WendyLuvsCatz said:

this is why they added Filament I guess

it needs to be working properly (cutout opacity, glow, shadow) and for every operating system though

Filament is a drawstyle, not a full renderer.

this is why they added Filament I guess

it needs to be working properly (cutout opacity, glow, shadow) and for every operating system though

Congrats on the upcoming MBP sounds great!

No updates that i'm aware of, other than the official plan back in July, 2021 when they were still planning to publish a bare-bones release version of DAZ Studio 5 at the end of 2021:

- This release will work on at least x86 Macs (with both Filament and Iray). We are still investigating if this initial early-access release will run either natively or through emulation on M1 macs, but M1 support will come during the continued development of Daz Studio 5.

So, they were in a position where they were planning to publish a mostly working DAZ Stuido 5 last January, and were planning to release/update any missing features throughout the year which would have been done... about now. With the pressure off a bit and time needed to update for Genesis 9 and to keep iRay working, I'm guessing (just a guess) that we might see DAZ Studio 5 in the next six months, in time for my birthday. (fingers crossed)

That said, even if we do get an Apple Silicon native version, it most likely help iRay renders all that much. For what it's worth, my M1 iMac renders iRay about three or four times faster than my Intel-based Macs, and yours should be a fair clip faster than that. Still glacial rendering times compared to a high-end nvidia card though.

-- Walt Sterdan

Every plugin I have tried works.

Thickener, Simterno Randomizer, Filament, autofit,mesh grabber,measure metrics, and a few others.

Saxa -- SD said:

Have for example 10xG8s in test scene with morphed geografts, hair-clothing, not base res and 200 frames. Though base-res recco is a good one. Search forums and you'll find script. Think was technical forums.
And have an obscene amount of morphs for anyone making scenes.  That will get reduced to bare bones visible to DS later.
300 morphs? Did you enable show hidden in parameters to see other JCMs etc also active?

My PC specs are similar to yours.
Animation is single threaded for all software.  
So that heavy hitter CPU is only using one core.  So fastest CPU is still best in 2023 for animation. Eyeroll bigtime.
RAM amount is good, but ram speed is the most important for anims.
GPU has zero bearing on anim manip - unless it bottlenecks - which higher end GPUs don't generally do.

Click IK bone in filament and drag.
Takes about 5 seconds holding the mouse dray button the whole time and then bone posing moves normal speed.
However there is a moment with all these chars&morphs where up top at DS menubar says 'not repsonding'. Happens at about second 3-4.
While still holding down mouse button drag a smidge. Non response disappears and now easily move.

Moving anims out of DS means the whole game of export, are all bones there, all morphs, geografts working render appearance for mats change.  
And learn new software.

Feels hilarious to say in 2023, anim-users are still limited to single-thread for anims and moving assets around to get them fully recognized is still a lifestyle time-wise.

Also, wendy's screengrab is one of they key parts.  Play with that. That and draw style pane.

Found the script. Noticed my 5 second loading when moving a limb is down to 2 or 3 now, and turning the cam in the viewport is closer to 20fps versus its previous 5 fps slog.

Definitely considering using animation software for the rest of this project, but not really sure what my next best steps should be.

WendyLuvsCatz said:

use the opposite settings to these  except performance 

they are the ones on my Filament Render machine not my iray one

(which is busy rendering )

 

I saw a noticeable improvement from these settings, thanks Wendy.

Have for example 10xG8s in test scene with morphed geografts, hair-clothing, not base res and 200 frames. Though base-res recco is a good one. Search forums and you'll find script. Think was technical forums.
And have an obscene amount of morphs for anyone making scenes.  That will get reduced to bare bones visible to DS later.
300 morphs? Did you enable show hidden in parameters to see other JCMs etc also active?

My PC specs are similar to yours.
Animation is single threaded for all software.  
So that heavy hitter CPU is only using one core.  So fastest CPU is still best in 2023 for animation. Eyeroll bigtime.
RAM amount is good, but ram speed is the most important for anims.
GPU has zero bearing on anim manip - unless it bottlenecks - which higher end GPUs don't generally do.

