photo texture conversions for iray

alan bard newcomer

trying to find info on this...
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my character cats... use pictures of real cats to make the faces... 
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while I love what iray is doing for clothing textures etc... 
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I'm thinking my photo faces are a little flat... and wondering is there a conversion* to run or should I try to add more sparkle to the original jpegs... 
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conversion .. in that new settings or layers maps etc for iray is there a suggested list of changes to make
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their faces seem flat in tone compared to the other surfaces
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directions to a discussion of this problem would be appreciated as well as brilliant  answers....

 

alan bard newcomer

here's a better picture .. same scene same textures etc... different lights  ... top one Iray with two crossing spotlights ala theater set up and a skydome and sun 
Bottom one with 3dl and one spotlight and skydome and sun...
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no roof above the room...
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so what is the difference in the face due to? 
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thanks...

prixat

Hi Alan

That would be a difference in the shaders not the jpeg.

If those are still 3Delight shaders (in the Iray image) then DS does its best to autoconvert but can only make a best guess at settings.

If you have manually changed them to Iray shaders you'll still need to tweak the settings to get what you want.

alan bard newcomer

the faces are literally the jpegs with bump maps... what do I need to do to convert them to "shaders" instead of just textures? 
for some reason the book isn't effected as much even though it's just a jpg on the object. 
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it seems from a scientific viewpoint ... there should be info some where as to Iray wants spectular levels of x instead of the y that 3dl wants or needs this kind of a ambient .. opacity ... etc... 
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technically I'm using a photograph for their skin... what is the difference between skins that were created for 3dl and the ones for iray. 
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most of the shaders like the velvet etc are just regular ones and iray does a great job with them... 
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I need to go back and down the images in 4.8 .. I don't think the effect was the same.
if they start with a photograph than their should be a certain set of steps to maximise the image for either 3dl or iray.
 

 

mjc1016

A texture or material is a shader plus image maps plus specific settings.  Everything starts with shaders.

What you need to do is convert the Studio default 3Delight shader to Iray by selecting the appropriate surfaces, then in the Shader Presets > Iray > DazUber and apply the Iray UberBase.  This shader will now give you the controls you need for Iray...autoconversion doesn't do that.  Without any tweaking,  the results will pretty much be the same as the autoconversion...but now that the controls are available you can make sure the bump map is being used and adjust its strength (can't do that when autoconverted).

alan bard newcomer

thanks I will go in and beat on them...

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oh my.. 
it appears you can't take a nine file back to eight
I took the scene back to 4.8 to see what it would look like  and got this... same scene as in the previous picture... rendered in iray with the same lights.. 
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has there been a change in how data is saved? 
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or I suppose this is because even though nine scanned the disk with the files ... I eventually had to manually add the HD folder as a directory in order for it to see the data it had scanned. 
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so that everything is down one level in the nine content directories.

mjc1016

That's just over exposed...in 4.9 there seems to be a units change on some of the lights.   In 4.8, the Luminence values will be way to high because of that...

alan bard newcomer

that explains the brightness
but this is what the image now looks like before rendering... 
which is what makes me think that 49 saved the textures with it's new locations 
as opposed to where 48 saved them
this is a screen shot of the file having gone into 49 and back to 48....
but the next one I will post show a new and different problem

 

alan bard newcomer

 i went back to 48 and opened the file again (without it having been opened in 49) and rendered it in iray with same lights as it was rendered in 49 
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the picture attached the top is 49 iray... the bottom is 48 iray... so what happened?
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because it looks like something happened differently to the shaders between the two versions.
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I did this because I remember being impressed with the results in iray... and now it's different
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and the characters were loaded into the base scene in 4.9 for that render
and the characters were loaded into the base scene in 4.8 for that render 
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they are kept as scene subsets...

 

jestmart

You should be keeping your textures in [Your mapped library]/Runtime/Textures/[Your textures]/[Project name]/  so that they are saved with relative paths.