Iray to 3delight converter

Keiron

Hi

I recently purchased both Iray to 3delight and 3delight to Iray converters

The converter was easy to use just 3 steps

Following trying out the Iray to 3delight converter I ran into some problems

Out of some 600 + converted Iray textures around 300 came out white and the remaining textures looked far from metalic or shiny

So I contacted SickleYield to ask for advise on what I was doing wrong

"The script does not have a way to recreate shaders that were originally tinted if a mesh did not have actual textures on it. It sounds like the piano keys were just tinted in the surfaces tab. You can get the black color back by going into Surfaces and tinting the black keys' diffuse channel back to black. Turning up the metallic slider at the top of surfaces should also fix the metallic bits. The script goes by surface names, so if a surface is not named after a metal it can't tell it is metallic."

I also found this link that was very helpful to understand the sliders used in Iray

https://www.deviantart.com/sickleyield/journal/Iray-Surfaces-And-What-They-Mean-519346747

So the first thing' I noticed was there were at least 3 ways I could set up whats available to see

PBR Metallicity/Roughness:

This is the only one that exposes the Metallicity slider, which does more or less what you would expect - dial it in only on metals.  DAZ's shaders included with the public beta swing heavily toward use of this shader model, not only on metals but on glass and skin, so contrary to what you would expect, they seem to feel it is the best "general use" shader.

PBR Specular/Glossiness:

This shader model locks the glossy weight at a higher value and hides that slider.  It also exposes the specular glossy color.  Just changing from this to the previous type and back can change the look of your shader to something smoother and less metallic.  It is not used by any of the shaders DAZ has included with the public beta content, but in my experiments it is useful in some specific cases (I prefer it to their chosen look for human corneas and sclera, for instance).

DAZ's docs say this one is the closest to the way the 3Delight shader base was set up.

PBR Weighted:

This one takes the values of the diffuse weight and glossy weight and adjusts them relative to each other.  It can be harder to get a good look with this but it is worth going into for some items.  DAZ uses it on their included velvet and satin shaders. I checked this, but this does not mean the diffuse and glossy weights must add up to 1.0; it's definitely possible to have the total value of both be higher than 1.

I went through all the Iray shaders I had, and noticed that the Nvidia set I was using was causing the issue as a lot of the available Iray dials were missing.

So I removed these from Daz Studio

I replaced all the Nvidia shaders with others and tried the convert again and all looked OK.

I rendered it using 3delight now no white keys, but the render was dull it looked like an open gl render and not like

a 3delight render

After a lot of checking it looked like I now had all the dials, but something was a miss

So I looked at the dials etc and noticed the specular colour was black and glossiness was at 10% so I set these to near white and 100%

Well it's now shiny but not looking metalic, also I couldn't find a metalic slider

I then also noticed that the felt pads didn't look right either

So in conclusion im somewhat dissapointed

To change 600 + surfaces so they look OK and spend days doing it is not good

My advise change the surfaces using 3delight textures using  it's settings.  it looks like this script doesn't apply the settings you need

 

Catherine3678ab

I looked into converting the NVidia shaders awhile back and concluded that they simply are not convertable. So yes if you are not rendering with Iray there is little point to having them.

For correcting the same settings in 3Delight, i.e. to change 600 files to have a metallic sheen ... I do hope you thought to make some specific presets ;-) Then with 600 [small] items in the viewport, all selected and with all surfaces selected, apply the specific preset. Have attached one as an example. All it does is change the "lighting model" to metallic.

 

Keiron

Hi Catherine

I must admit I've never done that before. thank you for the zip

I'm still going through all the shaders to ensure they are all not Invidia

Thank you

 

 

Keiron

Hi Catherine

I've now finished changing some 300 + surfaces from NVidia shaders to good shaders

I have a scene with Iray textures and another with the converted Iray to 3delight

Do I make a material preset of the Iray scene shaders and then apply that to the converted 3delight scene by merging them?

Keiron

Given up with this, asked for a refund

WendyLuvsCatz

I never find any of those converters terribly useful either way

(use a free one for 3Delight a paid one for iray but it has issues too)

this free one 

redoing each surface manually yourself is the only way to get it right

Catherine3678ab

I didn't get notifications and missed the thread, not intentionally.

