Is there a way to add my Shaders and Shader Presets to the toolbar?
carrie58
Posts: 4,009
in The Commons
like the title say I'd like to be able to access my Shader Folder and the Shader Preset folder from the tool bar is this possible ?
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Right click on the Shader Asset, choose "Create Custom Action"
I set "Root Menu" to Favorites
Optionally set Submenu and change Text
Go to Window -> Workspace -> Customize (F3 by default)
Expand the Custom group in the left pane - the item should be at the bottom of this group
In the right pane, expand the Tool Bar you want to add the item to, or right click and choose "Add Toolbar"
Drag the item from the left pane to the right pane and place where you want it
Click on Accept
If you create a new toolbar, you will need to go back to Window -> Workspace -> Customize and enable it in the Activities tab in the right pane afterwords.
@Omniflux so do you mean I have to add each individual shader ? I know how to add scripts to the tool bar......
Do you want the tool bar to have a shortcut that makes the content library jump to a specific shader folder?
Well I was kinda hoping to just have the Shaders and shader presets in a tab on the toolbar like scripts ....... so I didn't have to go back into the content folders ......I guess I was hoping to be lazy .....
can you have a short cut on the tool bar?
You can right click on a folder and choose "Create Custom Action" to create a shortcut to jump to the folder in the Content Library, but if you want all the shaders to show up in a menu, you either have to add them all manually, write a script to add them all and run it everytime you add or remove shaders, or write a plugin to do it (or get someone else to write).
The MD Pins for Libraries plugin might be close to what you are looking for...
@Omniflux Thank you I hadn't seen that plugin .
On the "Surfaces" pane you could always just click the "Presets" tab and it will show you your shaders and presets.
Then you can just click back and forth from the "Presets" and "Editor" tabs while using the surface selection tool ( ALT+SHIT+M by default) to click the surfaces in the scene you want to work with
That's how I do it.
@IceCrMn wow didn't know that either I'll try that too .
https://www.daz3d.com/visualmenus
You can make yourself a sweet popup menu that will pop up with a hotkey with this addon. It is really quite cool, and not too hard to get the hang of. You can get really fancy with it.
@RL_Media Thank you I'll look into that too.
What do you do when they disappear after reinstalling Daz, for example? My "Presets" tab doesn't even show a directory I know is there, and even if it did, it wouldn't display half the presets I've saved previously. This happens kind of a lot and so far I've just been starting from scratch again.
What are you seeing, and what did you expect/hope to see?
Good question, felis. Thanks. I took some screenshots. I don't know how to explain this without details so please bear with me.
I asked because I had to reinstall the other day and they're all gone from the Surfaces tab again. In order to answer your queestion, I rearranged my interface layout so you could seee several things at once. Because I did this, I see that maybe there's a workaround just by navigating in the Content Library tab to the folder where I kept my shader presets. That does seem to work for most of them, even the oldest ones. But in the first screenshot, you see the Surface pane's Editor tab on the right of the screen. There are no "Saved Files" at all there. I have several locations for them, which I shouldn't but I do. None of them are there. So I selected a surface and saved it as a shader preset, and then took the second screenshot. Now you can see the preset has been added to the same location as al lmy other recent ones, shown in Content Library on the left. You can also see that now there's a new "Saved File" in the Surface pane on the right, which is what I expected to see in the first screenshot - but there's only one file shown even though that same location has dozens of them in it. (You can see others in that same directory in the Content Library pane on the left.) This time, I'm not seeing what I usually do: placeholders for files I created a long time ago. The placeholder icon is an empty yellow border with an exclamation point, indicating "there's a file here but something's wrong with it." If I were to double--click one of these yellow-bordered icon frames, the selected surface doesn't change the way it does if I double-click on a proper icon like the one you see in the second screenshot. Which means even if Studio recognizes that I have saved files (which apparetnly it doesn't right now), I can't use half of them because they display with a non-functioning alert placeholder instead of a working icon/thumbnail.
But like I said, the files seem to work as long as I navigate to them from the Content Library tab instead of the Surfaces tab. I think I remember Richard H. may have explained the Surface tab error to me years ago when it happened a lot more often, but I don't remember what he said about it. I came away with the feeling I was just going to have to re-save all my presets every time I reinstall.I was hoping someone would know if they fixed the problem.
Note that in the Content Library pane under Daz Studio Formats you are looking at files on disc, in their actual folders. In the various Presets tabs (and Samrt Content, and Categories and Products in the Content Library) you are looking at databse entries. Only the one preset in the Content Library pane has obvious metadata from the database (the Shader content-type tag at top-right of the thumbnail) and so it is probably to bee xpected that the others will not appear in the database-driven views. Are all the files from the same product installation?
Thanks for your reply, Richard. All of these presets are saved the same way; why this new one has the "Shader" tag and the others don't isn't clear to me. (The only thing in the directory you can see there are saved shader presets.) On the Surfaces tab - which I think draws from the database if I understand you correctly - they do tend to either disappear altogether, or become inaccessible (with the placeholder icons) as a group. In other words, I seem to be able to access them from that location only if I created them during that install period, whether or not they have the tag. I think that's consistent with what you're saying. I'm still not sure why sometimes the don't-bother-clicking-me placeholders are there and sometimes they're not, but it's probably the same sort of database issue you're talking about. I think what I'm hearing is that I should stop using the Surface pane for this purpose and just work from the file locations. I wouldn't have thought to do this before I tried to answer felis's question, so once again a round of grateful thank-yous to everybody in the forums :)
As far as I know the Presets tabs in property panes have the same requirement as the Smart Content - category, compatibility, and type - which should be saved to the dsatabase and exported with userdata.