Stonemason Custom Shaders

[Midnight Arrow]

Some Stonemason sets such as Through the Woods and Urban Sprawl 3 use custom shaders for the ground plane to layer several textures together. But it doesn’t seem like the exporter recognizes them and they load in with just the top layer. Are there any plans to add support for this?

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It isn’t hard to translate it but it’s pretty tedious.

[Alessandro Padovani]

There was a project to convert shader bricks but it has been discontinued afaik, see #7. So no, shader bricks are not supported. Then if you find a easy way to translate them to blender please feel free to contribute. Personally I’m quite sure it is a mess so I don’t even try. It may be possible for some limited cases.

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[Midnight Arrow]

Then should we at least get a warning the shader has unsupported properties and that we’ll need to remake it ourselves?

[Alessandro Padovani]

I agree on that. But the plugin by design is a lot flexible in what it takes as input. For example 3delight shaders are mostly approximated. To get a good conversion you should always convert to the uber shader or pbrskin before exporting. So more than a warning the user should be aware of this.

[jeroen b]

As an alternative Alessandro, would it be possible that the plugin creates a material with a fake user that contains all textures that are not actually used?

That would save users the time consuming search for the missing textures from the DAZ runtime directory.

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[Alessandro Padovani]

There’s an option in the debug section of the global settings “prune node tree“, if unchecked will not prune the materials and leave you with the unused textures. Not sure if this will work with shader bricks too.

[Thomas Larsson]

There is now a very preliminary implementation of this kind of daz bricks. It assumes that the layers are called Base, Layer 1, Layer 2, etc., so other kind of daz brick material will not be imported correctly.

[Alessandro Padovani]

no news in a long time, some support has been done