• Required Products: None
  

Advanced Metal Creator is both a complete set of Metal Shaders, but also a Merchant Resource for all your DAZ content creation. Advanced Metal Creator relies on two possible different metal types, one with isotropic and one with anisotropic BRDF for specular component, both build around DAZ Default material, and adding all the additional surface features required for perfect metal rendering. They go far beyond the usual DAZ Studio default material brick, since, based on the physics of reflection, they now include all the additional parameters required to drive your reflections, allowing to shape highlights, to mix mapped and ray traced reflection, and to add several layers of surface defects.

Also note that the Anistropic version of the metal presents direct sizing of highlights in two separated direction and great highlight shaping features for incredible effects, making it compliant for many more other material types.

You will find in this product first two Metal Shaders Appliers allowing you, in a simple double click to add to any of your existing props all the additional dials for advanced metal properties management and keeping their main initial image maps. But you will also find 59 various full metal presets already set up for you, relying on variations, for the two metal types, of 18 base pattern families.

Once your base is chosen, you can then apply more than one hundred sub property presets, allowing you to set up step by step the various properties influencing the final metallic aspect: base colours, reflection colours, specular highlight shapes, reflection type (proportion and strength of mixing environment map and ray tracing), surface defects (up to 5 levels of surface deformations, 26 defects displacements and 26 normal maps available) and individual tiles properties in order to reach the metallic state you want in a few clicks. Advanced Metal Creator is both highly customisable and easy too use thanks to very intuitive dial naming, and very clear sub-folders organisation for sub-properties of metal types.

Advanced Metal Creator is a merchant resource, meaning that all content creators are allowed to sell all the props, figures and materials built using any of these Shaders Appliers, or even directly the Full Shader Presets themselves, as is, or customised. There are no limitations for content creators using the shaders relying on the maps they created themselves. For content creators willing to go faster and include directly some of the maps or Full Presets - eventually modified by the sub-presets included - there is a limitation of 3 full presets per product, or of a total of 21 of any of the included maps per product. See ReadMe for additional details.

Advanced Metal Creator has been developed in order to be intuitive and easy to use. Yet since they introduce some new parameters, a complete pdf document has been included in order to, based on a concrete example, detail the influence of all the different surface properties in the final metal rendering. This is a step by step and parameter per parameter illustrated explanation of the development of a metal, including all the useful tips you will need to reach your goal faster. In this documentation you will also find useful links to more than four hours of HD video demonstrations explaining “live” the shaders specificities and how to use them in the different stages of your development.

Because of the redundancy of some of the sub-properties presets, owners of “Advanced Metal Shaders” or “Advanced Wood And Metal Shader Bundle” get a permanent 20% discount off this product.

Below is a list of the installation package types provided by this product. The name of each package contains a Package Qualifier, which is used as a key to indicate something about the contents of that package.

• 1 Core ¹⁾

[ ] = Optional, depending on target application(s)

Not all installation packages provide files that are displayed to the user within the interface of an application. The packages listed below, do. The application(s), and the location(s) within each application, are shown below.

• You can find new icons for loading this product in the following DAZ Studio Folders:
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:01FullPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:02ReflectionsRoughMetals”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:03ReflectionsMirrorMetals”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:04MRDisplacementPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:05NormalMapsPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:06ReflectionMapsPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:07TilesPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:08ColorPresets”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:08ColorPresets:StrongColors”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:09OpacityManagement”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:10TipsForFlatObjects”
  • “Shader Presets:V3D:Advanced Metal Creator:11VideoTutorials”

• You can find new icons for this product in the following DAZ Studio Categories:
  • “Documents”
  • “Lights:Other”
  • “Materials:Other”
  • “Shaders:Metal”
  • “Shaders:Utilities”

• Advanced Metal Creator is a Merchant Resource. Here are the details of you are allowed to and not allowed to sell.

• YOU CAN :

• 1. Sell the assets and the material options/texture packages you created using these shaders. The materials can be directly included with your assets or included as separated material options, and even as separated material products.
  • In order to create them, you can use ANY of the image maps included in this product, as well as ANY of the FULL metal presets included with a limitation of :- a maximum of 21 of the Advanced Metal Creator image maps included in the product, including, but not limited to the image maps of the Full Presets.- a maximum of 3 of the included Full Presets per Product.
  • Please also note that the 2 maps “DispPatchKeepMeIfNoOtherMap.jpg” and “ZeroBlue.jpg” are course never included as maps in these limitations.

• 2. Sell, without any limitations, your assets as well as alternate materials presets which you created using any or both Shader bases. There is no limitation as long as you are using your own maps. Materials can of course be sold within the asset, supported directly by your asset and/or as materials presets for it, included in your main product and/or as separate material pack products.

