warning for unsupported shaders ?

[Alessandro Padovani]

daz studio 4.15.0.30, blender 3.2.0, diffeomorphic 1.6.2.1051

Actually the addon tries to import anything and “adapts” for what it can understand when there’s a unsupported shader. This is very good and quite a sort of magic if you ask me.

But it would be nice to warn the user when a unsupported shader is found. So that he knows there may be bad materials to fix.

The actual supported shaders, from what I know, should be:

• daz studio default. This is legacy and not tested from a while since it was used to import 3delight to the blender internal renderer now discontinued. But should work with cycles and be maintained if there are bugs.
• iray uber. Actually mostly supported it’s the best we have.
• 4-layer uber pbr mdl. Supported once #1070 is fixed.
• pbrskin. Supported quite fine apart some minor features.

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The warning message could be something like: “warning: unsupported shaders are found there may be some materials to fix, please see the system console for details.“. Then the system console could list the unsupported materials with their shader name.

I can also write a note in the blog about this.

edit. Included a simple test scene with the supported shaders and one unsupported shader.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

note. From what I see most items in the G1-G3 generations use the daz studio default shader. Then G1-G3 figures use the age of armor sss and the omnifreaker shaders. I don’t know how fine these are supported since it’s pre-iray/cycles era when there was only 3delight and the plugin converted to blender internal.

The best way for 3delight content now is to convert to iray before exporting, by applying the iray uber shader. It’s a one-click operation that the user can easily do. That’s also what iray itself does before rendering.

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note. Also forgot the dforce/sbh hair shaders. We support the blended dual lobe hair shader, only for the basic features since there’s no equivalent in the blender shaders.

[Alessandro Padovani]

As a comparison, from information by Daniel Bui who’s the daz developer, below are the shaders supported by the official daz studio bridge. But not all the shaders features are supported so it’s a limited conversion. Specifically iray uber gets a better support (but not even close to diffeomorphic), while 3delight shaders only get support for the basic features.

Likewise we may want to consider the 3delight shaders as “supported“ in that the basic features will be imported, but advice to convert to iray with a warning. As for example “warning: 3delight shaders are found the support is limited. For the best result please convert to iray uber before exporting.“

https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/578001/shaders-and-bridging

1. IrayUber
2. PBRSkin (uses the Iray Uber nodegroup)
3. AoA_Subsurface
4. omUberSurface
5. Daz Studio Default

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[Alessandro Padovani]

note. If the implementation of these warnings is cumbersome or difficult for any reason, I may simply write a blog post about material conversion so the users are aware of the material limits and how to get the best conversion.

Please Thomas let me know what you think.

[Thomas Larsson]

Now the plugin warns about Daz shaders with a definition file. In the example it warns about the sphere material, with the definition file "support/DAZ/Uber/shaderDefinitions/volume/omUberVolumeDef.dse"

If you like to write a blog post, please go ahead.