Is it possible to add basic color adjustments to shaders?
SnowSultan
Posts: 3,648
This is kind of technical - too technical for me to actually contribute anything towards accomplishing it, but I was wondering if it would be possible to implement basic color correction and adjustment parameters to the basic DAZ Studio Iray shader so that they can be tweaked on a surface-by-surface basis without having to mask them and do it in postwork. Things like Curves, Hue-Saturation, a B/W toggle, Contrast, etc. Other programs can do it with nodes (like Blender), but since many vendors have made interesting additions to Iray shaders, I thought it might be something worth considering.
Thanks for your time.
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Comments
can the bricks in shader mixer do this? ive never ventured into shader mixer so dont know if they can.
I believe you can, but it takes the bricks. Slosh's hair shaders work this way. I wish the standard iray shader did.
Aren't the bricks only for 3Delight?
I know that for 3DL shaders you can always adjust the dffuse color. Sometimes you need to adjust the ambient and spec as well, to get what you want. No idea regarding Iray.
Right, I also do the same thing with Iray shaders. I'm just talking about adding additional color adjusting options to a default Iray shader. Hopefully Oso or others who have actually compiled custom Iray shaders might be able to provide some information.
No, there are bricks for Iray shaders too. Not sure how user-friendly they are. I've only tried to use them for a minute a long time ago. ;)
Laurie
If I get a chance to catch up with him I will ask him SS
OK..it was a custom shader. Not part of Iray basic I guess.
I might be missing something here. Don't the shaders come with image maps for the bricks which are then tiled to create a surface like a wall? So why wouldn't you open that image to adjust hue, saturation, contrast etc in PS or any 2D program. That's what I would do.
It's done in the tone mapping area most easily for the whole image but accomplishing the same on certain surfaces of certain products in a scene that are just wrong or not to your liking then you can adjust the translucency colors & strength, opacity color & strength, base color, top coat, transmitted, and quite a few other surface settings individually. All that's so involved and the effects sometimes so nuanced that you want a very fast nVidia GPU to quickly see cause & effect as you work your way through them.
Keep in mind that no matter how you adjust the color the image will still look different on different monitors, or in a few weeks on the same monitor. Also if this is for printing then you need to work on a color calibrated monitor to get accurate results.
For still images, rendering to canvasses you can get a mask anything that's not an instance* with no additional effort other than making a tick in the "Alpha" box. That provides a lot more flexibility and is much faster than trying to mess with shader colours.
*If it is an instance, you mask everything else and invert. It can get messy, though.
More the interface not being user friendly.
I added some options to the uber shader, and it is crazy trying to following the link paths - not unique to Iray as it happens. But curved like they are adds to the complexity. I added half or maybe more of what's circled (or squared) in red, but probably not all and without examining closely, I can't be sure; I may have added elsewhere, but don't think so.
That level of complexity really isnt for the human mind to understand. In blender you can kind of merge down/simplify groups of bricks - can you do that in shader mixer to make it more manageable?
I'm very familiar with color correction in postwork, I've got custom Photoshop actions to load an entire folder full of alpha channels as masks for adjusting every surface of a render. I just asked because I'm interested in being able to make slight adjustments to shaders in the renderer so as not to have to do so much postwork later.
Canvases don't mask on a per-surface basis, that's why I'm still using Mask and Multipass Toolkit and my own Photoshop action to batch import and apply them.
LOL Nicstt, that is...insane. I see why no one's really bothered with Shader Mixer much in Studio. ;)
You can certainly group bricks and collapse the group to a single brick. Custom bricks do exist, but I'm not sure if they are open to "all of us" in principle or if they require inner knowledge.
I find Blender's much easier to use; the UI for it helps a great deal; don't know if you can group in that like in Blender's either. I didn't find out, and got what I needed done anyway. It's one of the reasons I decided to go to Blender or back to Blender; not used it until these last couple or so of weeks for rendering for years.
For example, those Iive group in the left image are actually shared amongst the various skin nodes (torso, arms, legs and face etc); Something Studio handles for us, which is great. I love Studio; I hate, however, being almost literally forced to use Nvidia, and higher end Nvidia too.
It would be really helpful if Studio's node editor allowed grouping, plus arranging the node paths so they are more easily followed - at least by ourselves as the creator; I rarely see anyone using the nodes to direct the links, whereas I have used them since Cycles (or they) were introduced.
I've got decent results on this shader, but need to add specularity and roughness options too; so I'll be working on that on the next character lol.