Clarisse iFX tips for beginners

Hi there,

I think if you just started to learn Clarisse iFX like me you’ll find this helpful.
These are mostly general not project specific things.

If you want to “exit” from a specific camera just click the eye icon, select nothing a click Apply. 🙂 In general this is the Clarisse way to unlink/unconnect anything in the software. 🙂
After you imported a camera (alembic) you may have to change the Image resolution to get exact match with what you saw in your original application (Maya, Houdini etc.)
The default is 16:9 ratio at 1280×720 resolution which is not necessary what you need.
An Image (Image Gallery) contains all the layers (Layer Editor).
You can add Filters to each layer (color corrections, Optix Denoiser etc.).
You have to select an Image than you can add the AOVs.

As in all software you have to set the Color Space correctly for each Map File:
Turn on the Use Raw Data for every non surface color like texture map (Roughness, Metalness/Metallic, Normal, Bump, Displacement, masks etc.).
For Diffuse, Base Color/Albedo, Specular Color (usually for standard shader) use the default sRGB. Of course if you have tx files the used Color Space depends how you converted the tx files originally.
For grayscale (one channel not rgb) textures you have to turn on the Force Luminance option at the Evaluation/Single Channel File Behavior. Usually you have a lot of textures that are grayscale not rgb.
Unfortunately the new Disney Principled shader currently does not have a backlight (to mimic translucency) feature. So in many cases you can’t use it for leaves or similar objects (use the Standard shader).
When you import a obj (which can generate the shader tree based on the textures you have) the generated shader tree contains a TextureBumpMap node instead a TextureNormalMap node.
You have to replace them manually (or write a script :)).
I used Speed Tree assets (exported in obj) where this happened every time.