I am interested in several products designed by a vendor named "pappy" in which he uses "metal shaders".  The Readme says the object will work in any application that works with object files and can apply metal shaders.  He felt that these would probably not work in the Daz Studio programs.  I use DS 2.3 free version and DS 3 Advanced, their new render program.
He suggested I post the question here in the Daz Studio forum for help on if these metal shaders would work in DS.
Thank you any help you can offer,
redwoodcats

I believe that it depends on whether these are procedural shaders created in Poser's Material Room or if they are jpg files. Often a product description will mention if they're procedural. You might also be able to find the information you're looking for in the readme; there's a link on each product page.

If they're procedural, they won't work at all in any version of DS. If they're jpg mats (also known as mat poses - very confusing terminology), you shouldn't have any problem, though you'll probably need to tweak them (specularity, reflection, etc.) in the Surfaces tab.

There is an alternative if they're procedural and you still want to use the base models. That is to use metallic DS shaders like the kind made by the Khory_D and si_Vincent or by mmalbert. I can highly recommend products made by these folks, and the support they provide is excellent. One thing to find out from the model vendor, though, is how many material zones there are and how detailed the model is. The more zones and detail, the better results you'll get with DS shaders.

If you want to experiment, there are quite a few nice free shaders available for DS at ShareCG.com. And mmalbert and the Khory_D/si_Vincent partnership both have free shaders and excellent instructions on their personal websites, Redeyecat.com and Calida3D.com, respectively.

Hope this helps!

It should be possible to reproduce the effect in DS, but you will almost certainly have to set it up yourself in the Surfaces palette or use a third party shader such as the ones Dialer mentions as I should think that the surfaces use things like ray-traced reflections and refraction that DS won't read from a Poser file even though it can produce them.

I purchased Pappy's Ark of the Covenant a while back. It is just an obj file that has no shader. I believe Pappy expects you to use it in a 3D app that can load an obj file and apply a shader to it (such as Poser, DS, Carrara, etc...)

There are D|S shaders avaiable here in  the market place (I have purchased DS shaders by mmalbert that work well in DS2&DS3) and also for free at www.sharecg.com (I have free DS shaders by Gorgehaze that work well in DS2&DS3).

Thank you for your help.  I am new to 3D Art and really appreciate your tips and advice.