I am not sure whether this has been mentioned already nor whether it is a real "fix" but what I generally do is 

set the "Intensity" in the "Render Settings" tab down real low (around 0.3 or even 0.2) or the other way is to set the

intensity (percentage) for your scene lights down quite a bit. Of course when you than go back to "Iray Shader"

you'll find now the scene is too dark :(

 But that's what I did, in particular if rendering out to a "Filament render" image - you will also find that if you

select "Viewport" as the output, and save your scene file, the icon generated will be of similar appearnce to your

filament view settings. I haven't really toyed around with filament that much but hopefully this can at least let you

appreciate that actually filament renders are fairly good quality even for "demo quality" renders, though you'd probably 

wany Iray (or Octane maybe? Haven't installed it myself) but filament can be a very fast choice for testing animations

although I still have some "odd" problems with light artifacts though I am sure these could be reduced with good lighting 

rigs, and good light setup choices. best regards and have a safe and merry season :)

Michael K.

Good day, you are right to be concerned ... but there is hope.

First, avoid installing the regular Daz Studio update since it will replace your current version. Instead, you can install the ones labeled BETA - this is a separate version and you will have both your old and new versions available on your machine which allows you to test the new one and see what does and does not work.

Second, a number of things have been addeded since 4.12 - including the facial posing options. The big change that will effect you is the addition of PBR (physical based rendering) shaders. So far, these have mostly appeared on characters and not scenes. But this will not render in the older versions. Also, autofit will not work on the newer(est) generations.Also, I am guessing that the Filament rendering was added after 4.12 ... that takes some getting used to also.

Third, more than likely, when you update Studio you will need to update your graphic card drivers. This is usually not a problem ... but sometimes it is. Keep your old driver updates handy. 

EDIT:  Yes, I think it is possible to have a separate version of Daz Studio on a separate drive ... but when installing you must be cautious to direct things to the right drive. Since you are manually installing, that is less of a problem.

TBorNot said:

A while back I stumbled across this beta documentation which was later pulled, but grabbed it before it left.  The mispelllings are in the Apple Docs.  Metal could always return true in using software, no need for this new call unless it's to return if there is Metal hardware Ray Tracing.

From the Metal 3 Documentation:
suppoprtRayTracing
Declaration
var suppportRayTracing:Bool{get set}
Beta Software
This documentation contains preliminary information about an API or technology in development.  This
information is subject to change, and software implemented according to this documentation should be
tested with final operating system software.

I think it's really important not to read too much into that, nor into the mention that DAZ Studio 5 will be "using metal". Apple's Metal isa  low-level, low-overhead hardware-accelerated 3D graphic and compute shader API. It's used, for example, to implement the Filament rendering engine; by the DAZ developers stating they're "using metal" it's entirely possible that's all they meant.

It's way too easy to over-speculate on what's coming out and almost impossible not to hope for or expect too much, so I'm just going to sit back and be happy knowing that Mac users will at the very least get Filament (since it was working in the development verson 18 months ago).

We'll see what we get when it gets here, but as always, even some minor development updates would be appreciated. Hopefully we'll be pleasantly surprised.

-- Walt Sterdan

Oh, you are on a Mac.

I don't know how/if Filament work on those.

But what happens if you just set Aux Viewport to 'Texture Shaded'?

Hello,

Thank you for your help. I did everything as you described, but unfortunately it didn't work. The filament window is not responding. The Filament Draw option does not come up. Maybe it has to do with new filament rendering. I've attached a few pictures as attachments. thank you again and all the best to you.

Reza from Berlin

If you hoover your mouse over the Aux Viewer, there should be a dropdown for drawstyle visible (the icon left to 'perspective view'), similar to what you have in your Viewport.

Click that and change drawstyle to 'texture shaded'. It looks like it is in Filament with too high intensity.

If it is Filament, you can also Create > New Filament Draw Option and lower the intensity in parameters (will be created in the scene tab).

https://www.daz3d.com/laguna-mermaid-set-for-genesis-3-female-s

OK. So I have the Laguna Mermaid Set and want to apply it to a G3 Female figure.

The figure displays just fine in the viewport using the NVIDIA Iray Drawstyle, including the Fanta Sea Hair.

But as soon as I load the mermaid tail, it just causes my computer to run at high speed, fans spinning like crazy (thus the pun in the post's title) and never ever get to the point where it displays the Iray preview.

Is there something I can adjust on the Laguna Mermaid Set that will make it display in the Iray Viewport Preview fairly quickly? The system just runs and runs and never displays Iray. 

I don't have this problem with any other geoshell or clothing items, and I have hundreds (the mermaid tail is a geoshell) with fitted tail wardrobe?

Also want to mention when I change the Viewport Drawstyle to Filament, the mermaid tail keeps cycling about like a Christmas tree lights blinking on and off where the tail sections are highlighted in consecutive order. I'm not sure how to describe it but it seems to be stuck in a loop in Filament and never gets to the point of rendering the preview either.

