"Adjusting" Poser Mats for DS
About all I know about Poser is how to spell it, and that it was usually meant as an insult by the skater crowd when I was growing up in the mid to late 80s.
Often when looking at freebie or commercial items on various sites, the description will say the item was designed for Poser, and that the materials "may need adjustment" for use in DS.
What I'm wondering is whether there is some typical actions that need to be taken to make these "adjustments"?
It's probably important to note that I generally only work in Iray, so I am very familiar with converting mats from 3Delight to look correct or more realistic with Iray shaders.
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This is a good tutorial for converting Poser mats to 3delight: http://homepage.eircom.net/~neilvpose/tutorial-1.htm
If you are going to Iray, why bother?
Just scrap the 'preset' materials, load the Iray Uber and tweak from there. All you'll really need are the diffuse and bump maps from the original and if they aren't carried over, just load them in by hand.
I assume you're keeping the same figure, and not doing a texture conversion as well (say, from V4 to G2F).
If you are using V4, the generic Uber Iray preset gives poor results. Many of the features designed for skin, like SSS, and not active, requiring you to add these yourself. You can apply the G2F Iray preset, then change the diffuse and bump textures, but don't forget some of the better characters come with other maps, like displacement maps for things like vascularity.(Just be sure to use the DS version of the displacement map, or else set up the displacement range to be positive-going only.)
One of the bad things about simply applying a Poser preset is that many of the older characters were poorly designed to begin with -- color applied to the ambient channel instead of diffuse, blue-tinted diffuse color on top of the texture, and worse. These just carry over to your your revised character, and give poor result. Some materials even come across with the emissions channel set for things like teeth. It's a very low value so it won't actually light up the mouth, but it doesn't help the render time any.
It greatly depends on just what was used in the Poser material room, in the tutorial Mike linked to the outfit uses a pretty basic shader setup, as many of the textures have been loaded from it into DS, problem with that is DS can't load every texture used in the MAT file so it's always wise to check the products texture folder to see what else is there.
More and more vendors are using more advanced shader setups in Poser, as a result there aren't any textures listed in the parts of the MAT file DS can read, these require you to find the textures and to try to recreate the Poser look with DS shaders.
Then there's Procedural shaders, they don't usually have much in the way of textures and instead rely on complex math equations to create the look, DS can't use these and instead you need to use the Shader Mixer to try to replicate the effect.
The attached pic is an old one I've posted before, it shows an outfit that uses a partial procedural shader, the only textures are masks and a reflection map, on the left is what you get in DS when you apply the MAT to the outfit, on the right is after I've spent a couple of hours in the Shader Mixer trying to recreate the Poser shader.
And that's all just for 3Delight, then you have to figure out how to redo all of that for Iray.
I have converted a number of V4 characters with Poser skin material to work in DAZ Studio usually using the AoA SSS shader. I have now converted a couple of the AoA SSS skin material to Iray with reasonable results.
If a character has SSS material and the material presets are .pz2 files only, this is Poser SSS material. These will load in DS, but most of these Poser V4 characters also some with Std material which is for older versions of Poser that do not support SSS. You are usually better off to load the std material in DS as a starting point. Usually the Std material will render ok, but frequently not like the promo images done with the Poser SSS material. The specular seems to frequently need adjustment.
I have usually just gone directly to the AoA SSS shader and set up the specular after I get the diffuse and SSS set reasonably. Once you have a character resonably setup for Iray, you can just change out the mats to another character and then adjust from there.
Thank you for the responses. I'm pretty comfortable with converting objects/figures intended for 3Delight to Iray, but it has mainly been items purchased from the DAZ store. I'm also comfortable with wiping out mats and building from scratch. I just started with DS about 3 months ago, though, so I didn't bother learning much about 3Delight shaders, or anything Poser-related, and just focused my energies on Iray. Considering that, though, I just wasn't sure if there was any special magic that I wasn't aware of related to objects designed specifically for Poser.
Thanks again!
Other than Poser dynamic clothing and hair (not too much of that floating around), no, not really.
Some of the newer Poser specific figures use a completely different weight mapping that makes them not very usable in Studio...