Shader Mixer starting points

sriesch

When creating shaders using Shader Mixer, does it make sense to try to include every single setting or not?

From reading a tutorial, I see if you apply values to the default shader on a primitive, then load that into the shader mixer it will use the nonzero values but won't use the others. My first thought is that I feel I HAVE to set every single value to something, otherwise I might create shaders that people can't use the way they expect to be able to. However I'm worried that beyond the obvious minor inconvenience of burying myself under a huge pile of bricks, this might be a bad idea for other reasons that I'm not aware of (might there be some speed penalty, settings I don't personally use that could make no sense or cause problems, etc.?)

For example, I'm familiar with what some of the parameters do, but I've never really closely looked at or thoroughly explored Normal Map, UV Set, Multiply Specularity Through Opacity, Smooth, Angle. I wouldn't want to exclude them if they will still be of use to others who may use any shaders I could create, but also don't want to include them if that could cause problems.

Thoughts?

Bejaymac

My starting point with the SM is to select the item I'm going to be working on, then select one or more surfaces on that item, then fire up the SM and start working from the two bricks you see in the work space.

The only time I ever "import from scene" is to check how other peoples SM shaders were made, or to import one of my own that I was foolish enough not to save a .DBM for, that way I know I'm not going to get a lot of garbage bricks trying to mimic the default surface shader, although I have found a couple of SM shaders that started out that way, the displacement bug tends to make them "stand out" from the others (pun intended :P ).

Richard Haseltine

There are some samples in Shader Mixer Presets in your content folder, which you can read in as Bejaymac suggests - though you should check they work as advertised first. There have also been a number of threads both here and on the old forums (forumarchive.daz3d.com) discussing ways to achieve particular goals with SM.

sriesch

So it sounds like I should just add the parameters I want and not try to go overboard.

So neither of you have ever looked at a shader somebody else made and though "why didn't they add parameter , I really needed that parameter"?

Yep, I'm just starting to look back at the sample shader mixer presets to get the hang of things.

Thanks!

sriesch

Ok, I didn't notice earlier, but I now see that actually UV Set, smooth, Angle, and Multiply Specularity Through Opacity all have nonzero values and are actually all included in the 2 base bricks even if I don't modify the defaults to purposely include them.