Please help!

Check if your viewport set to "Filament" when the skin is 'glowing'.

lilweep said:

vrba79 said:

It's never a good look when the end users are expected to fix problems with the finished version of a product. You payed good money for that, you're not a beta tester. Why are you expected to supply what should have come out of the box?

that's one way to characterise it, or you could just recognise you are a small minority of users and are expected to take a few extra steps to get it to work on your bespoke or obsolete shader set up.

(There's also Filament as an alternative to Iray and 3dlite, which also isn't 100% supported by PA's or frankly Daz Studio, but is still there for users to use if they want to tweak things.)

..well with those decided to stay with W7 or 8.1, and/or have older hardware, it's already the end of the line for Iray GPU rendering as of the 4.21.1.13  Beta as it requires a driver that no longer supports the older operating systems..  Qt6 which i what Daz5 is being built on will end support for both as it only supports W10 and up.

So it's either going back to glacial CPU rendering or grabbing Wowie's AweShader system and moving back to 3DL (there are some incredible images on the Show us more of your 3Delight renders thread that use the AweShader).  If you have a decent core count CPU you should get much better render times than Iray CPU rendering.  I did one a couple years ago that took only 14 min (on a 4 core 2.8 GHz i7) and looked better than the same scene optimised for Iray which took over 2hr:45m on the same CPU.

There is a conversion tool for Iray to 3DL by Riversoft Art that does a decent job but it still requires some adjustment to get the desired  quality

Thank you Mr. Versluis! Part 6 in the intro is the first clear, concise explanation of the relationship between Filament and Iray that I've seen - I mean how it can be used to support development of a scene for rendering in Iray.

I gave up Filament long ago, wondering what the point was, considering what you get out of it. I spent too much time fighting it. Better to spend my time on the DS functions that I'm at least used to. But you showed just those few quick setups that Filament can do to help guide the Iray setup. That's all we need. I'm slapping my forehead;-)

I still wish it could be developed to provide the fast, art-worthy images that I'm told it's capable of, though. But again, thank you very much for that tutorial!

You could also leave the lights alone and adjust the tone mapping in Render Settings (you will need to do a render/Iray or Filament preview or use Create>New Tonemapper Options Node to access the settings)

necrothreads are by their very nature outdated there is now Filament and bridges to other software that did not exist when you started digging up the rotting bodies

In addition to what Richard said...  Filament can be an extremely useful engine because it's extremely quick and it gives you a pretty good impression as to what your render is going to look like (even Iray renders; though some details may differ). The only issue with Filament: default lighting, things can easily look seriously overexposed.

If that also applies to you: open the 'Create' menu and add a "Filament Draw Options Node". While having this node selected in your scene go check out your Parameters tab and bring down both "environment intensity" (default 1500) as well as the "Distance scene light scale".

It's not directly related to your question I suppose, but figured I'd mention it anyway because... Filament can honestly be quite useful, especially because it's a heck of a lot faster than Iray.

Maybe a late reaction to the original post, but oh well...  I'm a die-hard 'Ghost in the Shell' fan, I've seen the original anime in the cinema as a kid (which was pretty special because the movie was hardly mainstream, I have no idea how my parents pulled that off) and got immediately overwhelmed with both the awesome animation techniques as well as the overal atmosphere... oh dear.

I stopped caring ever since it got turned into a "franchise" (never saw the live action movie because... eeew) but I did manage to collect quite a bit of the original stuff.

Anyway, because of that I also took an interest in this genre; especially because of the amazing atmosphere that more than often gets automatically involved. And as the others mentioned above: there's already quite a bit available in the shop. Of course, on the downside there's so much available that it can be hard to separate the awesome from the generally good stuff.

For what's it worth....  I'd like to mention some of my favorites.

https://www.daz3d.com/cyberpunk-unlimited-outfit-for-genesis-8-and-81-females

When the author mentioned "unlimited outfit" they weren't kidding here! The customization features of this critter are massive. It comes with a nice selection of material presets, morphs which you can use and if you want even more than the UV map provides plenty of options to do some geometry adding without suddenly causing crashes or incompatible textures.

Next we have Niko 8...   I also became quite a fan of both the figure and the world which the authors created around him:

https://www.daz3d.com/niko-8-cyber-funk-bundle
https://www.daz3d.com/niko-8-supercharged-cyber-bundle

It began with the cyberfunk bundle because that seemed to give me the most for my bucks. I took an immediate interest in Niko's "semi masked" appearance. And the nightclub scenery is simply gorgeous. Best part of that scenery is that it has many subections so it's very easy to re-use it for lots of different things. Despite the fact that it's mostly focussed on Iray I also got some really interesting results using 3Delight & Filament.

