DAZ Studio : The Complete Guide to Creating Iray Shaders

DAZ STUDIO : CREATING IRAY SHADERS

IRAY is a physically based renderer used in DAZ Studio and it calculates the behaviour of light in a way as close to reality as possible. In this live webinar workshop we would like to help you create Iray shaders from start to finish.

Presenting the two sessions will be Esha, who was one of the original pioneers of creating Iray shaders; she was one of the first DAZ published artists to experiment with Iray and learn it all from scratch.

She’ll take you through the whole process of shader creation and then go in depth with seven very useful case studies of different shader materials. Join us for these invaluable sessions!

Session 1 : Saturday 4th February 

20:00 GMT London/12:00 PST Los Angeles/15:00 EST New York

1. Foundations

Shader vs. Shader Preset
The Iray Uber shader
Iray and 3Delight

2. Gathering reference images

3. How to set up a material

Using a preset as a base
From scratch

4. Analysing a material

Color
Structure
Glossiness
Special Effects

5. Preparing the maps (part 1)

Session 2 : Saturday 11th February

20:00 GMT London/12:00 PST Los Angeles/15:00 EST New York

5. Preparing the maps (part 2)

Photos
Texture Software
Painted in Photoshop

6. Case Studies

Matte material (fabric)
Glossy material (polished stone)
Metallic material (silver, gold)
Refractive material (glass, water)
Translucent material (flower petals, cream)
Emissive material (light bulb)
Special Effects materials (sci-fi style)

Bonus Session : TBA

Esha will set a Shader Creation Challenge at the end of session 2 and we will visit this answer and any other shaders you may have created.

Presenter : Esha

Esha lives in Austria and has been creating 3D products for nearly 12 years.
She has created content for Smith Micro and Daz and is an active vendor at daz3d.com.

When Daz released the Developer Tools for Daz Studio in 2008 she integrated them into her workflow and has been working with Daz Studio, alongside Poser, ever since. In recent years she has been focusing on DS for product development.

Esha’s favourite tools include Daz Studio, Poser, ZBrush, Wings3D, Xfrog, Marvelous Designer, UVLayout and Photoshop. In all of these she is a self-taught artist, basing her skills on years of experience and numerous online tutorials.
She fully understands the difficulties of moving from Poser to Daz Studio, having made that journey herself, and enjoys passing on her Studio know-how to new users.

Esha also has several years of experience in teaching adults. She firmly believes that the best way to learn is to actively do something yourself, so she favours a hands-on approach in teaching.

Knowing only too well how tiresome it is to gather scraps of information all over the web she wants to provide comprehensive webinars that really offer solid information. Moving from the basics to advanced procedures she takes care to make sure that her audience will be able to follow her courses smoothly.

In her spare time Esha loves listening to classical music, baking muffins and collecting cat photos.