Rock Grass and Dynamic Nature Shaders For DAZ Studio (Commercial)
DimensionTheory
Posts: 434
AgeOfArmour and I have been hard at work putting together some nature themed shaders and presets for DAZ Studio users to have some fun with! Soon you'll be able to get your hands on a custom rock shader and grass shader made by AoA along with a suite of presets made by myself. These two separate products will also be included in a rock and grass bundle which includes loads of bonus content from both of us. The bonus content includes rock piles, terrain models and two complete "ready-to-render" scenes (grassy hills and asteroid belt) featuring the two shaders!
First up is the rock shader, which is designed to add realistic rock features to any model. Numerous feature controls drive detailed displacement to add lots of variance and customization, being fully procedural means there's no limit to resolution detail and each iteration looks completely unique! The shader uses an object's location in the scene as a seed for randomization of the surface. Each object will have different bumps and features even on objects which are exact copies of eachother. Complex boulders can be easily made even from the simplest geometry such as a SubD cube. This, used with DAZ Studio's instancing feature, allows the creation of highly complex looking scenes, such as piles of rocks or an asteroid field, with as few as 6 polygons.
Check out the awesome documentation by AoA for more detail!
http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/tutorials/AoA_rock_shader_help.html
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Second is the grass shader, which is designed to work much the same as the rock while complimenting it nicely! Use the numerous features to control things like clumping and blade thickness, the procedural nature of this shader as with the rock means numerous objects can be "joined together" using the same shader settings. This also means it can be used on any surface, even non-UV-mapped objects. Since the shader actually creates grass geometry it can be used for scenes where texture based grass would not be suitable due to insufficient closeup detail or noticeable texture tiling. Please note that this extra detail comes at a cost and may render more slowly than a standard, texture-mapped surface.
AoA has some great documentation for this one as well!
http://www.ageofarmour.com/3d/tutorials/AoA_grass_shader_help.html
This looks exciting! Thanks for posting the PDF instructions already.
Lastly is a new shader I'd been working on myself, which at it's core provides the same sort of variance as the rock and grass shaders to surfaces using texture maps. Nature's variance for DAZ Studio allows you to mix color and alpha variance in with your existing texture maps, letting to do a lot of things nature does in terms of random color! Easily take any existing tree models and take them through the seasons by adding in dynamic Fall colors, and use opacity noise to take those leaves off in time for Winter. Use the same color variance to add splashes of different colors on your flower pedals, or have fun using it with things like candies or clothing!
Also included are a set of nature props taking advantage of the Nature Shader. You'll find four trees and two bushes with color variance on their leaves, along with four different flower patches using it on their petals. Another four scattered leaf props with four single leaf props to help complete your scene when using opacity variance for dramatic Fall renders!
Just to be clear I thought I'd mention again this will not be part of the rock-grass bundle.
I've put together some documentation for this product so you guys can check it out too!
http://3dimensiondigital.com/locker/NatureShader/NS-Documentation.pdf
Only thing I can think of to say is WOW
- any idea when?
Question - can the grass be used to do fields of corn, can it go that high? Thanks
My next project requires a large number of medieval buildings, with ground props, from several diffent PAs. The grass prop should be useful in creating a consistent ground surface for them.
I do have a grass shader at the moment but it creates grass in a very light green, which doesn't look remotely realistic as a consequence. Your shader looks like it generates a much darker, more realistic grass.
I will look forward to further developments.
Cheers,
Alex.
These are on 'buy RIGHT now' list ... :)
These look fantastic! Does it include both the 'regular' shaders as well as projection shaders?
how does the grass in this set different from shades of life-nature, besides lots more options?
I hope you'll consider adding more tree bark shaders, possibly with ability to change the direction of the bark, as that was one difficult I've had with shades of life-nature ? (i couldn't find that option and found it needful to do so, several times).
i also looooove your mossy rock and mossy ground shaders and would love more of those. As well as muddy grass options owuld be fantastic.
I use your shades of life set a TON and these sets will likely hit my cart instantly. Thanks so much for the great tools!
Price for each is ?
.
This is baffling! My runtime would get so much more diverse :D
Thanks for all the comments, everyone! I'll do my best to answer any questions you have and post examples when needed.
These aren't related to my projection shaders since they don't work with any actual textures (Nature's Variance does but not in the same way). The grass and rock is all generated internally without the use of any texture maps so there's no projection going on, they're quite a bit more user friendly this way and have fewer restrictions but are limited to the features built into the shader since it doesn't use texture maps.
Grass presets included with my projection shader were more in line with results you get on existing models out of box, something like this for example... http://www.daz3d.com/hilly-surround
The grass shader being released uses displacement to create actual geometry and has features designed to change how it grows. So it is somewhere in between texture based grass like my projection presets and actual 3D models of grass with individual blades. Unlike modeled grass however the shader will place grass onto any surface, while modeled grass is restricted to the shape it was exported as (usually square patches which require careful placement and can't follow curves of terrain etc).
As for release dates I don't want to give anything specific just in case things change but you shouldn't have to wait very long :)
Price wise I put Nature's Variance at $15.95 non-sale price for the shader, shader presets and all the props. I'll have to double check with AoA about the rock and grass as he submitted those, but they should be a few bucks cheaper and I know the rock-grass bundle has a discount along with the bonus content.
The biggest problem I have with existing grass implementations, is when the grass pokes through things standing on top of it. It would be a huge technical leap forward if a shader could have some kind of collision detection to prevent that. In the real world, when I stand on grass, the grass is smashed under my feet; it does not grow through my feet! Any hope of such an implementation with your new grass product?