So then I decided I wanted more and ended up with the supercharged bundle as well. Those cyber implants are pretty neat.

And finally....  (I don't want to share yet another small essay ;))

https://www.daz3d.com/cyber-dream-bundle

I'm gonna be honest here: the best part of that bundle is the cyber core, that environment is just crazy! Iray only obviously, you can't really get the color effects otherwise. The outfits are very nice as well, but to be perfectly honest I always figured those were lacking a bit. Probably because I got spoiled from the 'unlimited outfit'. Even so...  using Substance Painter can apply some seriously good effects on those suits, making them very well worth it. 

But yah, there's already a lot of good stuff available!

benniewoodell said:

wsterdan said:

I've been running DAZ Studio on a 2012 Mac for 10 years now, and according to my logs I've had a total of 31 crashes (almost all from DAZ bugs like crashing on Command-r and Command-s). I haven't needed to upgrade hardware or drivers once, so I'm not seeing "the problems".

I do toon or comic art, so I run DAZ Studio, and not "iRay Studio" so that might be the key. 
 

Yeah, I guess for me I should clarify the problems, I animate and render in iray. My render times went from 9 hours a frame to three minutes when I got my 1080ti a few years ago, then that 3 minutes dropped to 45 seconds when I got my 3090. I couldn't do what I do on a Mac.  

Sounds awesome, and well worth the switch!

I'm finally getting to animate a short cartoon, and I'm getting about 0.5 seconds a 1080p frame using OpenGL and loving it, but it will be interesting to see how things look with Filament or if DAZ Studio 5 offers some other new options. OpenGL works for the style of toon I'm doing, but it's obviously not good enough for most of the 3D art we produce.

IceCrMn said:

So popular consensus is that it's the textures in "texture" (openGL) viewport mode that is causing the viewport slowdown and not the geometry?

I'll admit, I never use filament, but is it any faster?

I like to be able to see the textures in the scene when I'm building.

Just a personal opinion but most of the time I prefer the OpenGL viewport to Filament although there are times I switch to Filament. One of those occasions is when I need to see whether the character's feet are actually grounded on the surface of the floor: Filament is much better at showing those different surfaces whereas they get lost in the dark shadows of OpenGL. Otherwise, I don't like the look of Filament and long for the day when the IRay preview is quick enough to use that instead.

I just wanna know what rendering engines we'll have available. Iray and that glorified preview engine "Filament" are a given, but we've heard nothing else about 3DL's fate or any alternatives.

At top-right of the Viewport, just to the left of the button that lets you pick the view to use (Perspective View or Default Camera usually) theer should be an Iray or Filament logo - click that and pick a different Drawstyle, or hit ctrl 9 (cmd 9 for Mac) to switch to Texture Shaded Drawstyle.

IceCrMn said:

Yes, that is true. Some progress has been made.

Sorry for the long post but I feel like I'm not making myself clear.

Daz isn't writing one version of DS5 they are writing two.

One for windows and one for mac.

Maintaining feature parity between them is going to cost time and cause delays itself.

Milestones in development may have been met, but negated because something wouldn't work in one of the versions.

That can cause days, weeks or even months worth of work to be lost if parity is a requirement.

It may even necessitate a complete rewrite of certain features. So the "first line of code" can be rendered useless if you get to start over.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm sure there is some boilerplate code that gets added to the first stanza and other places so generic things can be done quickly.

 

I envision the first line to be something similar to

//this is the mac version.Attempt number 17 this week.God I hope it works this time//

So it could be reused as needed making it an example of the "boilerplate code" I referred to.

What follows after that line may or may not be usable, and that's what I'm getting at.

They are not writing two versions of DS 5. QT is a framework that runs on both windows and macs and the whole purpose of using a framework is that the vast majority of the code you write will work the same on both systems. Naturally there will be some work on a per OS in getting certain things working, eg: installation, and testing. There will also be extra work getting third party libraries working, eg filament.

My company develops apps that run on Android phones/tablets and Apple IOS phones/tablets, and there is no way we could do this without using a platform independent framework that means the bulk of our work on our apps only needs to be written once.

wsterdan said:

IceCrMn said:

Daz isn't writing one version of DS5 they are writing two.

One for windows and one for mac.

Maintaining feature parity between them is going to cost time and cause delays itself.

Milestones in development may have been met, but negated because something wouldn't work in one of the versions.

That can cause days, weeks or even months worth of work to be lost if parity is a requirement.

It may even necessitate a complete rewrite of certain features. So the "first line of code" can be rendered useless if you get to start over.

I'm not a programmer, but I'm sure there is some boilerplate code that gets added to the first stanza and other places so generic things can be done quickly.

Filament, a feature introduced in the Windows version two years ago, is still not available for Mac users. If they were going to hold release to maintain a parity between Window and Mac users, they're two years too late.

From what I've read, it's not possible to add Filament to the Mac version before upgrading the Qt version.