I don't use converters, not even the free ones. Tried a few times but basically the different types of shaders are like apples and oranges.

For a basic switch to either shader, I apply the basic default shader preset and then make desired changes. If starting off with a plane or sphere, there being only one surface, one can easily save out a Shader Preset. Said preset can then be applied to any material surface.

After applying established [keepers] shader presets, then one can save out material presets. They will only work on the one model.

With regards to the merging of shader [preset]s question, if I understand what you're asking, no.

If "the merging" is meant to apply the Iray shader presets/textures to the 3Delight items, they would then have Iray materials I think, have not even thought of trying this merger idea to get Iray textures on 3Delight items though. Could be wrong.

I'm going with the concept that all these 'shaders' are actually the Shader Presets [regardless of what their little icons say] because that is what shows up in Daz Studio. If you are actually using the Shader Mixer to make Shaders that's another ballgame.

Keiron

Hi Everyone

Thank you for you comments

I'll just apply 3delight textures to them in the future

Here are a three renders in Iray and a couple of converted ones so you can see what I mean, some surfaces seem to be reflective and others dull. The holders and rivits are copper, hammer gold, the note itself is a bit more complicated  as it's black or white dependant on what key it is  with the cylinder and sphere and lower key mech in platinum

The last render is a converted Iray scene if you look a lot of the surfaces are dull and not metalic looking

 

 

 

Sven Dullah

Keiron said:

Hi Everyone

Thank you for you comments

I'll just apply 3delight textures to them in the future

Here are a three renders in Iray and a couple of converted ones so you can see what I mean, some surfaces seem to be reflective and others dull. The holders and rivits are copper, hammer gold, the note itself is a bit more complicated  as it's black or white dependant on what key it is  with the cylinder and sphere and lower key mech in platinum

The last render is a converted Iray scene if you look a lot of the surfaces are dull and not metalic looking

 

 

 

Rendering metals properly in 3DL is a matter of choosing the right shader for the job. The dz default shader is highly limited, the reflections are always "perfect", as in 100% sharp. That works well for mirrors but for things like brushed metal etc, not so much. And you have to estimate the color of the reflections;) The OmUberSurface adds the option to blur the reflection, and has an anisotropy control and two specular lobes that will go a long way. And there is this: https://www.daz3d.com. It's on my wishlist so haven't tried it, but it's an actual shader and not just another dz default preset. Adds some nice features for sure.

Or you can go all the way and enter the world of scripted pathtracing with wowie's Awe Shading kit, free for personal and commercial use. Direct DL link: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1i3P5yVxiS4wZzhdZu6FeLNuiNuIPOAVe/view?usp=sharing

Some metal surfaces using aweSurface:

Btw...the only converter I've tested is the free script from the freebies forums. For reasons unknown it inserts the diffuse map in reflection color. This means the diffuse map is simply wrapped around the reflective object, think old school faked reflections. This also means you will have no raytraced reflections at all. If this is the case with your converter, simply remove the maps from reflection color. To further expand on the matter, if you use a  map  in reflection color for fake reflections you should atleast use a dedicated reflection map, not the diffusemap LOL.

Catherine3678ab

nm - store glitch, link now goes to the shader.

Keiron

Hi and thank you for your advise and contributions

Those advanced metal shaders look cool maybe on my wish list as well

I thought out of interest i'd try Iray shaders rendered using 3delight, there are more reflections although platinum looks white.

It would take a few days to change everything to 3delight

Catherine3678ab

Last October many shaders/presets landed in the sale bins ;-)

 

Keiron

Hi Catherine

Yes I did buy a few of the Iray ones, as I like the iray results

 

 

Catherine3678ab

Happened upon the store link for awe shading kit: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/awe-shading-kit/86304

 

Keiron

Thank you

I found them ok and installed,

Not sure if there convertable?

VicS

I nmjust want 3dlite instead of iray becaszue m4 and v4 look interesting (renered in iray) g8 3 2 or 1 look flat and boring, will the iray to 3dlite be good for me does anyone think?

Mage 13X13

It appears that the best way to convert textures from Iray to 3Delight is to remake the textures manually. For that, you must find the textures folder, and plugin the images you can use in the Surfaces Edit pane under 3Delight. You most likely won't get it to look as good as the Iray version, but if you know how to work with it, you should be able to get most textures close.