We all love the convenience of Poser content in Carrara but tweaking every shader is a tedious task, especially when it is the same settings over and over: reduce the shiny highlights, remove the extraneous color multiply… . Shader tricks that control settings in Poser often have no equivalent in Carrara, leaving a trail of “junk DNA” in the shader tree. Meanwhile, common settings like the bump and shininess values for a figure’s “skin” are scattered across multiple shaders…. We’ve come to accept that the benefits of content outweigh the inconvenience of manually translating each of Poser’s shaders by hand, one by one.

But no more! Fenric has released his ADVANCED SHADER TWEAKER plugin which adjusts many multi-shader values all at once!

AdvancedShaderTweaker

  • remove color multiply
  • remove extraneous alpha operations
  • Highlight value
  • Shininess value
  • Copy texture to bump
  • Bump amplitude value
  • Texture Filtering: Sampling, Gaussian, Fast MipMap
  • Enable Blurry Reflections
  • Reflection strength
  • Reflection bounce depth
  • Reflection fresnel
  • Transparency depth
  • Index of Refraction
  • SSS Translucence
  • SSS Reflection
  • SSS Fresnel
  • SSS Refraction
  • SSS Intensity
  • Translucency Value

The usual suspects are addressed directly in the Assembly Room so you can tackle the most common problems immediately as you load items into your scene.

It works by selecting the model (or models) to have the shaders adjusted for, and select the “Advanced Shader Tweaker” option from the “Fenric” menu, located under the main “Edit” menu. All the model’s shaders are adjusted at once.

FenricEditAST

If you hold down the “shift” key while choosing the menu option, then the tweaker will start in “texture filter” mode, where only the texture filtering options will be displayed. Finally, a fix to Carrara 8.5’s insistence on changing every texture shader to Fast Mip Map!

ASTtexturefiltering

The plug in is available now and costs only $10. A free trial version is available to download, and will operate for 10 minutes before automatically being disabled.
http://fenric.com/wordpress/downloads/

In order to enable full functionality, a license key must be purchased at Fenric’s store.
http://www.fenric.com