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. 

Noah LGP said:

How many Mac users are we telling about ?

I thought it was a small minority compared to the Windows users.

There are definatley far fewer Mac users than Windows users, but that's only one statistic that we don't know. A more important metric would be how much money is spent at DAZ by Windows users versus Mac users. We know neither statistic. If I were a Windows user and had to spend hundreds of dollars on a new nVidia card just to keep iRay running, that's hundreds of dollars that I wouldn't have available to spend on DAZ assets that a Mac user would have, so who knows?

I suspect that any portion of their profit from Mac users, even if only 20 or 30%, makes it still worthwhile to develop for Mac users, even if all of the features aren't available in the Mac version. If there wasn't enough profit from Mac users to be worthwhile financially, I expect they will drop Mac support like a hot potato as it would be the most prudent decison to make. I believe developing the Mac software has been profitiable enough so far to explain why they're still supporting Mac.Should the day come when Mac support isin't worth it, my feelings wouldn't be hurt if they dropped our support. It's just business.

When DAZ Studio was first released, it's release date was set back a few months simply because the Mac version wasn't ready yet, so Windows users had to wait a few weeks. That was then, this is now, and as we've seen, they didn't wait on releasing Filament support until the Mac version was ready. I suspect that if the Windows version is ready long before Mac version is ready, they might just release the Windows version and possibly a Beta version for Mac to play with while they finish it off.

All speculation, of course; it would be nice to get an actual update.

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.

The excessive time it's takiing to produce DAZ Studio 5 is mainly due to updating all of the code (Windows and/or Mac) is due to moving to the latest version of the Qt libraries.

From the few times I've glanced at the change logs, it seems like most changes and fixes tend to deal with keeping iRay running properly, as is witnessed as well by the vast numbers of threads asking for help with or detaling problems with iRay. I guess if they didn't spend that much time keeping iRay working, they might have release D|S 5 long ago, but you're correct, we don't really know where they are development-wise. We do know that scripts and plug-ins need a lot of attention as they're not gonig to work without updating, and so on.

Based on my two-year-and-counting wait for Filament, I don't believe that complete and total feature parity is the thing holding them back.

wsterdan said:

IceCrMn said:

vrba79 said:

I can't help but feel DS5 would be much closer to a reality, if Daz3D weren't chasing certain pipe dreams.

We the users really have no clue how far along DS5 is.

We can only guess and make assumptions.

Maybe it's finished and waiting release after Christmas.

Maybe they haven't typed the first line of code yet.

We just don't know.

Well, yes, we do, in fact, know that they've "typed the first line of code".

If you go back to the first page, first entry of this thread you'll see that in July, 2021 they had a pre-beta they were going to release to allow Macintosh users to run DAZ Studio on machines using Big Sur, and that they'd planned on releasing a more functional version around New Years a few months later. In the thread announcing that Apple had helped them get 4.x running on Macs so the pre-beta was off (https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/514751/daz-studio-5-preview-release-is-delayed-and-that-s-good-news/p1), they also informed us that the pre-beta already had Filament working on Macs.

I – like everyone else – would like an update, but I'm also confident that they have been working on it consistantly and they'll release when they're comfortable that it'll be fairly solid and useable.

The point I was trying to make is, we have no idea where DS5 is in development.

Obviously it's going to be somewhere between not started yet and finished. Hence the generalization.

Yes, I have read both threads concerning DS5.

There was no mention in either about other projects delaying the release of DS5 or the milestones achieved other than what was posted by DAZ_Rawb.

Nor have I seen any other posts about DS5 delays in any other forum.

I could have missed some though. I'm only one person and there are only so many hours in the day to scour the internet looking for info.

If you have more complete and up to date info lots of people would be interested in reading about it.

---

In the  future I'll make note of the things I'm generalizing in my posts so it's clearer to the readers what I'm writing.

IceCrMn said:

vrba79 said:

I can't help but feel DS5 would be much closer to a reality, if Daz3D weren't chasing certain pipe dreams.

We the users really have no clue how far along DS5 is.

We can only guess and make assumptions.

Maybe it's finished and waiting release after Christmas.

Maybe they haven't typed the first line of code yet.

We just don't know.

Well, yes, we do, in fact, know that they've "typed the first line of code".

If you go back to the first page, first entry of this thread you'll see that in July, 2021 they had a pre-beta they were going to release to allow Macintosh users to run DAZ Studio on machines using Big Sur, and that they'd planned on releasing a more functional version around New Years a few months later. In the thread announcing that Apple had helped them get 4.x running on Macs so the pre-beta was off (https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/514751/daz-studio-5-preview-release-is-delayed-and-that-s-good-news/p1), they also informed us that the pre-beta already had Filament working on Macs.

I – like everyone else – would like an update, but I'm also confident that they have been working on it consistantly and they'll release when they're comfortable that it'll be fairly solid and useable.

What do you use for "Render Settings / Optimisation / Instance Optimization", Speed, Memory or Auto?

Neither option yields and improvement. BTW - I believe this option affects Iray only?

Two or three characters sitting in what would be considered a normal room with a sofa, TV, and common other furnishings will drag the viewport to crawl for me,and I've got 128GB of system ram and all the drives in my system are NVMEs.

Same here... Previously I had an i7 8700 + RTX 3090, 64GB ram, all disks SSD. Now I'm working on an Alienware x17 R1 (i7 11800H, RTX3080, 16GB version, 64GB RAM + the RTX3090 in an eGpu enclosure), two PCIE NVME disks. Same story. In my case, 5 characters (SUBD=1 in the viewport) + some architecture + ~10k instances of grass and foliage and the viewport update rate is like once every 15 seconds if I try to move the camera, or any object.

it's the textures that are an issue

Nope, not really... With a simpler scene I can load 8-16K textures all over the place and this has nothing to do with openGL viewport performance. For me it's the geometry that kills it.

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

Just checked it, and no. Same story.

 

the opposite of this is true in my experience... 

i load an insanely high poly obj and instance it several times and daz viewport is as fast as ever.  but if i load the same thing in blender (not even instanced, just by itself) and it's incredibly slow.

This is interesting. May I ask what CPU brand you have?

Filament is the fastest viewport draw style imo. but that might be GPU dependent