• 3. Deeply Modify all the included image maps “to make them your own” which means that by now way the original maps can be extracted from the final image map, and that the modifications cannot just consist for instance in only small contrast or color variations. Once done, you can then reuse these new image maps and they are automatically excluded from the “number of maps” limitation.

• 4. Sell shaders products, but none of the files and the image maps can then be included.

• 5. Contact me if you have a doubt about the usage rights.

• YOU CANNOT :

• 1. Whatever the type of product, include in any of your content any of the files called the appliers, more precisely the two files : AMC_Metal1_BaseApplier and AMC_Metal2_BaseApplier, or even minor variations of them.

• 2. Create a Merchant Resource out of these shaders or include in a Merchant Resource Product any file of this product.

• 3. Include in a Shader Product (standalone product of shaders only) any of the Full Presets, Sub-Property Presets (any of the file included from folder 01 to folder 12), or image map included. But you can use your own maps and your own presets using any of the shader applier to create new metal shaders.

• 4. Sell any of the .jpg file alone in a collection of 2D images.

• A few more details concerning the product itself.
  • You will find :

• 1. Advanced Specular Features :
  • Two types of specular BRDF models are included, corresponding to the two different metal models. The first type is a Blinn BRDF, and adds a dial working together with glossiness, and allowing you to customise the size of your highlight. The second type is an anistropic model, presenting first two dials to define the shape of the highlights in two different directions, independent of the UV map. Anistropy adds this possibility to have an “egg shaped” highlight. For this second metal you find two other additional dials in order to deform your highlights once they are shaped. In order to get rapidly familiar with the specular settings, you will find 16 specular presets for Blinn Metal and 16 specular presets for anistropic metal, all gathered in a “Reflection Rough Metals” folder.

• 2. Advanced Reflection Features:
  • The more a metal is polished on the microscopic level, the more it can potentially make an image of its surrounding environment, or “reflect its environment”. Advanced metal creator includes a dial allowing you not only to mix the classical environment mapped reflection and the ray tracing, but also to tune perfectly the proportion of each of them and to force the total reflection output strength. In order to get rapidly familiar with the reflection settings, reflection presets with various proportion of map version ray reflections and various specular properties are gathered in the “Reflection Mirror Metals” folder. There are 17 presets for isotropic metals, 14 presets for anistropic metal. And since surface defects are so important for metal rendering, also included in this folder you will find 7 “bump, normal, displacements” strengths presets to rapidly check their influence on final rendering. Concerning Mapped reflections, you will find 27 different environment map in the “Reflection Map Presets” folder.

• 3. Advanced Surface Deformations Features :
  • Surface deformation is a fundamental parameter of metal realism. These settings provide your surfaces the essential millimetric highlight distribution driving human brains to classify the rendered image as a metal. In order to add the maximum possibilities for the surface deformation components, the following features have been included. First you now have 5 levels of metal deformation, one bump, one normal map, 3 displacement map. The first displacement map, called texture related displacement is here to support the deformations visible on the underlying patterns (diffuse, ambient, specular maps). The second displacement, called material related displacement, is here to add displaced points, meaning surface defects, totally independent from the underlying patterns. The third displacement preset is the classical one, used to add pattern based displacements on your surfaces. All of them (except the Texture Related Displacement) present individual tiles to scale them perfectly for your needs. In order to rapidly test which one could suit your needs, 26 Material Related displacement maps and 26 normal maps presets (direct load by double click) are provided.

• 4. Advanced Tiles Features :
  • As mentioned earlier, Advanced metal Creator Present individual tiles for Material related displacements and normal maps, which are fundamental for metal rendering. In order to customise rapidely your metals using various tiles presets, tiles presets at 1, 2, 4 and 10 are included either for the all tiles of the material, or for the underlying patterns sharing the same tile only (diffuse, ambient, specular…), or for the displacement maps only, or for normal maps only. You will find them in the “Tiles Presets” folder.

• 5. Advanced Color Settings
  • Basic tints and reflection tints of metals can be different from each other. You will find, in the “Color Presets” folder, 26 base color presets, loading at once the diffuse and ambient color, and 26 reflection presets, loading at once the colors of the specular, of the reflection maps, and of the ray tint.

• 6. Advanced Documentation

• A detailed User Guide and Tutorial can be found here:
  • 19362_AMC_PDF_Tutorial.pdf

• A 34 pages pdf file presenting all the characteristics of the shaders can be directly loaded from the content directory. In this pdf, as well as in the documentation folder, you will find links to more than 4 hours of online video presentations, from basic explanations to set up materials on examples.

• File List

• None

• None