Unsupported shaders do not create a material slot?

[Donald Dade]

Hi Thomas, I hope things are going well with you.

I recently imported a G9 and some unsupported shaders where found.

• No material slot was created for the unsupported shader, and therefore the slots do not correspond to objects imported via Alembic or USD, making assigning materials difficult.
• The faces belonging to the unsupported shader incorrectly get assigned to another material slot.
• It’s not easy to visually identify where the unsupported shader would have been on the object, to determine if it is worth fixing.

Would it be possible to, when unsupported shaders are found, to create the named material slot anyway, but assign some sort of degenerate material to it, analogous to the fuscia color that Blender displays when textures are missing?

[Alessandro Padovani]

Usually unsupported shaders should be converted to something anyway. Unless the addon finds nothing to convert not even a single channel, in this case Thomas may add a dummy as you’re proposing. Can you link an example ?

[Donald Dade]

Hi Alessandro, I don’t know how I would upload a DAZ asset without violating the End User License Agreement. The asset is “Frawn Hair”, and it references a .dse file according to the attached image of the Diffeo error. You can see that Diffeo understandably gives up if it encounters an encrypted file, but this causes the slot count to mismatch and makes copying the materials to the Alembic or USD objects very inconvenient.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

Please link the product page, the DAZ shop search doesn’t find anything for “Frawn Hair“.

[Donald Dade]

Jesus, the DAZ search engine is even worse than I thought:

https://www.daz3d.com/frawn-hair-for-genesis-3-females

[Donald Dade]

Incidentally, Diffeo complains about that same .dse with https://www.daz3d.com/tma-kade-genesis-9

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[Thomas Larsson]

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All Frawn hair materials are created, but you have to disable Merge Materials because otherwise identical material will be merged. If the global settings Sort Materials Alphabetically is enabled they appear in the same order as in your picture.

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I’m not so happy with these warnings about unsupported shaders, because the plugin often manages to make some quite reasonable materials anyway.

[Alessandro Padovani]

4.2.0.2183, blender 4.1.1

I can confirm that “frown hair” works fine here, there’s no missing materials. The warning is only to inform that the material will be approximated since there’s not a complete support for 3delight shaders. You can try to update the addon perhaps you’re using a old version.

bug for Thomas. merge materials doesn’t work. I tried to merge materials but it seems it doesn’t work, for example “1Net” and “1Tie” are the same but don’t merge.

[Thomas Larsson]

Fixed in last commit. It turned out that 1Net and 1Tie differed in a their “session_id” attributes. This attribute has probably been added in recent versions of Blender, but now the plugin knows about it and ignores it.

[Alessandro Padovani]

4.2.0.2185

Works fine here thank you for the fast fix. If Donald has nothing to add we can close as resolved.

[Donald Dade]

After upgrading to the latest dev build (before the fix described above), I still get the warning about the .dse, but all the material slots are created whether I merge materials or not. I have nothing to add. As always, thanks, guys.