Yuletide Treasure Tree 2011 - Help with Iray textures?

mmitchell_houston

I'm having trouble with the Yuletide Treasure Tree 2011 textures in Iray. In short, they are acting very WEIRD.

I've attached an image comparing:

• OpenGL render (just so you can see the geometry of the tree)
• 3Delight, which works fine (but is not usable because I need the scene rendered in Iray)
• Iray, which looks like it's missing the transmaps, or something.

I poked around the material settings, but nothig lept out at me. Can anyone suggest something that could help?

 

mjc1016

My guess is that the problem is a combination of displacement and the transmaps.  For displacement to work in Iray there needs to be a lot more polys...that means, especially for something as fine as evergreen needles, insane levels of SubD added.   It looks as if the displacement is currently moving whole faces. 

The second, probably contributing cause, is that the transparency maps may not be in the cutout opacity slot...

Szark

did you convert the mats in Iray first or just let DS to a on-the-fly conversion?

mmitchell_houston

I used on-the-fly conversion. Is there a link to something explaining how to do it manually? And is it worth the effort?

Szark

Effort...Indeed if you want to get the best out of Iray, that is your choice in how much effort you want to put in to it. Just remember you get out what you put in.. The conversion isn't perfect but more of a starting point.

Go to the Content Library Pane (NOT SMART CONTENT) and go to Daz Studio Formats > My DAZ3D Library > Shader Presets > Iray > Iray Uber Shader.

Select your surfaces in the Surfaces Pane and double click the Iray Uber Shader and adust your materials to suit http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/surfaces/shaders/iray_uber_shader/shader_general_concepts/start#base_mixing

 

for me it is worth the time to set up the materials for Iray http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/95829

mmitchell_houston

I just gave up. It wasn't worth the time needed to fix things, and I really wasn't sure where to go in the textures, anyway. 

Instad, I bought two new trees. The first one was from Renderosity, but it turned out it was based on dynamic hair, so that was useless in Daz (of course, the listing didn't say it used hair, or I wouldn't have bought it). It did come with some gift boxes that I like, otherwise I would ask for a refund.

The second tree was on sale here yesterday: Holiday Dreams. The third time was the charm, as it worked out for me. I will still need to tweak the textures for Iray (the needles look too dark), but it has a lush, fullness that I'm looking for. It also has a quirk: It comes with candles, but only puts them on one side of the tree. This might be fine if I were viewing the tree from only one direction, but I'm actually doing two renders to show the front of the tree and the back. I tried adding a duplicate set of candles and rotating it, but then they do not fall properly on the branches. I may open the candle prop in another program and remove the extras so I can create individual candles and place them where I want them, one by one. 

Of course, all of these tweaks are dependent on time. I need to finish both the front and back images as a cover for a publication -- and my deadline is next week. 

 

Thanks to all for your help, and particularly for suggesting how to tweak the textures. I will be using that knowledge on this and future projects.