Does the Fabricator work with Reality?

twalling

Just wondering. Anyone?

Szark

This http://www.daz3d.com/the-fabricator ?

I would have thought so it is just mats unless it uses the Shader Mixer then that would be a no. But by the description I would say yes. No I don't have any of the Fabricator series of products becasue I do my own. :)

twalling

Thanks... it's just a little pricey so I thought I'd ask before jumping in.

cwichura

I have Fabricator, Silk Essence and Lace Essence and have used all of them repeatedly in Reality/LuxRender, though you will need to tweak material settings for some of them. All of the Fabricator products are shaders based on tiled textures, which LuxRender handles just fine. Some of them make use of UberSurface in Studio to get two different specular channels, which Reality does not know how to handle, however. Hence, why I say you will need to tweak the material settings a bit. Nothing rocket science, though.

twalling

Thanks... that was the answer I was looking for. :)

Szark

cwichura said:

I have Fabricator, Silk Essence and Lace Essence and have used all of them repeatedly in Reality/LuxRender, though you will need to tweak material settings for some of them. All of the Fabricator products are shaders based on tiled textures, which LuxRender handles just fine. Some of them make use of UberSurface in Studio to get two different specular channels, which Reality does not know how to handle, however. Hence, why I say you will need to tweak the material settings a bit. Nothing rocket science, though.

Thansk for that nugget of info...good to know.

Herald of Fire

*Edits Reality's .LXM file*
*Changes material to cloth*
*????*
*Profits*

cwichura

Yes, some of them work really well when using Lux's new cloth material type. But until Reality 3 is available, I don't see many people doing that given the work to edit the generated scene files.

Another tip for using the Fabricator line of products with Reality/LuxRender: many of them make use of displacement maps. This has two things to watch for. First, some of them set the min displacement in Studio to 0, which Reality has a bug with and sets it to the default of -.001. So you need to watch for that and set the min to 0 in Reality when this happens. The second thing to watch for is that these displacement maps, especially when tiled, result in very fine levels of detail. Even with the default of one level of subdivision that Reality always applies when you have a displacement map, there probably still won't be enough geometry to push around to account for the fine level of detail. So you need to bump up the subdivision a couple of levels in Reality. This will cause LuxRender to use a fair bit more RAM, however. (If RAM usage becomes an issue, you have two options: 1) use microfacet displacement, which doesn't use extra memory, but is orders of magnitude slower to render or 2) load the displacement maps in a tool like Shader Map Pro and generate normal maps out of them, and then use the normal maps instead of the displacement maps.)

agent unawares

HeraldOfFire said:

*Edits Reality's .LXM file*
*Changes material to cloth*
*????*
*Profits*

What do you use to edit lxm files? Right now I'm working in WordPad, but I suspect that's not the greatest option.

mjc1016

Any text editor...

For Windows, I'd suggest Notepad ++

http://notepad-plus-plus.org/

agent unawares

Thanks, that's set up a lot nicer. The word-wrapping made context a bit bewildering.

Herald of Fire

Yes, I use Notepad++ as well. It loads LXM and LXO files with the proper formatting, making editing much easier. It also has a feature to replace instances in every open document, so you can effectively batch-edit your Lux files.

cwichura

FWIW, I use Notepad++ as well.

sfaa69

I recommend Notepad++ as well, I've been using it for years as a relatively easy way to fix the "file not found" errors so frequently encountered with freebies.