Heya Robyns :)

I better explain my current thinking wrt ds shaders .... I "decided" I'll write my own DS (rsl) shaders if/when I need something that the default DS shader doesn't offer.  This was before shader mixer and shader builder came out, which is what what poseworks, omnifreaker and arthur heinz did (and DAZ, of course.) 

Ok, once shader mixer and shader builder came out they presented new options... but my limited attempts with shader mixer weren't really satisfying... the provided "bricks" (the small number I tried) just didn't look or behave like the poser material room nodes that I presumed* they were equivalent to. (*obviously a big part of the problem)  Add to that, shader mixer continues to be marked "beta" so I can't be sure if the things I think are weird will stay weird or be "fixed."  There's no guarantee that spending time understanding their behaviour won't end up a waste. 

So, there's shader builder which is supposed to make writing the rsl easier than having to learn renderman shading language all from scratch.  But due to lack of documentation and collective community experience, as far as I know the only way to tackle it still IS to learn to write rsl facepalm lol

Hence I'm still on square one!  And because I keep finding more fun things to do (modelling and texturing, rendering pictures, that sorta thing lol) than writing scripts and endlessly testing shader settings, I have been stuck on square one and just hanging around waiting for a "bagginsbill of ds" to ride by and do all that work for me.  Watch out, that could be you! ;)  lol

And so, with vested interest openly on the table, I wish you goodluck with your pursuits!! :D hehehe

cobaltdream, thanks, didn't realise most of the PoserSurface node input labels were pretty much arbitrary 8o

Khrys, apart from content vendors, I don't see why people would want to learn both poser and ds depth either.  And it's why there's a lot of complaint when content can't work the same in both since people want to stick with their app of choice. Like the toddler's scaling... and that's exacerbated since the creator is one of the app's owners. lol Oh well, can't please everyone!

Quote - cobaltdream says: AprilYSH works with D|S a lot, but is quite mistaken about Shader Mixer.  it's equivalent to the Material Room, not Matmatic.  it isn't a way to script materials so that you don't have to worry about making nodes at all.  in Matmatic, the compiler decides how many nodes you actually need to implement a statement like Blend(color1, color2, mask).  that's not at all the same thing as having to work with nodes directly.  the whole point of Matmatic is abstracting to expressions and not needing a GUI.  not to mention, ShaderMixer doesn't have built-in input multiplication.  it has input override.  so any nodes you'd generate from something like a Matmatic script need to be implemented very differently. 

lol ok I'll wear that but quibble that it could be more because I've not used matmatic... but also I'm sure I did not equate Shader Mixer to the Poser material room because in mixer you can redefine the attributes (nodes?) that appear in the main shader (and hence what the end user has to input in the surface tab ui) ... while in Poser you have to start with the predefined "PoserSurface". So it's still not quite the same in the context I was thinking,  and I'm not sure what else to equate it to.  Any suggestions? :)

On a separate note, Shader Mixer is still marked BETA and only a few people have poked sticks at it yet.  Personally I'm staying away from it in favour of reading up on RSL (if and when I have time) because beta means it could change drastically. Investing much effort in understanding its "bricks" could be a huge waste of time.  :/

Quote - cobaltdream says: but that's the thing.  the people who really understand stuff like this and build shaders mathematically sell things like HSS and PWSurface.  they don't say: "hey, this is how i made SSS work.  here you go for free."  i'm not saying they should do that, but even face_off wrote a free tutorial on how his Real Skin Shader was built before he sold it.  and all of the other Poser skin shader people i know of  posted their experiments here in the forums.  so yeah, the Poser community tends to be a little more generous, which happens when people don't need to pay more to become experts. 

probably true... just wanted to note that Arthur Heinz did have a huge long thread on his shader(s) where he shared his info and compiled copies for free long before he sold it :) 

Quote - cobaltdream says: not to say that there aren't nice and generous D|S users, but it's just harder and more expensive to get at in-depth D|S knowledge than it is to get at Poser knowledge.  and as a result, a lot of very accomplished D|S users don't actually have in-depth knowledge or understanding, so they can't share it even if they wanted to.

never thought about it before but your observations sound about right...

(well now I wish this heretofore reasonable discussion topic was in its own thread lol :) )

I like the kids 4, btw. hehehe
(there, back on track?)

bb, how much would it take to get you to be a double agent?? lol you probably won't remember but I was one (non daz employee) who pm'd you asking if you would do for ds what you do for poser. lol I realise now there's simply no time, regardless of conflict of interest.

