New DS Filament Render Engine

marble

Wicked Whomp said:

fred9803 said:

One wonders why if time could be better spent, if animation and quickness of rendering was the point of quick and dirty Filamant rendering, wouldn't that time be better spent just using 3DL. One step forward and two steps backward, is this Filament thing a joke?

What on earth are you on about? Comparing the rendering time of Filament and 3DL, Filament mops the floor with it and then some. There's nothing "dirty" about Filament either, it requires different settings just as one would expect when moving from 3DL to Iray or visavis. Some work needs to be done, sure, but to say one step forward and two steps back? That's just utter nonsense.

The hair issue in particular can be fixed, and I'm actually surprised it hasn't been done so quicker, given the plethora of information available on Blender's Eevee renderer, which work much in the same way.

I think that one of the problems seems to be that, according to some opinions in another thread, Filament in DAZ Studio is not the full render engine and is only intended for previews. I don't know whether Filament handles hair properly in the full version but I suspect that we won't get a "fix" because it is working as intended. The fact that DAZ promotes it for animations is another discussion, however.

WendyLuvsCatz

3Delight cannot be improved because DAZ studio is unable to impliment the latest version without breaking everything made for this one, shaders, scripts etc,  there have been posts on that topic before.

broken record warning

Nobody is stopping you using 3Delight, iray or openGL 

using Filament is optional 

DAZ can spend their time doing what they want, it is not your call Fred and not costing you anything 

I really am getting tired of people complaining about something I actually like using while they still have access to stuff I don't care for as much at no cost whatsoever.

and in some cases even getting very hostile as in one thread no longer here.

 

3Diva

fred9803 said:

One wonders why if time could be better spent, if animation and quickness of rendering was the point of quick and dirty Filamant rendering, wouldn't that time be better spent just using 3DL. One step forward and two steps backward, is this Filament thing a joke?

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

fred9803

3Diva said:

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. I see a drunken da Vinci doing the Mona Lisa with a 4B pencil on the back of a coaster in a bar because he couldn't be bothererd to get his real canvas and paint-set out. Quickness isn't a subsitute for quality. Render in Iray and be done with it... don't expect people not to notice if you've taken a shortcut with some trickery.... they will.

WendyLuvsCatz

fred9803 said:

3Diva said:

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. I see a drunken da Vinci doing the Mona Lisa with a 4B pencil on the back of a coaster in a bar because he couldn't be bothererd to get his real canvas and paint-set out. Quickness isn't a subsitute for quality. Render in Iray and be done with it... don't expect people not to notice if you've taken a shortcut with some trickery.... they will.

don't tell me what to do mate 

the masters all used charcoal sketches BTW and I don't think much of the Mona Lisa TBH

also those French Impressionists could have used much better resolution for their renders 

marble

fred9803 said:

3Diva said:

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. I see a drunken da Vinci doing the Mona Lisa with a 4B pencil on the back of a coaster in a bar because he couldn't be bothererd to get his real canvas and paint-set out. Quickness isn't a subsitute for quality. Render in Iray and be done with it... don't expect people not to notice if you've taken a shortcut with some trickery.... they will.

Many of us here are hobbyists. Many would not claim to be artists, let alone masters. A master might be willing to wait 3 months for an animation to render in Iray. I'm not. 

Actually, I'm the only one who sees my DAZ Studio output and I enjoy creating stories with pictures - for my own pleasure. I really don't feel the need to produce a great work of art and I don't have the time to wait for IRay animations. Stills yes, animations - not a chance.

3Diva

fred9803 said:

3Diva said:

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. 

LOL What are you even talking about? No one is trading anything for anything. We have ALL THREE - Iray, 3DL, AND Filament. Nothing is being sacrificed for anything. You can choose to render in whatever render engine you want to. We just have more choices now. I don't care that you don't like Filament. I'm not asking you to. What I am asking you to do is have some respect and decency for those people who maybe do like it and do want to use it. We don't all have to like the same thing. But you don't have to try and tear other people down just for having the "audacity" to like something that you don't.

