Who's most familiar with JGreenlees's iray shaders?

WillowRaven

I have a phantom Iray shader preset that I can't identify which product it came from. The folder path is: Shader Presets\Iray\JG\Utilities and within there are four folders: Metallic Flakes, Metallicity, Resets, and Tiling.

Does anyone recognize the product? Knowing would make it easier to recommend the product to others.

kanfre

 https://www.daz3d.com/sublime-iray-shaders perhaps ? But utilities folders are shared among several other JGreenless products (Sheer and Smooth Iray shaders, Sheer Satin, Shimmer and Lace ... to name a few)

WillowRaven

Hmmm ... I don't own that one ... One would think a 'utilities' file wouldn't be alone in the shaders preset folder ... odd ... Is it used the same way as other shader presets?

 

NorthOf45

All the Utility Shaders were mostly consolidated across literally dozens of her shader packs, so they could be from multiple sources. My system shows at least a dozen contributors to a couple of those folders. Almost 50 for the tiling!

You can apply them like any other shader, they should only affect the targeted channel, i.e., Metallicity utility shaders will only change the Metallicity value, and nothing else.

vwrangler

WillowRaven said:

Hmmm ... I don't own that one ... One would think a 'utilities' file wouldn't be alone in the shaders preset folder ... odd ... Is it used the same way as other shader presets?

 

As I recall, it was done this way because those options were repeated among several different JG shaders, so it made a sort of sense to just have one folder for all the utilities, rather than repeating the same options over and over. The difficulty in that setup for me is that when I'm in a specific shader folder and need to adjust, for example, the tiling, it never occurs to me to go and find the general utilities folder. I don't know if there's something in Smart Content that makes this any esier; I usually wind up moving a given shader's utility folder into the folder with the rest of the shaders for ease of use. (I have a somewhat custom DIM installation process.)

AlmightyQUEST

Resets and tiling are definitely common to almost all their current iray products, I recognize that. For my install I gave the vendor their own folder, so I at least remember where to go to use those utilities. I don't know how many of their shader preset products use the other two, but if you have a specific preset you have used and want to recommend to someone, the fastest way to figure it out would likely be to look at the surface and see where the diffuse image file is located.

Haruchai

I have many, many, of the shader sets and they all come with different Utilities, however, a lot of them, like Tiling, are duplicated in most of the sets. I have the shader sets in their own folder and I consolidate all the Utilities to one folder and delete any duplicates.

If you have more than one set then you will most likely have the same ones over and over again all called slightly different things. They are all the same basic tiling sizes, same goes for Normals, Metallicity etc.

JGreenlees

i did try to make sure my utilities were all together and overwrote each other when they were duplicated. That said however some of the earlier ones weren't done that way and i do need to go back and straighten up the mess. Metallic Flakes, Metallicity, Resets, and Tiling.are in several of my sets where i did use it (not just metallic sets) So i can't say which set threw it out of the proper folder but i will endevor to pull them all and try to straighten them up soon

WillowRaven

vwrangler said:

As I recall, it was done this way because those options were repeated among several different JG shaders, so it made a sort of sense to just have one folder for all the utilities, rather than repeating the same options over and over. The difficulty in that setup for me is that when I'm in a specific shader folder and need to adjust, for example, the tiling, it never occurs to me to go and find the general utilities folder. I don't know if there's something in Smart Content that makes this any esier; I usually wind up moving a given shader's utility folder into the folder with the rest of the shaders for ease of use. (I have a somewhat custom DIM installation process.)

I customize my shader folders by putting them all together, too, and even further by categorizing them by type (like fabrics, leathers, metals, etc). So I have no idea what to do with that unless they stand alone as shaders themselves. Are they linked to the named shaders in some odd way?

JGreenlees said:

i did try to make sure my utilities were all together and overwrote each other when they were duplicated. That said however some of the earlier ones weren't done that way and i do need to go back and straighten up the mess. Metallic Flakes, Metallicity, Resets, and Tiling.are in several of my sets where i did use it (not just metallic sets) So i can't say which set threw it out of the proper folder but i will endevor to pull them all and try to straighten them up soon

Thanks for the wonderful shaders, JG :) And it would be really cool if you can help me figure out how to use or designate that particular folder. Is it gonna screw up anything if I move things around?

 

AlmightyQUEST

They're not linked to specific presets, which is why they aren't in the folders with the specific products and why they are designed to overwrite instead of duplicate. These shaders affect just certain nodes of the shader, like just changing the tiling settings, so they work with any shader without affecting most of the surface properties.

WillowRaven

OK ... all of those are add-on shaders rather than standalone shaders. Excellent ... thanks :)