Manga Style Shaders - Help!

athompson283

Hello,

I just recently bought Manga Style Shaders and it's turning out to be more of a headache than I thought. I read the step-by-step guide on how to apply the skin shader and my result is ending up nothing like the image in the How-To guide (Found here)

 

I attached comparision images below - please see them to understand what the problem is (ie: the texture is all wrong, mine is still 3d-ish)

 

What am I doing wrong?

 

I know there's the Manga Style Shader help thread, but a) it looks dead and b) it's 16 pages and I don't want to have to dig to find out if my problem is something that's even addressed. Also, I had this same problem with the Genesis 2 figure (the figure I wanted to use to begin with) so if anyone could help with that too it'd be appreciated.

 

Thanks!

Sven Dullah

So did you try to render your figure? The picture attached looks like the preview window.

mindsong

First non-obvious thing about some older products... They didn't know about Iray, so they don't mention that you have to select/use the 3-Delight render engine (3DL) for them to work at all. Usually Iray renders of 3DL stuff looks washed out. For a *long* time 3DL was the only renderer in DAZ Studio. Hard to get angry with any vendor who didn't know Iray was going to be an option years later... Most Docs don't get updates after a good while either...

So..anyway - 3DL is in the 'render settings' tab - at the top... Perhaps you already knew that.

The thing that I found was always written in the manuals (it's right there once you 'get' it...), but took way to long to actually understand, was I needed to select the figure *and then* select the specific figure surfaces in the 'Surfaces' tab *as well*! If you don't select those surfaces... nothing happens, and I guess it makes sense once you know how it all works... I didn't for way-too-long.

Once you find those, you'll probably want to have the outer skin surfaces selected first (shift-click the face, head, torso, limbs items etc.) for a particular manga texture/setting/preset, and then the eyes and other more distinct features selected to apply other texture patterns/variations, etc.

I also realized that for most of these kits, you'll often need to find the 'base' shader - usually in the content library right in the main product folder (not in the various preset subfolders), and the select those surfaces mentioned above (all of the figure surfaces, usually), apply that base shader (select the surfaces then double click the product's base shader icon). You can tell you got it because at the top of the surfaces tab, the current shader is presented (the default figure shader is something like 'Dz default surface' or the like, and the newly applied base-shader should change that to something like Manga Shader, or Visual-Style Shader. Only then do the various presets in the product sub-folders mean anything to that shader! (Note that you can apply some Manga-Style shaders to some body parts, and other shaders to other body surfaces on the same figure. e.g. Manga-style for skins, and basic Daz Shaders with a dark solid color for hair)

To affect just a single surface, simply select only that surface and tweak the shader/surface sliders, or double-click on the presets you want to try, or both.

FWIW, The author of the product is *really* helpful in the product forums, and the products are actually really amazing - I think the breakdown is the assumption that we all know how these shader things work in a workflow, and until you get the feel for it all, it's pretty obscure that you have to select various things the way you do to get something 'active'.

I hope this wasn't well-below your level of experience, as I haven't seen your posts - apologies if you knew all of this. Perhaps other don't and will find it helpful.

If you know all of that stuff above, perhaps it's not installed properly? That happens a lot in here too.

Good luck, and show us a render when you get it all working!

cheers,

--ms

Richard Haseltine

athompson283 said:

Hello,

I just recently bought Manga Style Shaders and it's turning out to be more of a headache than I thought. I read the step-by-step guide on how to apply the skin shader and my result is ending up nothing like the image in the How-To guide (Found here)

 

I attached comparision images below - please see them to understand what the problem is (ie: the texture is all wrong, mine is still 3d-ish)

 

What am I doing wrong?

 

I know there's the Manga Style Shader help thread, but a) it looks dead and b) it's 16 pages and I don't want to have to dig to find out if my problem is something that's even addressed. Also, I had this same problem with the Genesis 2 figure (the figure I wanted to use to begin with) so if anyone could help with that too it'd be appreciated.

 

Thanks!

You hae to render, and you have to render in 3Delight as these are not Iray shaders.