How to make Iray shaders?????

lcahpowell

Does anyone know of documentation, tutorials, or any knowledge bases that tell how to make Iray shaders for Daz Studio? More than half of my 3delight shaders do not show up correctly when rendered in Iray, even with Iray uber base shader. There are surprisingly few Iray shaders for fabrics. I'm not looking for shiny and new shaders. What I need is grungy homespun fabric, roughed up leathers, and similar dirty types of real world fabrics that are Iray compatible. Figured I would make them since I can't find them but I'm having a hard time finding documentation on building shaders for Daz studio Iray. If anyone could point me in the right direction any help would be appreciated.

-Daniel
powellhouse.deviantart.com

Khory

I'm guessing your looking for shader presets and to create shader presets rather than to create a new iray shader from scratch. For now if you want to create your own your going to have to do a bit of trial and error. It is what i have spent the last couple of months doing myself. If they are not converting correctly adding the uber Iray over the top what seems to be going wrong with the conversion? I've had pretty good luck with just regular cloth and so forth so far. Velvets I am still working on and I've not looked at satin at all yet since I knew another PA was working on those.

Pendraia

I do know that there are special bricks in Shader Mixer for Iray but haven't really investigated them yet...due to lack of time.

Just had a quick look there is a new section under the bricks in Shader Mixer which is called MDL as this has PBR options I would think that is for Iray.

Pendraia

Pendraia said:

I do know that there are special bricks in Shader Mixer for Iray but haven't really investigated them yet...due to lack of time.

Just had a quick look there is a new section under the bricks in Shader Mixer which is called MDL as this has PBR options I would think that is for Iray.

I just tried importing some of the Iray shaders into shadermixer and they do show up as MDL bricks. With the lack of documentation your best way of studying the shaders could be to import the ones supplied into Shader Mixer and see how the bricks are linked together.

It would be useful to have some documentation on it though....the only other network I could find was here http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/54734/P1485/#815360

I think I may need to try and keep track of these and add them to the Shader Mixer thread as they are part of it.

Richard Haseltine

MDL is the nVidia shader language - there are docs for it on the nVidia site, the bricks give pretty low-level access to the functions (and you can load arbitrary code into a custom brick) so the information should be useful - of course the downside is that the networks seem generally to be much denser.

Pendraia

Richard Haseltine said:

MDL is the nVidia shader language - there are docs for it on the nVidia site, the bricks give pretty low-level access to the functions (and you can load arbitrary code into a custom brick) so the information should be useful - of course the downside is that the networks seem generally to be much denser.

Hi Richard, so glad to see you post here as you always seem to know how these things work.

I did find some info here

http://www.nvidia-arc.com/products/iray/mdl.html

Is that what you were referring to?

thanks

Pen

Richard Haseltine

Yes, I think that was the page I had in mind. I'm not sure where my link is to check.

kathrynloch

Thank you for posting this question and the answering links. After a little exploring on the Nvidia site I also found this:

NVIDIA's Material Definition Language: Handbook

It has it's own domain mdlhandbook.com and you can view either an html webpage or download a PDF. I did the latter and it appears more complete than the mdl intro. Dunno if it will help but it's worth exploring.

Cheers,
Kathryn

algovincian

Richard Haseltine said:

MDL is the nVidia shader language - there are docs for it on the nVidia site, the bricks give pretty low-level access to the functions (and you can load arbitrary code into a custom brick) so the information should be useful - of course the downside is that the networks seem generally to be much denser.

I thought that MDL was not a shader language, and that was sort of the point? My understanding is that it is a level of abstraction up from the shader language, making it usable by different cores (of which Iray is one).

- Greg

Pendraia

Any info at this stage will help...thanks for the link.

algovincian said:

Richard Haseltine said:

MDL is the nVidia shader language - there are docs for it on the nVidia site, the bricks give pretty low-level access to the functions (and you can load arbitrary code into a custom brick) so the information should be useful - of course the downside is that the networks seem generally to be much denser.

I thought that MDL was not a shader language, and that was sort of the point? My understanding is that it is a level of abstraction up from the shader language, making it usable by different cores (of which Iray is one).

- GregLanguage or not it would be useful to have even a listing of what the codes on the nodes(bricks) mean.

I've seen so far...

mt - material
t2 - was used on a bump map...
p - possible point?
l - input for subD displacement...
f - float or function??
c - I'm guessing this might be colour as it allowed me to input a new colour.

almahiedra

kathrynloch said:

Thank you for posting this question and the answering links. After a little exploring on the Nvidia site I also found this:

NVIDIA's Material Definition Language: Handbook

It has it's own domain mdlhandbook.com and you can view either an html webpage or download a PDF. I did the latter and it appears more complete than the mdl intro. Dunno if it will help but it's worth exploring.

Cheers,
Kathryn

It is very better than intro...but it is incomplete., only five chapters, and this have references to chapter ten.

kathrynloch

gilikshe said:

It is very better than intro...but it is incomplete., only five chapters, and this have references to chapter ten.

Now that's interesting. In the downloadable PDF version the title page says "Work in Progress - March 28, 2015" and the footer has "Partial Version" along with the same date, but the index only has chapters 1-5 - nothing more.

I read through the beginning. I live in an area where the major industry is petrochemical and for years I worked with many interns and co-ops. (cooperative students). It's an industry that's heavily regulated and new regulations always required new procedures. The company I worked for always assigned these projects to the co-ops and interns to write the handbooks under my supervision. I also spent several years working in the university system and again assisted the graduate student in work such as this. This writing is very similar in style. I wouldn't be surprised if Nvidia had an intern or co-op system where students would get credit for working with the company for a semester or two.

My point here is that rarely were interns and co-ops around long enough to actually complete the work. As the students transferred in and out, one would pick up where the other left off and projects could get left hanging if no one stepped in to fill the void. Many times, management transferred from location to location as often as the students and projects could be shelved or simply buried under the transfer.

In many areas of the US right now, we're in the midst of semester break in the university system. Which might explain why the project is as of yet incomplete. At the end of March interns and co-ops would have stopped to prep for finals. It's quite possible that we won't see anything more until the next semester is well under way and someone else is assigned to the project.

I hope that's not the case with this - but I have a feeling it is.

Cheers,
Kathryn