Zilvergrafix

thats how human works... complain on FIlament for being super simple AND Octane for being super complex and filled with 999,999 parameters that you need a Doctorate in Computer Graphics. 

khorneV2

Zilvergrafix said:

thats how human works... complain on FIlament for being super simple AND Octane for being super complex and filled with 999,999 parameters that you need a Doctorate in Computer Graphics. 

Not so far even for everyday parameters (considering viewers who have no knowledge of 3d graphic hobby) 

nonesuch00

Ideally Filament and iRay PBR materials would be 100% the same and the only difference would be iRay did the 100% light simulation model ray tracing while Filament only did a carefully selected 50% (or whatever of the subset it uses) of those ray tracing features to do render almost realistic renders in less than 5 seconds a render. A lot easier said than done though.

Even when I do get a RTX 30X0 GPU I will still plan on making scenes look good in Filament. If you want to animate or publish games the shortest path to porting what your DAZ renders look like to a game or animation is to use Filament.  

marble

nonesuch00 said:

Ideally Filament and iRay PBR materials would be 100% the same and the only difference would be iRay did the 100% light simulation model ray tracing while Filament only did a carefully selected 50% (or whatever of the subset it uses) of those ray tracing features to do render almost realistic renders in less than 5 seconds a render. A lot easier said than done though.

Even when I do get a RTX 30X0 GPU I will still plan on making scenes look good in Filament. If you want to animate or publish games the shortest path to porting what your DAZ renders look like to a game or animation is to use Filament.  

I believe that Eevee and Cycles materials are more or less compatible. I've rendered hair in Eevee and it looks ok - obviously not as good as Cycles (or IRay) but better than Filament. I do hope there is a way to improve it because I really want to use Filament to get more involved with animations. I'm still nowhere near having the know-how to do it in Blender.

There's another problem that I need to overcome too - the "glow" from nostrils and other "openings". 

Sevrin

fred9803 said:

3Diva said:

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. I see a drunken da Vinci doing the Mona Lisa with a 4B pencil on the back of a coaster in a bar because he couldn't be bothererd to get his real canvas and paint-set out. Quickness isn't a subsitute for quality. Render in Iray and be done with it... don't expect people not to notice if you've taken a shortcut with some trickery.... they will.

Buzzwords, however nonsensical in context, do not an argument make.  There's no trading.  No one's giving up anything.  Filament is a render engine.  Including it provides options to people. 

Richard Haseltine

This is a thread for discussing the Filament drawstyle included with DS. Any further attempt to discuss whether it should be included with DS will be summarily removed.

PhilW

Sevrin said:

MoreTN said:

jnwggs said:

Richard Haseltine said:

This is a thread for discussing the Filament drawstyle included with DS. Any further attempt to discuss whether it should be included with DS will be summarily removed.

Thanks Richard,
I came here for advice on how to use Filament better, and instead for the most part, I've had to sift through 25 pages of a bunch of squabbling and ungratefulness for something that I consider to be a gift, just to find the smallest amount of advice on how to use it better.

I like to make animations, and prefer to do them in Iray. But Iray takes a long time to render. Filament allows me to render out a whole animation, analyze the action and camera work, and tweak it, render again in Filament, an on and on until it "plays out" how I'd like it to. Then, I take a few select frames here and there from key areas of the animation and try them as single renders in Iray, and adjust the colors etc. This way, I can make adjustments and improve movements and see how they look after I've "rendered' them and played them back as a finished movie. If all looks good, if the sound syncs properly etc, then and only then, is it worth rendering for several days in Iray knowing I'll get the proper results. Filament is a gift, and I for one am grateful and have no complaints :)

And this, surely, is how Filament is intended to be used. It's a tool for rapid prototyping, not final renders. And it's great. 

For most Daz animations you see, in fact, for most animations period, lack of photorealism and render quality are far down on the list of things that break immersion.  It's almost irrelevant.  The story, pacing, dialogue, consistency of style and characters moving naturally and appropriately are far more important.

