Genesis 8.1 PBR material needs Cutout Opacity, or else most geograph addons become useless.
vozolgant
Posts: 207
in The Commons
Genesis 8.1 PBR material needs Cutout Opacity, or else most geograph addons become useless. There are many geograph anatomical addons for G8F, but without cutout opacity, they can't be used on Genesis 8.1 PBR material.
Just add Cutout Opacity to G8.1 PBR Material, then patch it into DAZ Studio. Please try to get it done within 2 weeks or sooner. Thank you.
This discussion has been closed.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
You don't need cutout oppacity for geocrafts. They work by hiding the underlying polygons and has nothing to do with curout oppacity.
I think he's talking about setting PBR material for extra geoshells that might be used along with geografts.
I'm not sure if PBR could be needed on those, though. It's not like one is going to need skin microdetails on a mermaid tail or a centaur body.
PBR still needs working opacity channel, though. It helps with creating fantasy characters when you want holes or seams in the character skin.
Like this:
The character on the right has opacity set for the skin and then there's geoshell moved INSIDE the body with robotic details to show between the seams. It's much nicer method than using displacement maps to carve character skin (I don't have to worry about displacement subdivisions and how heavy those are on video memory), but it won't work with PBR skin shader so I can't have skin micro details for closeups.
All in all, PBR skin shader so far is very lacking and requires some more work.
I can name many geograph products that use cutout opacity and Iray Uber shader, but a lot of them are adult.
We need the PBR material to have cutout opacity.
I don't have any 8.1 characters so I don't have this problem but I do know that Meipe released an update to his/her 3rd Party male and female anatomy products (geografts with geoshells for texturing) so that they would work with 8.1 PBR.
Geoshells on characters with geocrafts is something different. On geoshells you can use any shader you want, and therefore also cutout oppacity..
If you on Iray Uber use Cutout oppacity then SSS won't work in that surface.
You don't need PBR shader on any geoshell that might be coming with any geograft because with any anatomy grafts geoshells are used for adding extra larger texture to this particular part. Both PBR and Uber can be made to look the same in Iray and the only thing you'll get on PBR will be added tiled skin microdetails. Except whatever shell you might have on an anatomical element probably is already using 4096x4096 for this body part alone. It's already doing extra detailing. Not only this, but also for any micros to work whoever is making the geograft would need to supply microdetails weight map for this body part.
This is not true. They're inheritantly different. It won't look right, unless you have low quality standards. I've tried to match the settings as much as possible, and it still looks off. PBR handles subsurface scattering differently.
This semi-transparent-overlay-Geoshell is still using Iray Uber Shader, and it doesn't look right when overlaid over PBR skin texture.
This semi-transparent-overlay-Geoshell should also be set to PBR Shader, that will look best, that is professional. I want DAZ to strive for professionalism, not hack jobs.
Overlaying Iray Uber over PBR is just lazy and unacceptable, unless you have very low standards of quality.
If you're trying to make a render that's the BEST of the best, then you should use only one material type across your entire figure and its geoshells.
No shader handles volumetric effects like subsurface scattering when cutout opacity is used. It's a limitation in Iray, so what you're asking won't work (and the ball here is entirely in Nvidia's court, not Daz's).
The problem is that sub-surface scattering requires the surface to be thick-walled, and thick-walled effects only work properly when the surface is watertight - a ray needs to have a clearly defined entrance and exit from the volume. (And if you define leaving a transparent point as leaving the volume, you get *other* problems).
This is why PBRskin was not implemented with a Cutout Opacity channel, because it breaks the shader.
Even if what you were asking could work (and no, SSS and opacity don't work together even with Uber*), a geoshell messes with translucency and transmission anyway, because the presence of the underlying layer affects how light travels. If you're looking for full professionalism, you should really be overlaying the textures in an image editor so they're all on one surface, not using a geoshell.
* If you need proof, take a character with an Uber skin and just set cutout opacity to 0.9999 or something. Even though this is almost fully opaque, Iray automatically forces on Thin Walled shading, which means no transmission or SSS is calculated.
In that respect, a far better feature to ask for would actually be to allow a shader to be able to use multiple UVs; in theory, the overlay that a geoshell is being used to do could be mixed at a shader level (rather than needing an image editor) - things like the 4-Layer Uber Shader or Oso Blendy already do this - but the headache is often that the geoshell overlay wants to use a different UV to the main figure, and things can't actually handle that at the moment.
