Iray Shaders look terrible on clothing - what am I doing wrong?

alex_bb8aa5da

I bought the mischief outfit for gen3 female. It is awesome, but i wanted to change up the color. So i bought some leather iray shader, thinging to just change the material. I selected the piece of clothing, went to surfaces-->editor-->selected a serface.  Applied the shader.... and it looks terrible - all the nuances of the fabric are gone, things are flat, and it looks like a kid coloring over a picture instead of an actual material. I went back to just add a few accents, and ran into the same problem. It's not as visible with accents, but still flat whereever i applied the shader (red stuff). What I am missing?  I thought the point of buying all the cool fabric and leather shaders was so that I could use them to spruce my the existing clothing items, but I am only messing up the clothing. Can anyone point me in the right direction?

Richard Haseltine

You may want to try adjusting the Tiling settings, which will vary by the thing you are applying the shader to.

SpottedKitty

If you're not sure how to do that, some shader sets include utility presets to adjust the tiling directly.

alex_bb8aa5da

Richard and Kitty, might you be able for explaining what you mean a bit more? I thought tiling was how narrow or wide a pattern is -- how often it repeats, where as here is looks like all the nuances like folds and shadows and bumps dissapear. Im trying to understand the theory behind what i need to be doing.  Also, is tiling adjusted on the surfaces tab in the clothing or somewhere within the shader?  thank you so much for walking me throiugh this

SixDs

Do the leather shaders that you are referring to only include shaders, or does the package also include its own texture maps? You should be able to check this in either the originally downloaded zip archive for the product, or by merely looking at the texture maps in the Surfaces tab by mousing over them after applying the shader. It may be that some bump,normal, displacement, etc. maps from the original product are being replaced, thus not retaining all the features that you mention. Alternatively, if you are applying the shaders holding down the Ctrl key and telling it to ignore maps, then your new shaders are being applied strictly as surface settings retaining all the original maps. The potential problem with the latter is that the shader package was designed to be used with the included maps. Discarding them could understandably produce different results, especially when combined with maps intended for use with an entirely different set of surface settings.

For example, try this: load the clothing item (the tunic or whatever) and look at the bump settings under the Surfaces tab. Jot down the Bump Strength setting (%), as well as the positive and negative bump values, represented as positive and negative decimal fractions. Now, apply the shaders from the leather shader package using the "ignore maps" option. Now check those same bump settings comparing them to the originals. Are they the same? I'll bet that they are not. Why? Because you have applied bump settings that were designed to be used with a completely different bump map. You'll need to manually reset them to the original to get the same effect.