I'd definitely agree with this - the priorities are very different between stills (where render quality is very important) and animation (where it is the quality of the movement that is paramount). It is therefore great to have render tools for both and I can foesee a lot more use of Daz Studio for animation going forward.

cain-x

Animators for DAZ Studio must make a small subset of the user base - which is unfortunate as DAZ lowers the bar for entry into 3D animation. It has had the tools for over a decade and I have used it. I am one of those who hope that Filament will get fleshed out more - it has great potential for new and old animators.

For machinima, its a game changer. The hair, light shadows and transparency limitations are concerning but I am hoping there is more development on this front. Thanks to the DAZ devs for thinking about us.

N-RArts

Could someone please remind me, is DOF possible with Filament? I'm trying to do "still" render (I just wanted to see what Minotaur 6 looked like in Filament), and I'd quite like to blur out the background. 

cain-x

N_R Arts said:

Could someone please remind me, is DOF possible with Filament? I'm trying to do "still" render (I just wanted to see what Minotaur 6 looked like in Filament), and I'd quite like to blur out the background. 

No, it is not possible - at least when I tried tinkering with the Focal Distance and with DOF turned on. Works fine in 3Delight.

N-RArts

cain-x said:

No, it is not possible - at least when I tried tinkering with the Focal Distance and with DOF turned on. Works fine in 3Delight.

That's what I thought. Thanks for confirming :)

cain-x

Is anyone else also having issues with changing the HDRI map in the Environment Settings -> Environment Map? I have only gotten this to work once but now it always defaults to DTHDR-RuinsB-500 map.

3Diva

cain-x said:

Is anyone else also having issues with changing the HDRI map in the Environment Settings -> Environment Map? I have only gotten this to work once but now it always defaults to DTHDR-RuinsB-500 map.

Try rotating the environment map once you swap it to a new one. It seems to sometimes not "read" a new HDRI until you change it's position a little - or switch to Iray preview for a couple seconds and then back to Filament. Those options seem to help it update to the current HDRI.

barbult

Here is something funny I stumbled upon today. an Iray render does not treat the camera the same way a viewport render does. In the filament render (viewport) it looks like that farmer's wife's carving knife got him! Poor guy. It is the same camera. I only changed render engine.

 

N-RArts

EDIT: Not happy with render. Will post a better version later.

N-RArts

 

barbult said:

Here is something funny I stumbled upon today. an Iray render does not treat the camera the same way a viewport render does. In the filament render (viewport) it looks like that farmer's wife's carving knife got him! Poor guy. It is the same camera. I only changed render engine.

I don't know if I should laugh, cry, or throw up... :s

onix

I just upgraded DAZ to the latest version and found out that it has this new feature. but unfortunately, it is not of much use because everything looks horrible unless you deliberately tweak your scene for this engine but then it will be not usable for iRay anymore

I think Daz developers now need to make some effort in creating proper iray to filament (and also iray to 3gl) conversion system. because now the scene gets too light, too dark, individual item colors are way out of balance making this pretty much unusable. 

Also considering the fact that there are like 5 rendering engines available It would be a good idea to add some kind of "alternate surfaces" option for easy switching between rendering engines and also to make everything properly displayed.  even if this is just cosmetic, but it is quite unpleasant when your viewport looks like some abomination that does not even remotely represent the final result.

Galaxy

onix said:

I just upgraded DAZ to the latest version and found out that it has this new feature. but unfortunately, it is not of much use because everything looks horrible unless you deliberately tweak your scene for this engine but then it will be not usable for iRay anymore

I think Daz developers now need to make some effort in creating proper iray to filament (and also iray to 3gl) conversion system. because now the scene gets too light, too dark, individual item colors are way out of balance making this pretty much unusable. 

Also considering the fact that there are like 5 rendering engines available It would be a good idea to add some kind of "alternate surfaces" option for easy switching between rendering engines and also to make everything properly displayed.  even if this is just cosmetic, but it is quite unpleasant when your viewport looks like some abomination that does not even remotely represent the final result.

Iray and Filament is like apple and orange. Iray preview viewport will represent the final Iray result.

