full MDL guide

[theyz zz 0]

hey , i was playing around with the MDL graph in SD , i really love how you can create multi layered materials and be able to export them straight to another program . But the learning curve is something im concerned about , there's no full guide on how to use ALL of the nodes present in the MDL editor , there was the car paint guide on youtube which i appreciate , but it only goes through a few nodes and how to use them . There's very little info about it on the official substance designer documentation , and Nvidia's official guide on MDL is wayyy to technical for a beginner artist to understand , it just seems like rocket science to me .
https://developer.download.nvidia.com/designworks/mdl-sdk/secure/2019.1/MDL_spec_1.5.2_13May2019.pdf?Y-FTCLdZ-j8-p6toTrqu-rE93Liyc9diRI4Q-_hvj8Me5m99W6jcRHB7wJpsfSmrl_xrWW5xvwSLU93zrrzD8Cq1fMQI5tSpZZUJ_heD8HWP4s_i-KAv13iaxpZulkDCahmi2EEVFeBCZ8_1k8XC841SZh-xbrdHsWOMKYU
Im pretty sure there are many artists out there who would love to explore this tool , only if it were simpler and easier to understand ,
ive spent time reading up on your PBR guides and found a way to intuitively understand how some of the nodes work , maybe we can it to make the editor more intuitive , easy to understand and learn

[Bhuwan Sharma 0]

hey, for general understanding of how all these things work refer to https://www.pbrt.org/  ....
and yeah it all might be a little hard for an artist but only if he isn't interested.....
so if you want to learn all these things, go for it.....if you go straight into mdl you won't get anything cause they just have all the work already done. so when you go to nvidia to learn mdl you only get to know what functions are available and nothing on how they work........
..if you learn the theory behind them, it becomes universal to your mind....then be it glsl or mdl or any shading language concepts are everywhere same

and explaining all the nodes explicitly is not at all a good idea...cause if your base is clear then they all are related to each other and even becomes self explanatory....
happy learning......