Hello! Are there any issues in Filament in the latest DS 4.20 (Beta or General release)? I've just updated today to the latest 4.20 Beta after 4.11 Stable release and wanted to try this new render engine. But I got strange issues with Filament in viewport and more strange with different skin shaders of Genesis figures. At first, Filament doesn't work for me in viewport at all and I see just blank white untextured figure or any prop. But when I do Spot Render, it renders textured objects.

When I tried to render via Render menu - Viewport, firstly I tested with G8F base (not G8.1) and noticed that when I try to render Filament viewport immedieately, it produces just empty PNGs, but when I render Texture Shaded viewport at first and then Filament, it gives me the textured image (though I'm not sure it's really Filament, looks more like 3Delight). With G8.1 (PBR Shader) such Filament rendering crashes DS,  and with Genesis 3 (base native skin shaders), shows only blank empty images. Is is a bug of the latest Beta or of my system? I have double AMD GPUs, rather old, and it seems the Studio switches to the weakest of them when rendering, in spite of force-switching to the better one via Catalyst CCC. I run DS under Windows x64 and according to system info, it has Direct X 11 and Open Gl at least 4.1. What I need to use Filament without issues - I mean Vram or Open GL \ Open CL\Direct X version? As for other built-in engines, expect from Iray, all seemed to work right in this 4.20.

Georgehaze said:

Well, it'll let me use 3DL and Filament, b ut IRay no longer works.

Great job guys.  Glad you put so much effort into it.

G

as other people mentioned, just update your gpu drivers as always.

Well, it'll let me use 3DL and Filament, b ut IRay no longer works.

Great job guys.  Glad you put so much effort into it.

G

Richard Haseltine said:

How about if you do a still render of those frames, if that is not what you are showing? Have you checked that none of the hair properties are keyed?

 no, it does it consistently with Filament,

iray not so often but iray is very slow, I did render 30 frames the length of the animation with iray and they all had hair

 the filament one of the same poses was 1K frames as I changed the framerate to 1K fps

maybe it does not like huge framerates but I have had it happen 30fps too, they are image series 

a video with Flowframes interpolation between the 30 frame iray slideshow, she kept her hair, this is of course extra slow, my Filament animation was 30 seconds

I overwrote it sadly as was annoyed

does anyone else have vanishing strandbased hair in animation?

In particular using Filament with PBR visibilty all options and line tessalation 3 viewport and render

but it often does it using iray too if just visible in render, the initial frames render but after a few hundred it just stops rendering

Filament frame 1

frame 513 still has hair

514 onwards it is gone

Yes, Filament can produce too much light - there are options you can adjust by selecting the proerpties nodes in the Scene, or you can switch to another mode (there is a light-bulb filament icon next to the button for picking the current view, at top-right of the Viewport - click that to switch to another Drawstyle).

How do they render? Your image doesn't show any of the settings widgets in the Viewport but I suspect you are using the Filament Drawstyle there, which can be prone to over-exposure with the default values.

Richard Haseltine said:

Are they working in a regular render? What is the Environment Mode set to in Render Settings (after adding an Environment Settings node or doing an Iray or Filament render or draw)?

appears like it should,.. and scene only

Are they working in a regular render? What is the Environment Mode set to in Render Settings (after adding an Environment Settings node or doing an Iray or Filament render or draw)?

Irasy HDRIs? Is Draw Dome on in Redner settings, in the environment group (which won't show until you manually add an Environment node through the Create menu or do an Iray or Filament render or draw).

The filament is not that bad either but Daz implementation lacks a lot of important functions for some unknown reason and this severely limits its use for final renders.

...the same holds true for 3Delight and Iray.

In filament view nothing can be seen,

I must have hit the wrong key I guess.

On another note, in one scene, a G8F with 200+ morphs (or many many deltas) is basically posing the same time as a G8F with all the morphs OBJ-consolidated to one new morph (or 1 delta)  dial for head/body.  Animating in IRAY for 10frames is fast.  Filament is so much faster and pretty much live. Thats on beta 4.16.1.43.

Anyone have a more effective test to see if a G8F with tons of morphs poses/animates differently time-wise than a G8F with one morph to dial in your shape?

