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Make your own Shaders


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  • Applink Developer

Hi Everybody!

This is a short tutorial how to make your own shaders. Shaders in 3d-coat are nice tools to spice up your work.

Lately I have been working with 3d-coat shaders and I have found a way how you can change a picture to your

shaders which creates a new shader. I'm not a programmer guru at all. So there is maybe many mistakes and ways

how this can be done easier so feedback would be nice to have. Let's begin.

If you go to C:\Program Files\3D-Coat-3-00-ALPHA\Shaders\Custom\DirtyStone. You see how the DirtyStone shader has been

built. CustomShader1.dds is the file that includes the picture and our plan is to bring another picture which is in .dds format and

replace the old one with the new one.

So take your texture file that you are using. I have been using only .tga pictures but it should work with other types as well.

First we have to convert our picture to .dds and we need this program to do that.

http://developer.nvidia.com/object/dds_utilities_legacy.html

download a build and install it. Press Start->All Programs->NVIDIA Corporation->DDS utilities->nvDXT and it gives good guide

how to convert you picture to .dds type. I have been using this command: nvdxt -file texture.tga

and the last part what we have to do is replace the old .dds file with a new one. Copy your new .dds file to

C:\Program Files\3D-Coat-3-00-ALPHA\Shaders\Custom\DirtyStone and rename CustomShader1.dds to something else. and

rename your .dds file to CustomShader1.dds. That's the way you have a new looking fancy amazing shader in your hand.

In some cases You have scale your model up to see the shader a little bit better.

I think it is possible to just add new shader and not replace, but I don't have no idea how to do that yet. Maybe somebody can

help me with that. I have been using this way and started to build my web page and here is a quick sample what I have done so far.

post-1165-1234266908_thumb.jpg

This is done with Alpha 56. Thanks!

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Thanks for tutorial!

Small addition - to create new shader copy folder of source shader type to new location (and new name) at Shaders\Custom

Then replace texture as it described there.

If someone knows sites with good tiled free textures please post it there. Btw, I can make support of additional normalmaps if you want. It could improve visual appearance.

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  • Applink Developer

one good web page is http://www.cgtextures.com/ I have been using that for short time and it seems that there is quite a lot textures to use.

Normal map support would be great. I tried to use mask effect and sculpt detail on surface but it's quite difficult to match mask and shader together. So

Normal map option would be great.

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  • 2 weeks later...
  • Advanced Member
tiled free textures please post it there.

Some tiled stone textures here:

http://www.michaelcrawfordportfolio.com/te...le/1-tile-stone

They're creative commons license normally but I give you permission to use them commercially in your program.

A couple that might be good, for example (all tile in both directions):

stone5_tileable_1024.jpg

stoneWall1_tileable_1024.jpg

StoneBricks_Tileable_1024.jpg

stone2_tileable_1024.jpg

stone6_tileable_1024.jpg

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  • Advanced Member
How do you actually use shaders? Im guessing they are different to the material option. I cannot see a option to load them.

Shaders is only used for volumetric sculpting right now, but may be used for painting in the future:)

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  • Advanced Member

Andrew,

Attached is a tileable moldy swiss cheese texture I give you permission to use with 3d coat commercially (othewise creative commons license same as above ones):

It's good for stuff like zombies and other rotting surfaces (as you can see from the demo render and viewport shots).

16 bit uncompressed version and specular download here (note that these versions are slightly different from the ones I used for the demo render):

http://www.michaelcrawfordportfolio.com/do...sCheesePack.zip

And yes, the cheese was quite smelly when I took those photos. In fact, I have never been able to get the "funk" out of the garage after that.

post-1287-1235434788_thumb.jpg

post-1287-1235435117_thumb.jpg

post-1287-1235435699_thumb.png

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  • Contributor

.dds or .bmp are good.

Can't wait to try them ,they look beautiful. :)

sorry to hear about your crashing issue,

maybe if you post full situation along with specs in the buggz section

Andrew can help you finding what is going wrong

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  • Member

I'll tell you what i can do. I will upload all those in bmp 1024 by 1024 and you all can do what ever you want with them to create new shaders. I will host them at box.net during the week, perhaps on tuesday.

My PC is 4 years old so i am not going to worry about the bugs as it's probably me. Never should have given up drawing, heheh.

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