How Do I Create a New Surface Property?

Mag_bfaa50c8df

I have a V7 figure and I wish to add new surface properties to the torso in addition to it's original. Ambient color, Ambient SSS Contribution and Ambient Strength are the properties I wish to add. How would I do this? Thanks in advance.

Richard Haseltine

You need to edit the shader (assuming it's editable) - both the AoA SSS shader and the Iray Uber Base can be edited in Shader Mixer. What are you wanting to add?

Mag_bfaa50c8df

Hey Richard! So what I'm doing is I render V7 figures in 3delight but they have their Iray materials with some tweaking to get a desired affect that I like. It's very unconventional obviously but I like the results. I have the sachra and Tara product and I like the glowing tattoos from sachra. Well since I use 3delight to render, the only way I can get the tattoos is to use the 3delight material for her torso but I noticed that the tattoo affect is created with the surface properties I listed above in my original post. So I wanted to keep my V7 iray material and add the material properties, in this case to the torso, used to create the glowing tattoos so I could successfully render it in 3delight. Does that make sense? So basically I want to add the properties: Ambient color, Ambient SSS contribution and ambient strength to the existing torso surface section. 

Richard Haseltine

I don't think you can do that - even if you could, the fact that the shader is for Iray means it will be repalced on rendering with the basic 3Delight shader, as far as I know.

TheKD

Sounds like maybe you want to do one iray render, one 3delight render, then in composite blend the tattoo into the other render with a very soft brushed mask.

Mag_bfaa50c8df

TheKD said:

Sounds like maybe you want to do one iray render, one 3delight render, then in composite blend the tattoo into the other render with a very soft brushed mask.

That's deffinitely an option but what I'm wondering is if there is a way to add an additional surface property into a pre-existing group of properties. For example, you have a section of properties. It could be under head, hip, torso, it doesn't matter. You select say torso and the drop down shows all the different properties. I'm just curious if technically there is a way to add to these surface sections. I know how to copy surfaces but not how to create custom ones and how to add one or two to a pre-existing set of properties. Richard doesn't think this is possible and it wouldn't surprise me because I haven't found anything on it yet but I vaguely remember a work around I had found a long time ago but can't remember if it would apply here. I wish I could remember it.

Richard Haseltine

An added property does nothing. Adding a property to the bones or figure is useful only if you use it to load a morph or link it to other properties via ERC so that it acts as a cotnroller (or you may delibrately add a proeprty to a fitted item to stop it from geenrating a morph). What you want to do is beyond adding a property - you want to change the way the shader behaves, which requires a much deeper level of change.

Mag_bfaa50c8df

Richard Haseltine said:

An added property does nothing. Adding a property to the bones or figure is useful only if you use it to load a morph or link it to other properties via ERC so that it acts as a cotnroller (or you may delibrately add a proeprty to a fitted item to stop it from geenrating a morph). What you want to do is beyond adding a property - you want to change the way the shader behaves, which requires a much deeper level of change.

I see. So it's not possible to change the behavior of a shader in Daz I assume

Richard Haseltine

Mag_bfaa50c8df said:

Richard Haseltine said:

An added property does nothing. Adding a property to the bones or figure is useful only if you use it to load a morph or link it to other properties via ERC so that it acts as a cotnroller (or you may delibrately add a proeprty to a fitted item to stop it from geenrating a morph). What you want to do is beyond adding a property - you want to change the way the shader behaves, which requires a much deeper level of change.

I see. So it's not possible to change the behavior of a shader in Daz I assume

It is, by importing it into Shader Mixer if it is a Shader Mixer-built shader. However, in this case I think it would be simpler to apply a 3Delight shader which already has the desired properties and set itt o match - I haven't checked but my guess would bem if you check the log, that DS is repalcing the Iray shader with the default Daz Shader at render time anyway.

Tobor

If you go with Iray all the way, iray supports exactly what you want with the decal feature. It's under the Crate menu. Personally, I find decals a little obtuse, but there's a very active user here (Will Timmons) that uses them extensively, and I think has written up some tutorials. Do a Google or Bing search back into the forum to see what you can find.

Obviously, decals can't be used with 3DL, but one technique that might otherwise work with 3DL alone is applying a geoshell, turning off anything not used, and connect your texture to the shell.