13Jan15 EDIT: Bug found in environment mapped relections - see http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewthread/7582/P15/#744801 for the fix.
Works in DS3 Free, DS3 Advanced, and DS4 Pro (still in beta though)
This is basically for situations where you have a single surface but want to use two separate materials (e.g. a shiny reflective gold paint design on a stone surface). Yes, you can already do this by creating separate images to plug into the diffuse, bump, and specular channels (and that's not uncommon). But when you have two REALLY different materials that require separate values for glossiness, specular strength, reflection strength, etc, as well...
Seemed to me that specifying the two materials separately (using a simple greyscale image to define which is used where) was a simple solution. You can already do this in Poser's Material Room (since Poser 6 at least), and now DAZ Studio has Shader Mixer, which can do this. But many people don't use Shader Mixer. So I've created a simple (but quite big!) shader network, and made all the important stuff accessible from the normal Surfaces tab. If you're familiar/happy with changing things manually on the Surfaces tab, this should be fairly intuitive.
Most things seem to work - normal maps and refraction are the areas that still need sorting out.
A couple more notes:
1) Refraction is okay with the existing network if you change two parameters in each of the two Reflect And Refract bricks (you can only do this in Shader Mixer - I hid the parameters from the Surfaces tab on this beta, sorry!):
-Sample cone: Set this to 0, not 1
-Max distance: Start with it set at 1. If the refraction doesn’t work try 10, then 100, then 1000, etc.
2) The render on the promo isn’t straight out-of-the-box: the attached image shows what to expect if you simply create a sphere primitive and apply the shader to it. For the promo render I added an image (Clouds.png) to the Base Texture’s diffuse color, specular color and displacement, and added tiling (3 tiles each way), ray-traced reflection, and a bump image (Noise.png) to the Overlay Texture.
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