Click IK bone in filament and drag.
Takes about 5 seconds holding the mouse dray button the whole time and then bone posing moves normal speed.
However there is a moment with all these chars&morphs where up top at DS menubar says 'not repsonding'. Happens at about second 3-4.
While still holding down mouse button drag a smidge. Non response disappears and now easily move.

Moving anims out of DS means the whole game of export, are all bones there, all morphs, geografts working render appearance for mats change.  
And learn new software.

Feels hilarious to say in 2023, anim-users are still limited to single-thread for anims and moving assets around to get them fully recognized is still a lifestyle time-wise.

Also, wendy's screengrab is one of they key parts.  Play with that. That and draw style pane.

use the opposite settings to these  except performance 

they are the ones on my Filament Render machine not my iray one

(which is busy rendering )

The first is using the Filament Drawstyle, the second Texture Shaded. You may have hit ctrl 9 when aiming for some other combo. Click the sphere icon to the left of the Camera/View button ("Perspective view") and select Filament again.

I even render them in Filament on my other PC without a GPU (just integrated OpenCL graphics) 

it needs PBR enabled and line tesselation 3 but is textured unlike 3Delight

Wonderland said:

SofaCitizen said:

I would probably avoid using Daz Central or Connect in that situation - infact if you setup the base library on the external drive properly you won't even have to run DIM after Daz Studio is installed. Once DS is installed, immediately go into the list of base libraries and remove the pre-created ones which will be on C: - you will probably want to manually remove those folders. Then you can add the base library from your external drive and within Content DB Maintenance you can check Process Metadata Queue and Re-import Metadata and this will import everything into Smart Content (after several minutes).

However, even if you fully clean up and uninstall everything before you go home you would have to check the T&Cs to see if that is allowed. It probably would be since you would not be loading paid assets onto your friends computer but it's best to check for sure.

Iray preview does run on non-nvidia cards - albeit slowly. However, I don't know what the minimum spec would be for that, or filament or even just textured preview.

I don't want to screw up my existing DS (which already has multiple issues!) so I'd bring a fresh HD and install probably just what I needed on the new HD or who knows, maybe a fresh install would clear up my current issues. I don't see another way except through DIM but I have issues with DIM when I want to install into different folders (ie; I have a separate G9 folder) it will not show the items (all greyed out) on the folder that was not used in the last download. So if I download G9 items into its folder through DIM then open DS all my other content is greyed out and vice versa. I'm having so many issues with DS I 

Have you added the new G9 folder to the daz search path within Daz studio?

for me to do this I select the 'Content Library' tab

then, from the menu icon at the top of the 'Content Library' tab column select 'Content Directory Manager'

Inside the 'Content Directory Manager' select DAZ Studio formats

add the path to your new G9 folder

Quote

And and before I forget, if it takes a long time to show the HDRI in Iray preview mode, you can use the filament preview mode. That will show you the HDRI.

Richard Haseltine said:

wsterdan said:

algovincian said:

Torquinox said:

vrba79 said:

What is the actual purpose of Filament anyway?

I could be wrong, but I think it was supposed to be a really fast real-time renderer like Blender's Eevee. I don't think it reached its potential, though.

My understanding is that Filament was designed for use as a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android mobile devices. I believe it was originally a side project by a few people at Google.

It's being used in DS as an alternative option for viewport previews (as opposed to a full blown render engine meant for final renders).

- Greg

It will be the Mac replacement for the Apple-depredated OpenGL, for one thing. Personally, as I've mentioned way too many times, I'm pumped about using it for toon animation. I'm currently using OpenGL and getting 1080p frames for under under half-a-second, Filament should give me the same render times or faster, an will add features like HDRI and better transparency, among other things. For me, at the very least, an OpenGL renderer equivalent but on steroids.
I believe a fully-supported version of Filament has the abilty to cast shadows as well, though I have no idea what features will be provided in DAZ Stuido 5. Fingers crossed, though.

