Issue with Importing "Wet and Tanned Skins for G8" Materials

[Hank Yelany]

Importer Plugin Version 1.6.2

Link to the product page

I noticed this issue when trying to import a character with the Wet and Tanned Skins shaders applied.

It looks like the character was imported with only the base G8F textures and the importer ignored the other textures.

*An odd thing I noticed is that when I imported a character with the same shaders a while back with plugin version 1.6, the character was imported with the tan color, but not the tan-lines.

Here are screenshots with a spot render of the materials in daz and in blender.

Attached is the duf file from the spot render.

[Alessandro Padovani]

From the product description I see it uses a custom shader named “v3d tanned skins“. In general custom shaders are not supported apart a few exceptions that Thomas developed himself. You should receive an error for unsupported shader when you import the scene. You may try converting to uber before exporting, sometime it works.

This is not a bug. If there’s nothing to add I’ll mark as invalid.

[Hank Yelany]

I didn’t see any error messages. Thanks for letting me know though and I’ll try converting the shaders.

[Hank Yelany]

As an aside, do you have any advice on how to replicate the look in blender? All I can think of is the mix node, but I’m not too familiar with it.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Yes a mix color should do. You may try the various blend modes depending how the textures are made. Or you can also use the LIE in daz studio that’s imported fine.

https://docs.blender.org/manual/en/latest/render/shader_nodes/converter/mix.html

@Thomas Larsson Can you please check if the plugin throws a warning for custom shaders ? So we can mark as resolved or invalid.

[Hank Yelany]

Alright, thanks for the info.

[Alessandro Padovani]

update. bug.

daz studio 4.21.0.5, blender 3.4.1, diffeomorphic 1.7.0.1413

I can confirm that the plugin doesn’t warn for custom shaders. The plugin should warn the user when any non recognized shader is imported. In particular the only full supported shaders are “Iray Uber”, “4-Layer Uber PBR MDL” and “PBRSkin”. All the rest are not supported or partially supported.

Test scene included mixer.duf that’s using a shader mixer custom shader named “Mixed Fractual Sum“.

[Alessandro Padovani]

test scene for custom shader

[Hank Yelany]

I don’t know if I should still respond to this because it isn’t really a bug, but I managed to work out a node setup that came close to rendering like the original character I was working on. I will put this here to try and help anyone who also ran into the same issue. I’m pretty sure the node tree can be improved, but I think it works.

Here is an image of the final skin with tan lines applied:

‌

And here is the node tree:

‌

with the tan lines mask and color sections isolated:

‌

‌

I only included pictures for the torso material, but it also has to be applied to the material zones of the genital area if you have those. However, you can just drop the nodes in the “Tan line Mask & Color“ Frame in those mats in the same place because they use the same Image Texture as a mask. Of course, you can also use whatever image textures you prefer in those nodes.

It was surprisingly simple and I mostly needed to learn out how to use masks to figure it out. I think searching up tutorials on using mix nodes and masks were most important.

[Thomas Larsson]

While it is unrealistic that the plugin should handle unsupported shaders in general, or even the general DAZ Brick shader, it is now possible to make it import the textures for unsupported channels so you can tweak the result in Blender. I suppose this is similar to what you do above. See https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/2023/02/unsupported-shaders-and-unused-textures.html.

[Alessandro Padovani]

As for commit 8a66854.

Thomas you did a great job to extend support for unused textures and shaders that’s very useful thank you.

Just one note. What you call “DAZ Brick shader“ is not really a shader but a material method to build shaders with nodes. The same as the blender nodes tree. Each shader build with bricks have a name that’s what the daz user sees in daz studio as the shader name. Thus it would be useful to report the brick shader name instead of the generic “daz brick“. For example my test scene mixer.duf includes a brick shader named “Mixed Fractual Sum“ of type “daz_brick“.

Let us know what you think if you can add the brick shader name in the warning. Otherwise I’ll mark as resolved since the main issue is addressed.

‌

‌

[Thomas Larsson]

The shader is now named after the url.

[Hank Yelany]

Thanks for adding support for unused textures.

[Alessandro Padovani]

Commit b83ea4b works fine thank you for nice improvement.