I'm a fan of the quick renders available in the Filament system. I was looking for information as to whether Daz will be adding to it's functionality, or promoting any more content for it. Am I the only one that finds Filament as a viable option? I see so much potential in releasing more features for it (the system now is barely what is available), as I am not really into the realism rendering. My art is more Comic Book, or Illustration based. Let me know if I missed something in the Forums section addressing this. Thanks in advance.  

Moté said:

Sorry, I forgot to come back and answer you… I don’t think these versions should be a problem. Can you please add Liny kernel and Wine version to the list?

No problem! Wine 7.1 Staging and Kernel 5.8.0-26-lowlatency. I do audio work on that machine so that's why I went for the low latency kernel but maybe that is the cause for some strange problems too. But anyways, I set up a brand spanking new Kubuntu 21.10 box (generic kernel) together with Wine 7.1 Staging again (no Lutrix, no Proton anything) and can happily report that Studio runs really really well now WITH GPU support for iray.  Pretty much worked right away with the instruction you've posted here while over on my old system, no matter what I tried, GPU iray simply wouldn't work. Funnily OpenCL GPU for physics IS working on that old system but to be honest I tinkered so much with it over the years that I simply forgot what helped in the end. Had tons of stuff I kinda figured out by looking through forums for answers and could be that it was one of those occassions where some driver link was referring to the wrong/old file. In one occassion something referred to a driver file in a version numbered folder which of course wouldn't work with a different driver version so fixed it by making it use relative file access. But that was literally years ago. Maybe it even just was some opencl .icd file that needed to be installed but yeah, I tried so many things that years later I forgot what helped. But now with the new system GPU for dForce is not working again so I guess I'll try to find out what I did back then to make that part work again. It doubt it's some direct Wine problem since the dForce GPU support on that machine worked even after many Wine and driver updates and even complete Daz Studio reinstalls. If I remember or find it out again, I'll let you guys know :D but maybe you people with actual knowledge are quicker on it anyways.

Running Filament on the new system was a total letdown again though. Same window freezing after a couple seconds of use just like on the old system. Some people say it's a Plasma problem and not directly related to Wine. But after seeing how stunningly fast and GREAT the new iray noise filter works, it's not that bad anymore. I was really looking forward to using Filament since I actually don't really need perfect photo realism and rather like to tinker around with non physically based approaches and tricks but iray photoreal set to really low samples + noisefilter gets really interesting results and super quick now with GPU supported. Iray biased would also be neat for my stuff but for some reason, while rendering faster, interaction with it is very sluggish. Which is kinda ironic since it was meant as "interactive". Iray photoreal allows butter smooth moving around in the scene with the camera but interactive keeps choking really hard.

Another thing I noticed and that's definitely a Wine thing -- 5.7 staging was the last Wine version that didn't cause Studio to flicker back and forth between iray rendered and "smooth shaded" opengl viewport. If you set the viewport to iray photoreal, it does stick in it when you move the camera around. In every single Wine version I've tried after 5.7 it annoyingly flickers between smooth shaded and iray rendered. So for example when you have a night scene going and move the camera, you'll get flashed by the bright gray opengl preview that flickers between your movement through the iray rendering scene. That can of course be incredibly annoying. Viewport response threshold setting doesn't help here either. It is definitely a problem introduced after Wine 5.7 staging.

For others reading, you need to ad the node from the Create menu or do an Iray draw/render or use the Filament Drawstyle

it is great for Filament, the line tesselation needed for strandbased actually makes that heavier

WendyLuvsCatz said:

video

Filament with the fiberfur

As I can see, the fiber fur is not so bad, hehe.

WendyLuvsCatz said:

video

Filament with the fiberfur

I will do him in Carrara Octane next 

Octane is being a PITA as it does sometimes with puppeteer and not advancing frames

I may need to add something animated out of frame to kick it into action

I lengthened your fur as think I like him floofier 

I like him "floofier" too. LOL  

video

Filament with the fiberfur

I will do him in Carrara Octane next 

Octane is being a PITA as it does sometimes with puppeteer and not advancing frames

I may need to add something animated out of frame to kick it into action

I lengthened your fur as think I like him floofier