-- Walt Sterdan

We are told that on Mac, as on Windows, Filament will be an alternative PBR preview Drawstyle. The OpenGL Drawstyles are being updated to take advantage of more modern technology in Qt 6, but that is separate from Filament.

Well, as a Mac user that is fairly promising and may actually get me to use DS again outside of shaping characters and prepping them for import into Blender. 

wsterdan said:

Richard Haseltine said:

wsterdan said:

algovincian said:

Torquinox said:

vrba79 said:

What is the actual purpose of Filament anyway?

I could be wrong, but I think it was supposed to be a really fast real-time renderer like Blender's Eevee. I don't think it reached its potential, though.

My understanding is that Filament was designed for use as a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android mobile devices. I believe it was originally a side project by a few people at Google.

It's being used in DS as an alternative option for viewport previews (as opposed to a full blown render engine meant for final renders).

- Greg

It will be the Mac replacement for the Apple-depredated OpenGL, for one thing. Personally, as I've mentioned way too many times, I'm pumped about using it for toon animation. I'm currently using OpenGL and getting 1080p frames for under under half-a-second, Filament should give me the same render times or faster, an will add features like HDRI and better transparency, among other things. For me, at the very least, an OpenGL renderer equivalent but on steroids.
I believe a fully-supported version of Filament has the abilty to cast shadows as well, though I have no idea what features will be provided in DAZ Stuido 5. Fingers crossed, though.

-- Walt Sterdan

We are told that on Mac, as on Windows, Filament will be an alternative PBR preview Drawstyle. The OpenGL Drawstyles are being updated to take advantage of more modern technology in Qt 6, but that is separate from Filament.

Thanks for the clarification, Richard, much appreciated.

When you wrote earlier:

"I am told that the newxt major build of Daz Studio, using Qt 6, is going to use Metal for MacOS. Windows may use OpenGL, Vulkan, or may even offer a choice - that is not yet determined."

I misintepreted that as meaning OpenGL might not be a Mac option as well. My bad.

I'm still very, very eager to work with it. When they were mentioning it, did they give an even vague hint as to when it might be available?

-- Walt Sterdan

Sorry, no - nothing that I could parse as a state-of-play or ETA.

It would certainly be useful if Filament could be tweaked so that the results are more in line with iRay in terms of brightness, shadows and transparency. Even if filament behaves differently to iRay it should be possible to put in an inline convertor to adjust what goes in to what those settings would mean if it were iRay. It's not beyond the wit of imagination to think it, so it should be possible to programme it. Would be good to have.

Regards,

Richard.

Richard Haseltine said:

wsterdan said:

algovincian said:

Torquinox said:

vrba79 said:

What is the actual purpose of Filament anyway?

I could be wrong, but I think it was supposed to be a really fast real-time renderer like Blender's Eevee. I don't think it reached its potential, though.

My understanding is that Filament was designed for use as a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android mobile devices. I believe it was originally a side project by a few people at Google.

It's being used in DS as an alternative option for viewport previews (as opposed to a full blown render engine meant for final renders).

- Greg

It will be the Mac replacement for the Apple-depredated OpenGL, for one thing. Personally, as I've mentioned way too many times, I'm pumped about using it for toon animation. I'm currently using OpenGL and getting 1080p frames for under under half-a-second, Filament should give me the same render times or faster, an will add features like HDRI and better transparency, among other things. For me, at the very least, an OpenGL renderer equivalent but on steroids.
I believe a fully-supported version of Filament has the abilty to cast shadows as well, though I have no idea what features will be provided in DAZ Stuido 5. Fingers crossed, though.

-- Walt Sterdan

We are told that on Mac, as on Windows, Filament will be an alternative PBR preview Drawstyle. The OpenGL Drawstyles are being updated to take advantage of more modern technology in Qt 6, but that is separate from Filament.

Thanks for the clarification, Richard, much appreciated.

When you wrote earlier:

"I am told that the newxt major build of Daz Studio, using Qt 6, is going to use Metal for MacOS. Windows may use OpenGL, Vulkan, or may even offer a choice - that is not yet determined."

