What's the difference between a 'shader' and a texture and how do I use the former?

behansen

I've "technically" been around DAZ for a while but never used shaders before.  I have several in my library, most of them I aquired for free but some were part of things I bought.  Textures are simple, just click and the texture loads onto the model and to change textures, I just click another option in my library or if I really want to be creative I put a different file into the diffuse layer.  But when I click on a shader as I would for a texture, nothing seems to happen.

sriesch

Which shader and/or content thumnail specifically are you clicking on?

Note that you may not see a change in the preview window, you might have to render for the change to show up.  Also some shaders have a "base" shader that changes which shader is used, however it might still be using, say, the diffuse texture you already had applied and might be very similar to the default shader it replaced (probably not the case, but could happen).  Also make sure you have selected the surface of the object you want to apply the shader to, and not just the object itself without having also selected one or more of it's surfaces.

Richard Haseltine

A texture is an image file designed to wrap around a model (or possibly a generic, tiling image that can be repeated across well-mapped surfaces). A shader tells the render engine how to use textures and numeric values to determine the appearance of a surface under the scene's lighting. A shader or materials preset tells DS which shader to use, and which textures and values to apply to it - a shader preset modifies all selected surfaces on all selected items in the same way, a materials preset has a list of possibly varying settings to be applied to each of one or more named surfaces on all selected objects.