^All of this.
Also, if I recall correctly the most popular anatomical details geografts already use different material setting because even if the figure skin and the geoshell are Uber, I think materials for higher resolution nipples were using Specular/Glossiness base mixing whilst the character skins usually are Metallicity/Roughness.
All I'm going to say on a closeup shot so close that it starts being visible that the added anatomy is on different shader separate pixels of the character own skin would be showing as well.
Thank you for this wonderful writeup. You know your stuff. I learned a lot. You also confirmed one HUGE thing for me.
This is the exact conclusion I came to. I was going to stop using the geoshells, switch uv's, overlay textures in photoshop, but this will result in lots of Seams, and fixing those seams is too much work that I don't have time for. That's why I'd rather pay someone for a product that's ready to go. If I want to use PBR, I have to apply your solution these products: Breastacular, Lickalicious, Futalicious, and that will take too long, too much work.
I think I'm going to be forced to stick with the Iray Uber Shader. This sucks.
I wish DAZ would just be more open minded when it comes to sexuality. They always neglect: Butt, Genitals, Tongue and Breasts. It's like a rule on a sign they keep at their office: "Dear staff, always neglect the butt, genitals, tongue and breasts when designing genesis figures, thank you!" LOL
Anybody can make a shader for Daz Studio. So you do not have to depend on Daz for this. There is a product in the Daz Store which contains a shader that you will be very interested in as a bonus.
https://www.daz3d.com/breast-utilities-2-for-genesis-8-and-81-females
In this product Soto includes "Iray Uber Detail". This shader does exactly what it sounds like, it takes Iray Uber and adds the ability to tile specific textures just like PBR Skin does. The catch is that the problems that have been mentioned by others in this thread still apply here, as that is an issue with Iray itself. But at least Iray Uber Detail gives you the chance to try it all out and see if you can make something that looks fine. I used the shader on clothing, it is perfect for making clothes that have opacity maps for holes, while using a tiled detail map to add depth to the texture.
Out of curiosity, I tried it on a wet skin geoshell. It can totally work for this use, you just have to be careful what settings you use. If the normal map is set too strong, you will get dark black areas on the parts of the geoshell that are elevated above the skin by the normals. Soto's shader allows me to try this, and while it might not work, it is possible to make it work or experiment an alternative...while Daz PBR Skin removes this entirely. I suppose Daz did not want people complaining that something wasn't working exactly right and just decided to nuke the whole thing. Still, it would be great if the option was there in some form, like an Advanced PBR Skin. At any rate, I like what what Soto did here, because Iray Uber Detail has the setting from Iray that I am used to, as PBR Skin also removes a couple of settings besides just opacity.
PBR responds more predictably with light, where as IRAY Uber Shader is unpredictable with its SSS, skin changes a lot based on the lighting, where as PBR is more normalized. I was hoping to use PBR specifically due to how well it responds to light with predictable visual results.
You're not obligated to use the Iray render engine, or even Daz Studio. There are alternatives for Daz Studio, like Octane, and there are alternatives to Daz Studio, like Blender.
Iray Uber and PBRSkin can both use overlays, DAZ have used it for eyebrows on some of their G8 characters, I've used similar with some of my own custom shaders.
Normally it's done using PNG's with Alpha channels, and uses the built in Image Editor to force Iray to use the Alpha, so I have no idea if it would work with a transmap JPG.
Any chance DAZ could just make it so PBR material can have cutout opacity? Come on... Make our lives easier, please. It's already bad enough that 4.20 has tons of problems.
Or how about stopping the bellyaching and using a certain lump of gristle for something other than a cushion.
(Points at attached image) Five minutes in the ShaderMixer is all it took to do that, you see PBRSkin was made in the SM, so it can be altered in the SM. I had to change the shader name (circled) otherwise it will conflict with the original, and importing from scene does wipe out the fancy colors on the sliders.
As we're consistently mixing up terminology here, I think it's important to say that all Iray materials use physically based rendering; "PBR" is not a good shortcut for referring to the PBRSkin shader.
But beyond that - no, they cannot. Updating PBRSkin in that way would probably break a lot of things. However, even an end user can do as Bejaymac says and create a copy of the shader that has a block to add Cutout Opacity in the Shader Mixer... but I will point out that as I said before, this will still force on Thin Walled rendering if used, and will thus not handle SSS at all. And updating that would be something that (if possible at all) would fall under Nvidia's development.
Closed due to bumping.