Sevrin

onix said:

I just upgraded DAZ to the latest version and found out that it has this new feature. but unfortunately, it is not of much use because everything looks horrible unless you deliberately tweak your scene for this engine but then it will be not usable for iRay anymore

I think Daz developers now need to make some effort in creating proper iray to filament (and also iray to 3gl) conversion system. because now the scene gets too light, too dark, individual item colors are way out of balance making this pretty much unusable. 

Also considering the fact that there are like 5 rendering engines available It would be a good idea to add some kind of "alternate surfaces" option for easy switching between rendering engines and also to make everything properly displayed.  even if this is just cosmetic, but it is quite unpleasant when your viewport looks like some abomination that does not even remotely represent the final result.

Filament is not intended as an Iray preview anymore than wireframe is.

onix

Sevrin said:

onix said:

I just upgraded DAZ to the latest version and found out that it has this new feature. but unfortunately, it is not of much use because everything looks horrible unless you deliberately tweak your scene for this engine but then it will be not usable for iRay anymore

I think Daz developers now need to make some effort in creating proper iray to filament (and also iray to 3gl) conversion system. because now the scene gets too light, too dark, individual item colors are way out of balance making this pretty much unusable. 

Also considering the fact that there are like 5 rendering engines available It would be a good idea to add some kind of "alternate surfaces" option for easy switching between rendering engines and also to make everything properly displayed.  even if this is just cosmetic, but it is quite unpleasant when your viewport looks like some abomination that does not even remotely represent the final result.

Filament is not intended as an Iray preview anymore than wireframe is.

 

Galaxy said:

onix said:

I just upgraded DAZ to the latest version and found out that it has this new feature. but unfortunately, it is not of much use because everything looks horrible unless you deliberately tweak your scene for this engine but then it will be not usable for iRay anymore

I think Daz developers now need to make some effort in creating proper iray to filament (and also iray to 3gl) conversion system. because now the scene gets too light, too dark, individual item colors are way out of balance making this pretty much unusable. 

Also considering the fact that there are like 5 rendering engines available It would be a good idea to add some kind of "alternate surfaces" option for easy switching between rendering engines and also to make everything properly displayed.  even if this is just cosmetic, but it is quite unpleasant when your viewport looks like some abomination that does not even remotely represent the final result.

Iray and Filament is like apple and orange. Iray preview viewport will represent the final Iray result.

 

Cosidering how super ugly is opengl viewport (not only ugly but marginaly dysfuctional because some areas get too dark to even see ) and the fact that this filament renderer is just as fast as opengl it can be used as opengl alternative.

and it works as preview prety adequate, probably even better than 3delight just that it need some tweaking

If daz products were optimized for at laest those 2 rendering engines or at lest to iray and viewport it coud not be such a pain to our eyes to work with daz.

 

If swithing betwen them was easier it may be even possible to do hybrid rendering where you render environment in filament and craracters in iray. then combine everything, 

this is not even so much about performance but about the fact that we run out of GPU memory  with super complex nature environments that ere not rendered great in iRay anyway.

3Diva

onix said:

I just upgraded DAZ to the latest version and found out that it has this new feature. but unfortunately, it is not of much use because everything looks horrible unless you deliberately tweak your scene for this engine but then it will be not usable for iRay anymore

That's not true. All you need to do is adjust the Filament Draw Options Node to suit your taste - it doesn't affect the way the scene looks in Iray at all.

 

Go to Create >> New Filament Draw Options Node.

Select it in the Scene Tab and in the Parameters Tab adjust it's ISO Scale.

 

That brings the Filament Preview more in line with what you see in Iray.

Filament:

 

Iray:

 

And just for comparison, what most people USED TO USE for a preview draw style, texture shaded:

Filament preview is MUCH more in line with what you see with Iray. 

 

Dkgoose

hey guys so i've been gone a while and slightly confused about filament, i updates but i don't see it listed under the render engine in the render settings tab? is it just the viewport engine?

Sevrin

Dkgoose said:

hey guys so i've been gone a while and slightly confused about filament, i updates but i don't see it listed under the render engine in the render settings tab? is it just the viewport engine?

Viewport works with the current viewport draw mode, whatever it is, except, you know, Iray..  Filament is set up as a draw mode.