That is something I had been struggling with too, and the displacement masking feature of the grass shader gives you the ability to fix such things. If you look at the house render I posted for Nature's Variance you can see it being used, I have it setup to keep the grass from growing through the stone path going up to the house. It does require a little bit of work but it's really easy to do, I'd be happy to put together a tutorial showing how I did it.
From memory the water shader used in 3DU's Skull Cove has collision detection that adds 'froth' around any object that intersects the surface, so there may be hope! :)
That would be wonderful, thanks. Your products are capable of amazing things and are instant buys. However they are complex, and not intuitive, because they are unique and paradigm-changing. I'm still struggling to figure out how to use the EYEris subsurface expansion set. The EYEris documentation talks about the shader details, but doesn't act as a tutorial for how to use the product on character eyes enough for me to master it.
Potentially this could be done with occlusion calculation. I remember this at least from some time ago with the snow shader, where occluding surfaces prevented generation of snow. It was a bit tedious to set-up though if I recall correctly and depends on whether these are shader mixer shaders here or not.
Anyway, all shaders look great and consider them already in my cart :)
I had talked to AoA about potentially using ambient occlusion to allow for displacement restriction, but unless there is some way to prevent the surface from self-occluding the grass blades themselves would be causing occlusion and it wouldn't work. The rock shader uses occlusion to create it's moss effects so the idea works great for creating texture features, using it to drive anything that creates geometry though affects occlusion in turn and confuses things. Proximity would be the best way but there's no way of doing that in Shader Mixer as far as I know.
These look very nice, good work!
Just out of curiosity, are any/all of these shader-mixer shaders?
There in the store and I bought them both (Grass & Rock Bundle and Nature Shaders). They look like they will be a lot of fun!
My first scene is rendering now. I'm thrilled with how it is coming out!
Thanks :)
All of the shaders were created in Shader Mixer.
OK, had to give a quick blast before getting some sleep - it's default Genesis with pink grass set at U-length-5 - no lights or anything, just applied shader to Genesis in the boot-up scene.
Things are sure to be getting mad around these parts now, but at least I got an instant teddy bear to comfort me if things start to get too scary, hehehe...
Haha. If you had left it green then it would fit the wit of the great comedian Emo Philips who said "My mom said when I was born they threw away the mold... some of it grew back though."
Here is my first render with the new toys. I used one of the bundle bonus terrains DTGS-TerrainC. I used AoA distant and ambient lights with the grass flagged for Primitive hitmode.
I want lighter grass, but none of the documentation tips worked for me. I lowered the Translucency in the Surfaces tab all the way to 2 and I reduced the saturation of the Translucency color all the way to white. I couldn't see anything change. Any suggestions?
Lowered or increased the translucency? Increasing it should make it lighter though it does depend on either the strength of the ambient or angle of the distant light. Also, changing the ambient light's Polygon Facing Direction to "Surface Normal" my punch it up a little bit.
Easiest thing should be to lighten the root colors a little bit and see if that helps.
Lowered or increased the translucency? Increasing it should make it lighter though it does depend on either the strength of the ambient or angle of the distant light. Also, changing the ambient light's Polygon Facing Direction to "Surface Normal" my punch it up a little bit.
Easiest thing should be to lighten the root colors a little bit and see if that helps.
I lowered it, even though that seemed counter-intuitive. I read "If you are having difficulty getting the diffuse colors of the grass to show, using a less saturated Translucency Color or a lower Translucency Strength may help." The tip color in the surface tab was light green, but my grass was very very dark, so I thought I had to lower translucency to get that light tip color (my diffuse color) to show up. I guess I misinterpreted the instructions. I'll try again later today with some of your tips here. Thanks.
Oh, Yes I suppose that is pretty confusing.
When I wrote that part of the documentation I was thinking of it the other way around where the translucency might be too strong and overpower the colors of the base grass. But, in your case, it is the opposite where the grass is too dark. I'll see if I can think of a clearer explanation and update the online guide.
Out already???? I was expecting a wait for 'soon' to happen! :)
I bought all three shaders. A couple of very quick render. Just fiddling with the settings to see what's what.
Age of Armour and or DimensionTheory products => instant buying.
Thanks for the excellent products and the pdf !
Incredible. My "I wish Studio could do this" list is verging on gone.
AoA and DT keep on upping the ante in amazingly useful ways; each new product changes the game.
One general documentation question about the Rock Shader, though:
"As mentioned above, DAZ Studio's instancing feature can be incredibly useful for creating a large number of boulders. Each instance can be moved, rotated, scaled, flattened or elongated differently to create an even more random look."
I've never used instances. I would wish that the Rock Shader doc was more specific about how to make use of that feature. Then, I'd be able to utilize that aspect of the new product, and learn another very useful thing about Studio in the process; my happiest learning paradigm.
Incidentally, ditto on the Grass Shader doc's mention of Geometry Shells:
"A technique which corrects this issue and also adds realism, is to use a dirt colored shader on your terrain surface then create a geometry shell of it and apply the grass shader to the geometry shell."
What. where, how? I've seen mentions of Geometry Shells, but don't really know what they are or how to use them.
My internet access time is very limited, and research based on forum "term" searches is sometimes remarkably time consuming. I would rather spend time with new products exploring and learning what they can do for me, than on frustrating forum searches about new Studio features that these products apparently utilize so effectively, but which I know next to nothing about.
Very jazzed, and kinda bummed, at the same time.