a LOT of time, and changing its color too x_x
Right now I'm not in "learning mode" so I'm not reading too deeply because I'll forget anyway xD (I learn better doing), but Glow sounds very similar to emissive surfaces in Daz. Also, good to know the Aura effect is basically the bloom, I use that often at least a bit.
Oh, and about the rendering times, one of the reasons I'm learning Carrara and 3delight in DS is that I bought a laptop a long time ago, and at that time it was top-notch stuff. I think it was around 5 years ago. It has a GTX 880M so, not very good for Iray. But! It has an i7, sure, an old one but still an i7. So I can work and render in 3delight and Carrara there while I wait for my PC to finish rendering Iray stuff very well. Also, I'm digging the non-PBR look for comics and games.
Yeah... I like it for my movie too!
Cool! Nice render!
FYI, in Carrara, the Spec maps work nicely in the Highlight channel and, if they're fairly light, I turn the brightness down a bit. I normally go for a fairly low Shininess value (Value 1 - 100) of around 4 to 8ish. Just for some quick things to try.
It can also be pretty cool to put Carrara's Clear Glass shader onto the Cornea! :)
I should also add that I do like what you've done with your shaders! You've got this, my friend!
you could change the shader preview to a flatpreview. upper left corner
Thanks! Also for cornea thing. The eyes were the one thing I was least happy about but was running out of time that day so it's on the "to tweak more" list xD (although next time I'll probably mess around with a G1 figure to see if using G2 is what's getting those file sizes so high)
I did use the spec map there, I figured Highlight and Shininess worked pretty much like Gloss and Gloss Roughness although right now I don't remember which one is which. I just have it very low because I didn't want too much of a wet look with her hair looking so dry xD
Thanks! I noticed that but assumed it would help more for hard surfaces shaders
i love the hedrons for saving shaders on.
can make each poly surface a separate shader domain.
when i want to bring a small batch of shader to use around a scene, i bring in the hedron
specially good for animated shaders
can make 1 hedron the master hedron to rule them all visibility property