Non-Iray products on sale
marble
Posts: 7,500
Recently there was a sale of DAZ Studio resources and I happened to notice a product promoting seashore shaders which I thought would be something I could use so I added them to my cart and purchased them. Nowhere in the product description does it say that these are 3Delight shaders only (it says "DAZ Studio Materials"). OK, so I didn't pay much for them but this is not the first time I've bought products assuming they world be IRay compatible only to find they aare not. I don't render 3Delight so this product is useless to me.
I know that neither DAZ staff nor most PAs read these forums and it is pointless logging a ticket so I am really just registering my complaint here as a cautionary tale for anyone else failing to realise that "DAZ Studio Materials" does not include IRay.
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Comments
There still is the 30 day return policy unless they removed that too.
I always look for an "Iray" reference in products and also check the readme for release date. Looking at the product, the shaders should still apply and be able to convert to iray, the lights, probably not.
If it doesn't specifically say "Iray" in the materials section, then 99.9% chance it's 3DL only.
That being said, there are places you can get shaders like that for free...and of super high quality. Only caveat is you need to know what each map does and load it onto the Uber Base yourself.
Normally I would but it was so heavily discounted that it is not worth the effort. I'm more concerned that PAs or DAZ should be putting products in these sales with no indication that they are limited to 3Delight. I realise that when these products were created, IRay was not available but if you are not looking for such details you can be disappointed when it arrives in your library. Surely it is not a big ask to add a line of text to the description?
Sure, it is advisable to look very carefully but I spend hours wading through the thousands of products they shuffle around in these sales and those are hours that could be more productive using products that I actually want and need.
Interesting - I download the free HDRi backgrounds but have not seen IRay shaders. Are you allowed to hint at what to search for? I'll have a google myself meantime.
[EDIT] ... and my search found this thread right here:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/460766/nvidia-vmaterials-1-7-0-presets
That's the reason I retired 55 products that were older 3DL and/or Poser focused. I didn't want customers dealing with the confusion. The store page should clearly state whether it is optimized for 3DL. Unfortunately it doesn't. As a General rule Iray was introduced somewhere arounf product SKU 22000, so anything before that is likely 3DL only.
This is exactly why you should bug the sales team.
So that they will accomadate Clarity for the customers.
On Poly Haven. Really nice ground/floor/terrain shaders and some nice wood and metal shaders. Not so much for fabric shaders, so I do still buy those for the most part.
I have some of your older products and I don't mind applying the IRay Uber shader and tweaking them - I quite often use old sets like that. The thing with those shaders in my OP is that they are just that - shaders - which are totally incompatible with IRay so if I apply them to geometry and try to render in IRay I get plain grey. It is not possible to apply the IRay Uber shader to a 3DL shader, of course.
Perhaps I'm confused but I can only find textures @ Poly Haven. Can't see any IRay shaders - unless you mean I need to convert a texture into a shader?
They don't have shaders (certainly not Iray), they just have all the necessary maps to plug in to whatever shader you're using.
I'm thinking I should know what you mean but then I probably don't.
I think of either textures or shaders. Textures are the images (maps) applied to geometry using UV mapping but shaders, as I understand them, don't need UV maps as they are applied to a surface directly. Nevertheless, if I look at the Surfaces tab after applying an IRay shader I can see that it has image maps in several slots. I do not know the process of creating a shader though.
A shader tells the render engine how it should behave, basically. Look at all the parameters in the Iray Uber shader, for example. You could strip that down to nothing but a base color slot, and it would still be a shader. The presence or absence of a UV map has nothing to do with whether or not something is a shader, but will influence how texture maps will look when applied to an object. Daz terminology might be causing some of the confusion here, because the overwhelming majority of "shaders" in the store are actually shader presets, and a "texture" in the Daz store is ALSO a shader preset that just plugs item-specific texture maps into the appropriate slots. Almost every Iray "shader" in the store is just a variation on the Uber shader; different shaders are actually quite rare.
It's the tiled textures you need to make your own shader preset. That's why I said you need to know what each of the maps does and then load them into the Uber Base yourself. Then you can save that as a shader preset. You can get some pretty great results if you take the time to play around and learn what each of the texture maps does...i.e. normal/bump/height, etc. Plus that knowledge helps with customizing clothing and other objects, if you want to modify textures that might come with them.
How have I avoided knowing all this for all these years? What @Gordig and you are telling me is something I had never considered before (but then it was many years before I had any idea about the difference between a texture and a shader and a material). Now I learn that what I call shaders are actually shader presets which makes sense because I store them all under the Shader Preset folder. So how do I start with the basic Uber Shader then? I understand the different slots for maps like normal/bump/translucency etc., but is it just a matter of starting with a plane primitive and applying the Uber Shader and then plugging in the various maps that I can download from Poly Haven then save as a Shader Preset? If so, then I am going to make a few of my own.
there are a few annoying features of DAZ studio that doesn't always make it that simple.
I myself save both material and shader presets for that reason.
A shader will not always apply to a surface if it has a specialised shader (usually a 3Delight procedural ) and applying DAZ iray Uber to it first does not always work.
I ran into one again today and just gave up in frustration, Nerd's Shower Tool's drops surfaces, it obviously has a specialised brick and node system that simply won't accept any other shaders, I guess I would need to go into shader mixer to solve it.
In other words You can save your own shaders but if the surface does not have DAZ iray Uber applied to it already many won't load, then you get procedural iray shaders on top of this, so having both a shader preset and material preset (which fills in the map slots) is often useful.
Well, I had a go with one of the Poly Haven textures and this is the resulting Shader Preset.. I didn't know what dimensions to make the plane primitive so I guessed at 1m x 1m. The texture is 4k.
If you're using a displacement map, be aware that those are highly dependent on subdivision.
I did use the included displacement map but I see no effect. I will tinker with the strength but your comment might be the answer. I loaded the cube with 50 divisions. I have got into the habit of using primitives as dForce collision objects and for that I usually bump up the number of divisions - often to over 100.
For displacement, you also need to set the mininum and maximum distance.
You surprise me. I was sure displacement worked on the current surface, whether sub-divided or not, and moved the local pixel's surface position based on the displacement map and max/min values. And displacement was a way of simulating the effects of high sub-d values without the computational expense (though evidence has been shown in this forum that sub-d 0-3 is quicker than displacement maps for 20xx & 30xx GPU's). It seems to work that way on DS4.10-4.15, but I've not got beyond that version.
I presume the change to sub-d dependancy was in either DS4.16 or 4.20 which would explain why I've not seen it.
Regards,
Richard.
By "subdivision", I meant mesh density.
there is a subdivision parameter under the displacement ones in the shader tab
That's what I assumed you meant and why I mentioned the fact that I loaded the cube with 50 divisions.
Yeah, that SHOULD have have been one of the first things DAZ did after adding the Iray render engine in DS 4.8. There are a handful of PAs like First Bastion and Maclen who have gone back and labeled their stuff or added iray versions at no extra charge, but given that DAZ still hasn't even redone the Users Guide to reflect the fact that 3DL is no longer the default renderer, let alone properly identified the older stuff... let's just say I'll expect to get the news of DAZ doing that delivered by flying pig.
As much as I appreciate the selfless (unselfish? lack of english knowkedge) motivation of your decision, I dont hope that other PAs will follow, as it is really quite easy to convert 3DL products to IRAY and oftentimes there are very useful props hidden in some older sets (not to mention that many products are definitely worth buying. Only the geometry matters.
as a Carrara user I second this