can you make old generation M4/V4 3delight era clothing Iray?
Toobis
Posts: 965
in The Commons
So with an Iray scene I want to include some background characters that would be clothed M4/V4 ones. The question is, is there a way of making their clothes Iray at all?
Comments
You definitely can. If you can use the earliest Genesis characters, you can get resources down even further with products like MMX resourse saver.
If you want to change the textures on the clothing, any iray shader will work. If you want to use the original texuters and make those iray, RSSY has a converter that can help you and there is a thread here on the forums with information about using it.
https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-3delight-to-iray-converter
Iray and 3Delight (or any two render engines, really) use mostly the same types of maps for mostly the same purposes. They might use different names for them, they might have slightly different functionality (3Delight's ambient parameter doesn't really have an equivalent in Iray, with the closest analogue being emissive), but it's mostly just a matter of understanding what each parameter does. A "glossy" map might go in the Dual Lobe Specular Weight, for example, and Iray's Base Color parameter is where you'd put the diffuse map (unless there are both diffuse and base color maps, in my experience, then you'd use base color).
Yes, you can. There are some converters out there but personally, I don't find it too hard to do the conversion manually. It gives me more control over the process which satisfies the OCD part of my brain.
You should note though, if the idea is to fill the background with low-poly characters, my understanding is that Gen4 has more polys than G8. I don't know where G9 falls in this.
I think the best way to get low-poly background characters would be to use G8, keep SubD as low as possible, use Scene Optimizer to scale down the textures, possibly use some of MMX' resource-saving shaders.
I completely agree with this. V4/M4 has 4 times more polys than G8, although in reality the polys are not the problem when it comes to resource usage, it is the textures. V4/M4 share their arm/leg map, so there is some saving there, but for background characters you need 2K, or more likely 1K maps, and for this a product like Scene Optimizer does a good job, and you might as well use G8 since there is so many resources available for it.
iray already attempts to convert old 3delight shaders, like from V4/M4, automatically. Sometimes it works, but there are often issues when there's transparency or light emissions involved. Progressive shaders (less often found on figures or clothing) won't work at all (Really a shame we can't use the bronze patina from https://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-dirt-shaders in iray).
Best results are obviously when you manually convert the shaders to iray, or replace them with iray equivalent shaders entirely. But, if it's just for background figures, you can always just do a short test render to check for glaring defects, and if none are there, proceed with a serious render.
I use G3 to fill backgrounds because it loads so much faster for me. (I bought way too many G8s, and though I uninstalled many, my G8 load times are still triple G3). I also have a lot of low poly figures from Turbo & CGTrader that help crowd a background.
As says, DS will do a conversion (the equivalent of applying Iray Uber base) at render time for the standard surface shaders, manually converting is needed only if you want to tweak settings (e.g. metal and glass often need work, especially if they had reflection maps). or if the 3Delight materials used a non-standard shader. Still, for background items you might want to look at some of the MMX Resource Saver products to get generic, low demand materials you could use instead of the base materials.
V4/M4 used to have hidden low-poly versions, too. A couple different sizes. I don't if they are still available or not though.
Richard Haseltine .. I'm having an iray problem on another thread. Maybe you could take a look, please?
Level of Detail (LoD) works in DS still, but is not saved to the scene file so it has to be redone each time (as I recall).