Nerd 3d Smokin Flames materials not loading

aprilsunshine7_4526d47d74

When I try to load some materials onto the flame plane, nothing shows up in the render or in the viewport. For example: fae blasts, fae dust, and the vapors don't show up. The lightning does show up, but the color is missing. (For that I tried to change the color in the surfaces tab, but no luck.) But all of the fire materials load properly.

Do I need to find some sort of maps to load by hand or something in the surfaces section?

As far as I can tell, product hasn't been updated recently. I'm using Daz Studio 4.5, and I'm loading the materials from Daz's library, not the runtime.

Thanks.

Richard Haseltine

I just tried that, and had nothing show. Then I applied a different mat, one of the flames, and that did work, so I hit Undo and the Fae Blast material worked. That shouldn't be needed but try it and see if it helps. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the number of images that need to be optimised.

aprilsunshine7_4526d47d74

Richard Haseltine said:

I just tried that, and had nothing show. Then I applied a different mat, one of the flames, and that did work, so I hit Undo and the Fae Blast material worked. That shouldn't be needed but try it and see if it helps. I'm wondering if it has something to do with the number of images that need to be optimised.

Thanks for looking into it. I tried undoing it (ctrl z) but it didn't work.

But you got me thinking about maybe the wrong maps were being applied. It turns out that for me, SmokinFlames is loading the wrong diffuse map for everything but fire. From what I can tell, it's only supposed to load a diffuse map for orange fire. Everything else, it's supposed to be just a diffuse color. So I went and took that out. (The fae blast opacity map had been loaded in the diffuse channel.)

Then I noticed that the ambient strength was different for the different effects. Fire needs to be set at 150%. For everything else, an ambient strength around 100% makes it show up in the viewport. Lightning is for some reason loading at 250%, which is why there's no color in the lightening, and the ambient strength needs to put back at 100% manually.

I did not install the poser version of this tool, or the poser files, since the readme says that the poser version isn't compatible with the DS version. Should I install those files, do you think? Now that I know what the problem is, I don't mind manually tweaking things. But it would be good to know if my problem is caused by not installing the right files.

Thanks.