Can SomeBody Explain What Exactly a Shader Does Like You Were Talking To a 5 Year Old?

404nicg

Again, a slow 5 year old lol.

Also, there's a difference between surface shaders and light shaders?

Thanks

millighost

404nicg said:

Again, a slow 5 year old lol.

Shaders are small people that live inside your computer. They want to paint everything in colors. There are two factions, the light shaders and the dark shaders. They fight a war against each other. The light shaders want to paint everything in bright colors whereas the dark shaders want to paint everything black. You can put a light source (actually a light shaders source) into the scene, and out there come the light shaders who paint everything bright, whatever they can reach.They have trouble to get behind objects, because of that is where the dark shaders are hiding (see below), so the backsides of objects will be painted darker.

Also, there's a difference between surface shaders and light shaders?

The dark shaders try to avoid to be seen by the light shaders by hiding behind surfaces. Hence they are sometimes called surface shaders.
Thanks
My pleasure.

DAZ_ann0314

You could try looking at some of the tutorials and reading through the posts from this New User Contest on Shaders: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/29938/ it may help :) There are tutorials linked in the main post for Surface Basics, Uber Surface in DS etc :)

mrposer

A shader is a set of algorithms that determines how 3-D surface properties of objects are rendered, and how light interacts with the object within a 3-D computer program. (you did mean a 5 Year old Vulcan..right?)

Vhardamis

Shaders are also like textures, you can use them to change the color or appearance of just about anything by changing the amount of diffuse, ambient & displacement levels. Some of them even have patterns You can take an item made of cloth and make it look like its made out of metal instead by applying a shader.

There are surface shaders and light shaders. Surface shaders do just that change the colors on slected surfaces.Light shaders shade an entire scene at once and some apply effects like window pane lines. rain drops, etc.

Serene Night

Shaders work by painting the texture of a surface, much as you would use paint with a brush to paint on a plain piece of ceramic.

Because there are different types of textures that you can paint on surface (such as cloth, stone, etc). There are also textures of various sorts to make the item look real.

If you use a patterned brush such as a texture with polkadots, you may have to adjust the tiling to add smaller or larger polkadots. Depending on the surface area, this might not all be the same for an object, as some material areas are smaller or larger.

Because some shaders have layers, or require other textures, you may have to change the textures or adjust settings to make the best of a particular shader.

Shaders are applied when the object is selected in the scene tab and in the actors tab>Surfaces (Color) is also selected. If an item has more than one shade-able surface those are called material zones. Well designed objects usually have more than one material zone so you can optimize on the texture options and looks you can achieved.

To use Shaders.

1. Select item in the scene view.
2. Go to Actors, Wardrobe & Props tab.
3. Select the item. Expand if necessary to show the mat zones
4. Click zone you want to shade
5. Click corresponding shader
6. You have now applied the shaders to the selected surface.

Totte

404nicg said:

Again, a slow 5 year old lol.

Also, there's a difference between surface shaders and light shaders?

Thanks

In a 3D program, you want to give a polygon a color, that color is placed there by a shader.

A shader is always a small program, a list of instructions to the rendering engine telling it how a polygon should be colored, textured.

Those instructions can be:

- Simple: Use this blue color.
- Moderate: Use this image and use this other image called normal-map to simulate height and light obstruction.
- Complex: Run this special shader program, list of instructions, to calculate the color of every pixel on the polygon you are about to texture.

- A light shader is even more complex, it tells the render engine that this pixel will not only have this color, but emit this amount of light in that direction, so the render engine will add that ray of light to its internal calculations.

Richard Haseltine

SereneNight said:

Shaders work by painting the texture of a surface, much as you would use paint with a brush to paint on a plain piece of ceramic.

Because there are different types of textures that you can paint on surface (such as cloth, stone, etc). There are also textures of various sorts to make the item look real.

If you use a patterned brush such as a texture with polkadots, you may have to adjust the tiling to add smaller or larger polkadots. Depending on the surface area, this might not all be the same for an object, as some material areas are smaller or larger.

Because some shaders have layers, or require other textures, you may have to change the textures or adjust settings to make the best of a particular shader.

Shaders are applied when the object is selected in the scene tab and in the actors tab>Surfaces (Color) is also selected. If an item has more than one shade-able surface those are called material zones. Well designed objects usually have more than one material zone so you can optimize on the texture options and looks you can achieved.

To use Shaders.

1. Select item in the scene view.
2. Go to Actors, Wardrobe & Props tab.
3. Select the item. Expand if necessary to show the mat zones
4. Click zone you want to shade
5. Click corresponding shader
6. You have now applied the shaders to the selected surface.

I think you are discussing a shader preset, which optionally applies a shader and sets one or more of its properties. It's much the same as a pose or shape preset, making changes to settings. The shader is what tells the renderer how the surface (or light) behaves, and offers settings for colours, textures and other values to change the appearance. A preset is needed to apply a shader, but a preset isn't a shader - just as a figure is needed for pose or shape settings to be applied, but the shape or pose preset isn't the figure itself.

Stryder87

millighost said:

Again, a slow 5 year old lol.

Shaders are small people that live inside your computer. They want to paint everything in colors. There are two factions, the light shaders and the dark shaders. They fight a war against each other. The light shaders want to paint everything in bright colors whereas the dark shaders want to paint everything black. You can put a light source (actually a light shaders source) into the scene, and out there come the light shaders who paint everything bright, whatever they can reach.They have trouble to get behind objects, because of that is where the dark shaders are hiding (see below), so the backsides of objects will be painted darker.

OMG... I almost spewed my coffee!!! That was awesome!!! hahahahahahahahaha

Mind if I steal that style for a couple people at work who need that kind of explanation for things?? :lol:

404nicg

Thank you everybody for your replies! Everybody has been extremely helpful.

A follow up question :

Say you have 2 t-shirts with the same texture

Can a shader on one make the t-shirts look drastically different? (I know this is something that I could experiment with but I'm thinking about making a shader purchase and I'm pretty lazy)

Serene Night

yes. depending on what shader you use it could make the texture look different.

404nicg

SereneNight said:

yes. depending on what shader you use it could make the texture look different.

Gotcha thank you very much.

And also thanks Ann for the link to that thread. I'm definitely going to read through that.