• Required Products: None
  

Metals interact with lights with really specific properties. Are you bothered by metals which never render like real metals? Then Advanced Metal Shaders is your solution!

Advanced Metal shaders is not only a set of metal shaders but also a brand new shader type specifically developed around the DAZ default material, including several more features in order to take into account all the particularities of light and metal interaction. They also include a complete toolbox to play with all the important elements of metal reflections. You will be able to render easily and with very realistic results different types of rough metals and of polished metals using a same shader base but applying the different metal types presets included. They go far beyond the usual DAZ Studio default material brick, since, based on the physics of reflection, they now include all the additional parameters required to drive your reflections:

- Your specular brick now includes a Blinn Model giving you the opportunity to spread or focus more or less your highlights around their initial Size. Blinn Model takes into account the effect of extremely small metal surface defects. This new “Spread” dial has a cross effect with the usual glossiness making possible to reach a large variety of rough metal effects.

- In the reflection brick you now have the opportunity to dial the relative influence of environment maps versus ray traced reflections, and to force reflections above DAZ material limits. These are very useful for polished metals.

- Displacement has been modified to take into account two Displacement Maps, one related to the texture (colour pattern) of the metal, and the second one being related to additional independent surface defects you might want to include.

- You can also use the normal map to dial the depth of some smoother surface defects. All the elements related to surface additional defects (Normal, Secondary Displacement, Bump) have of course separate tiles in order to scale them independently from the underlying colour patterns.

How does it work?

First you will find the base shader presets made of fifteen various families of patterns, all of them coming in two presets, standard and strong metals, and in two orientations, horizontal and vertical. Once you've applied one of the shader presets to your surface, you will find included in this product a real toolbox to customize metal reflection types and surface finish.

You can also decide to keep the existing diffuse, ambient and bump map of any existing material based on DAZ default Material in your scene and use the “Shader Base Applier” to inject in this material all the additional features and dials of these new advanced metals.

The rest of the features are organised in subfolders in order to chose and/or apply:

- 8 rough metal types properties presets,

- 17 polished metal types properties presets with different reflection types, 9 map based, 8 mixing environment maps and ray tracing, and 3 ray traced.

- 22 Various displacement map presets for supra millimetric metal defects, also including 6 strengths presets for this secondary displacement map, and 6 strengths for the primary displacement map,

- 23 Various normal maps presets with strength dials for smoother supra millimetric metal defects,

- 17 Environment Maps presets, 14 blurred, 3 crisp.

- 26 Base Colours (Diffuse/ambient) and 26 Reflection Colours (Specular/Reflection/Ray Tint),

- 16 Tiles tools : Tiles Presets at 1, 2, 4, 10 for all Tiles, general Tiles, Displacement Tiles, Normal Tiles.

Advanced metal shaders is a powerful tool for your metal renders both easy to use and highly customizable.

Below is a list of the installation package types provided by this product. The name of each package contains a Package Qualifier, which is used as a key to indicate something about the contents of that package.

• 1 Core ¹⁾

[ ] = Optional, depending on target application(s)

Not all installation packages provide files that are displayed to the user within the interface of an application. The packages listed below, do. The application(s), and the location(s) within each application, are shown below.

• You can find new icons for loading this product in the following DAZ Studio Folders:
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:01RotatedPreset”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:02ReflectionsRoughMetals”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:03ReflectionsMirrorMetals”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:04MRDisplacementPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:05NormalMapsPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:06ReflectionMapsPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:07TilesPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:08ColorPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:08ColorPresets:StrongColors”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Shaders:09TipsForFlatObjects”

• You can find new icons for this product in the following DAZ Studio Categories:
  • “Shaders:Metal”

• A full presentation for the ones who want to go further with these shaders is available on youtube :
  • Video Tutorial

• A shorter presentation focusing only on how to use the shader base applier on any existing materials to enhance their metallic look is also available :
  • Video Tutorial

• Product Notes:
  • The shape of the highlights depends not only on the object curvature and light beam direction, but also on the camera angle/distance, because of the Blinn Model included. These are your 3 base parameters.
  • “Isotropic Spread” Dial you find in Specular works together with Glossiness. They have a cross effect. The safer value for beginners is a 70 percent glossiness. Spread may present too strong effects above 0.12, the most interesting variation area is between 0.01 and 0.12. I left the above values to reach more specific effects available.
  • Mirror and Rough Reflection presets are not made to be applied together. Just like in real life, you have to chose your camp : either your metal is rough, or polished. When you mix them, it can produce strange result. If you did this and you're lost, the recommended solution is then to reapply the initial shader preset of the main folder.
  • There is somehow a kind of transfer of energy from reflection to specular. For low values of Glossiness and high values of “Spread” you may overglow your highlights. To solve this, you can begin with reducing specular strength and colour. If it is not enough, when highlights are too strong you can then reduce the strength and/or colour of environment map 1 in the “Reflection” of the surface.
  • “Set More Reflective” and “Ray Tracing Contribution” can go far above their limits. Don't put them at too high values simultaneously.
  • Another way to increase your map based reflection is to increase the power of the secondary map (where it is written “keep low”). It is not recommended, but you can play with it.
  • “Apply Shader Base Only” file allows you to turn any material of an object based on Daz Default Material and apply the additional inputs, while keeping the initial diffuse, bump and ambient maps. Depending on the initial maps, you may have to readjust the colors and strengths applied to your diffuse and ambient maps.
  • Opacity strength is driven of course by the opacity map, but the strength is “color driven”. It is not an issue, if you know that 100% is pure white, 0% is pure black, and the other levels between 0 and 100% are reached by greyscale colors.
  • The 15th shader preset is just an higher (2048×2048) resolution version of the first one.

• Known Issues :
  • When you change the tile of the material, the effect of this change is not always visible in the preview. The tile of the pattern in the preview is linked to your normal map tile. Yet, it is only a preview problem, since for the renders, the real tiles you have chosen for each characteristics will be applied.
  • In the same way, the rotation of the pattern for the rotated presets is not visible in the preview. Yet it is visible in renders.
  • In order to optimize the aspect of the metal renders, the displacement bricks have a another type of displaced point influence than the one you may be used to. If you want to have complete offsets due to displacement, you have to go in the shader mixer to reconnect the P output of the “Displacement and Normal Input” to the “New P” input of final “Displacement” Brick, and you will be back (almost) to the original Displacement influence on displaced points.
  • Strong Colors Presets: these colors are the physically based colors of some saturated metals. Yet results may strongly vary depending on the shader preset you chose, and the lights in your scene. You will probably have to adjust the colors strengths and eventually values to reach the result you want.

• File List

• None

• None