I misintepreted that as meaning OpenGL might not be a Mac option as well. My bad.

I'm still very, very eager to work with it. When they were mentioning it, did they give an even vague hint as to when it might be available?

-- Walt Sterdan

wsterdan said:

algovincian said:

Torquinox said:

vrba79 said:

What is the actual purpose of Filament anyway?

I could be wrong, but I think it was supposed to be a really fast real-time renderer like Blender's Eevee. I don't think it reached its potential, though.

My understanding is that Filament was designed for use as a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android mobile devices. I believe it was originally a side project by a few people at Google.

It's being used in DS as an alternative option for viewport previews (as opposed to a full blown render engine meant for final renders).

- Greg

It will be the Mac replacement for the Apple-depredated OpenGL, for one thing. Personally, as I've mentioned way too many times, I'm pumped about using it for toon animation. I'm currently using OpenGL and getting 1080p frames for under under half-a-second, Filament should give me the same render times or faster, an will add features like HDRI and better transparency, among other things. For me, at the very least, an OpenGL renderer equivalent but on steroids.
I believe a fully-supported version of Filament has the abilty to cast shadows as well, though I have no idea what features will be provided in DAZ Stuido 5. Fingers crossed, though.

-- Walt Sterdan

We are told that on Mac, as on Windows, Filament will be an alternative PBR preview Drawstyle. The OpenGL Drawstyles are being updated to take advantage of more modern technology in Qt 6, but that is separate from Filament.

I would love to see Filament on my D|S version for the MacBook Pro M1. If I use Iray to view too much, I can crash hard. So I am left with the other options when I am working. Filament is nice on Windows. 

algovincian said:

Torquinox said:

vrba79 said:

What is the actual purpose of Filament anyway?

I could be wrong, but I think it was supposed to be a really fast real-time renderer like Blender's Eevee. I don't think it reached its potential, though.

My understanding is that Filament was designed for use as a real-time physically based rendering engine for Android mobile devices. I believe it was originally a side project by a few people at Google.

It's being used in DS as an alternative option for viewport previews (as opposed to a full blown render engine meant for final renders).

- Greg

It will be the Mac replacement for the Apple-depredated OpenGL, for one thing. Personally, as I've mentioned way too many times, I'm pumped about using it for toon animation. I'm currently using OpenGL and getting 1080p frames for under under half-a-second, Filament should give me the same render times or faster, an will add features like HDRI and better transparency, among other things. For me, at the very least, an OpenGL renderer equivalent but on steroids.
I believe a fully-supported version of Filament has the abilty to cast shadows as well, though I have no idea what features will be provided in DAZ Stuido 5. Fingers crossed, though.

-- Walt Sterdan

Torquinox said:

kyoto kid said:

Torquinox said:

Sevrin said:

Nothing Daz has done or said suggests that 3DL will see a renaissance.  While additional render engines are a possibility, they likely won't get any more support than Octane or Filamant do.

Daz is an asset store, and Daz Studio is their loss leader.  Daz won't ask its vendors to support multiple render engines, and most customers won't want to pay a premium for non-Iray materials.

You're probably right. Filament seems forgotten. There are still a lot of options and enhancements available to fans of 3DL, and I don't think converting to 3DL from Iray is all that onerous. There are converters available and one can use the uber shader to span the gap. Some of those options will perish in the transition to DS5. Some are already gone from the store. Even so, Daz has said the final version of DS4 will remain available to current DS4 customers. And some of us may choose to continue using older versions of DS. There are still a surprising number of people in that category, I think.

...then there's Wowie's AweShader system which as been producing some very remarkable rsults.  

I consider that one of the available options, yes. Very cool, though a bit slower and more render-intensive than I like. The PW shaders are another, though some components have disappeared from the store. I was trying to avoid making a list, though that might be a good idea...

...part of the reason I'm going with a 12 core 3.7GHz  Ryzen and 64 GB of memory (upgradable to 128) on my planned upgrade.