I'm thinking ds shader mixer is the equivalent to matmatic, shader builder is... not like anything else.  In ds you can actually define the set of shader attributes but in poser we start with the predefined "poser surface" top node to which you can plug in other predefined nodes.  So there's the main difference.  For ds there was no main node and no set of existing nodes to plug into it, so people tended to write their own shaders (which is in renderman shading language.)  That's the first hurdle.  DAZ came out with shader mixer and shader builder much later.

Gah, sorry, further topic drift!

Quote - Bagginsbill says:  I spend an extraordinary amount of time explaining to others how this works. I do not make money from it. I have no commercial products.

No - there is no Bagginsbill for DS.

true.

RobynsVeil, I didn't spot your questions there at the DAZ forums, not that I could help anyway as I haven't written any original rsl script myself.  Is it this one?
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=133078
It seemed to have been resolved amicably enough?

It's probably true there aren't any active ds shader experts in the forums there ... off the top of my head I can only think of 3 people who have put out original ds (rsl) shaders (not just presets) in the store, poseworks, omnifreaker and the other guy... (damn, forgot, sorry... oh!) Arthur Heinz (no wonder I forgot, that's a proper name, imagine that! lol) and none of them are active in the forums recently...  All others are as lost as you are, I imagine.  There's no official documentation from DAZ and sadly there is no bagginsbill (or forum active stewer) equivalent either. lol

Anyway, what I'm saying is I think you're not being stonewalled... it's just nobody knows the answers 8o

(ok... now that's totally off topic to this thread title but my little reply didn't really warrant its own thread lol)

you're joking but i'll state the obvious that carrara and ds don't actually support the "hack", that was just a byproduct of supporting pz2s. :)  from what i can tell, daz drew the line at poser 4 compatibility when they started developing ds and that was before mt5 and mc6 files were invented. so now carrara and ds can't even see the materials folder or mt5 and mc6 files.  if they did start to show them, people might naturally expect carrara and ds to actually read the poser shader tree and load the settings properly and translate them to carrara and ds shaders... so bit of dillema there as that would not be trivial lol

Not sure about p8 but in pp2010 you can move your pz2 folders into the materials folder (and vice versa) without having to rename the pz2s to mc6 file extensions.  You can even move them into subfolders of the cr2 or pp2 the mats are intended for, if you choose... but anyway, my personal preference is still pz2s. :)

it is much more useful to me personally to use transparency but it does make sense to keep consistent with "industry standards" if any exist.  how about an option for the aux psd z-depth to use transparency or not? lol

note the thread I linked, my original problem with it was it was not anti-aliased, so it was jaggy even on fully opaque objects. I hope that's fixed (too) ...

got that too, bb said to use atmopshere object depth cue instead (turn all lights and ambient mats off)
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/forumpro/showthread.php?thread_id=2797605
would like to see the auxiliary fixed though so it's all in a single render :)

oh favourites... haven't even used those yet.  nice to hear of other possibilities in future, though everything's fine and dandy as is already, imo. :) 

now they're much easier to see and navigate I can actually think how I want things categorised, so just need to make time to clean up my runtimes... eek!

ok, hold up on moving content from their native/traditional folder types... is there an equivalent to the DS content "database" where you can move content around into different categories without moving the actual files in the file system? so you could have all the mat presets for a prop as a "subfolder" to the prop "folder" but this is just in the database, the filesystem still has the mats in the pose(or materials) folder. 

personally I like the traditional folder type restrictions... they made finding things predictable (for me) rather than be subject to every random whim of content creators, a lot of whom are "artist" types, not tech types. lol  and for example if I know that this file is a pz2, not a pp2, then it must be applied to something, not load on its own, etc.

one extra thing I do like about the DS library that the PP library doesn't do is how the content  can be expanding panels instead of just tree format, click attached pic... (above or below, not sure where it will appear!)

ahh, I see it, thanks :)
yay!! worked great!!
inverted black/white but that's fine.
thanks all! :)

uhh, no, I didn't know about that ... 8o
I didn't use to care much about the setup of full scene renders in poser till now I'm on pp2010, since I mostly do head shots. And now only cos I was even playing with the new IDL (new to me as I skipped p8) where things are looking very nice :)

Ok, will look for that atmosphere material ...
Wait, is that to apply to every material in the scene? if so a python script to apply it would be handy... but not non-destructive (doesn't change anything in my scene) nor a single render then? :/
Anyway, will take a look, thanks :)