...so wondering now about the future of Iray and Daz. 

I have been on the Nvidia Reddit page and there is mention of a new realtime engine branded as "Optix" that Nvida has rolled out. 

There was also a reply to a comment I made regarding Iray that mentioned Nvidia was going to "depreciate" the render engine in favour of the new one. The new OPtix is also said to support  only W10 on up   The concern is how will this affect GPUs, drivers. and of course Daz. Will they continue run Iray even after it is obsolete as they have been doing with 3DL?  Will they drop Iray and move to the new Optix engine (they already have Filament as their "realtime" engine)?.  That would pretty much say that Daz will abandon anyone who isn't on W10 or higher (something I believe in the past was said wouldn't happen).  Will the old 3DL be the only render engine available if that occurs (in spite of just about every product today being released with only with PBR materials)?  

Hello,

I am triying to use the filament renderer and found the following problem.

When using the filament to render (either in the view port or render to still image or movie) the SUE character. There is a clear line around the neck (as show in the attached picture). 

The line actually is the boundary between the head and torso uv map. This only happen when I apply SUE's skin and using the filament renderer. Other character's skin  and other renderer

don't have this problem. 

Does anybody has this experience and has any solution to resolve it ?

Thanks and Regards

Is any way to replace default [HDR] map [used by Filament]?

Edited for Please put your question in the post body and the title - Daz 3D Forums

kyoto kid said:

....from, what I gathered in discussions, it doesn't render to a separate window. .Also not as impressed with the quality compared to Iray and 3DL.  Plus needs a couple plugins to do what the other two are already capable of.  If I was into animation I could see using it.

it most certainly does.

I often accidently do a Filament render to a new window when I forget to check image series 

kyoto kid said:

...I and others hope that won't be the case as 3DL allows for a far more stylistic choices, often "in render" without needing postwork thans to plugins like PW Ghost, PWToon, and others.  Filament is limited to the viewport scale whereas 3DL can be set to reader in any size and aspect ratio just like Iray.   Yes it's old but it still works and does not need an expensive (particularly these days) GPU to not have to deal with glacial render times. I rendered a reasonably complex scene in 3DL that took about 14 minutes whereas the same one, converted to Iray, took 2 to 3 hours to complete on the CPU (didn't have a GPU that could handle rendering at the time).

You may want to take another peek at Filament, if size was a major factor for you. When you render, you set the drawstyle as "Filament" and in your render options you select "Viewport" but that only tells D|S to use whatever the engine is being used in the Viewport, not the size of your render; you also set your render size, series of images, etc. It scales the same way iRay, 3DL or OpenGL do.

--  Walt Sterdan

Edited to fix a gazillion typos... there's probably more...

memcneil70 said:

@Fishtales, That is great! And so nice to wake up to it.

 

Thank you. That was a quick Filament render it would probably look better using Iray.

...I and others hope that won't be the case as 3DL allows for a far more stylistic choices, often "in render" without needing postwork thans to plugins like PW Ghost, PWToon, and others.  Filament is limited to the viewport scale whereas 3DL can be set to reader in any size and aspect ratio just like Iray.   Yes it's old but it still works and does not need an expensive (particularly these days) GPU to not have to deal with glacial render times. I rendered a reasonably complex scene in 3DL that took about 14 minutes whereas the same one, converted to Iray, took 2 to 3 hours to complete on the CPU (didn't have a GPU that could handle rendering at the time).

I am surprised they removed the PWToon and PW Shader bundles. No one must be buying those products anymore. Given the Filament development efforts they need to do is have iRay autoconverted to PBR like 3DL gets autoconverted to iRay so that works nicely with Filament, at least to EEVEE type realism. I like the new human PBR shaders in DAZ products better than the old iRay shaders. Filament can run on Intel and AMD integrated GPUs which iRay can't do. They could even publish DAZ Studio with relative ease to Macs, Chromebooks, and even the beefier iOS and Android tablets eventually if they wanted.

Quixotry said:

That looks like you're viewing it through the Filament preview. Is that correct? [EDIT: Ah, I see that you've mentioned that in your first post. My mistake for missing it.]

I tossed Ashan's textures onto the figure in a scene I'm working on, and tried both preview modes and can confirm that Filament shows the seams, but the Iray version looks normal.

 

Thanks for running the test...
Also no problem rendering in Iray, but my 'home' is C4D and Arnold, so I want to find out how to get similar renders in my 'weapon of choice' :)
If I export High Resolution maximum SubD .OBJ, the textures show in viewport as seamed but render OK using C4D renderers...
But not Arnold.
Kind of blows me away that the Bridge for C4D has material conversion for Redshift, Octane and VRay but not Arnold, the absolute gold standard for production VFX

Padone said:

wsterdan said:

.. what corners do you recommend I cut if my goal is to generate about 15-20 mintues of animtion a month on one or two lower-end computers, neither with an Nvidia or other high-end video card ..

Honestly animation requires a decent rig. It's not impossible to do it on a low end pc, but you just add "difficulty" to an already difficult task. You can't render with the gpu if the textures don't fit so your only option is to render overnight with the cpu. Be sure to at least have a good cooler because a home pc is not designed to work overnight. Then I agree with @Auroratrek, try to keep everything very minimal, and I mean everything. It is your only option.

Point on a short story with a good storytelling and possibly minimal animation. Play around with the camera to add "action" rather than using animation. Use camera angles and shots to minimize animation. Use lights to stroke emotions, they're almost render free and they're a powerful tool. Then comes the sound track, what lacks in animation can be helped with the right music and sounds to drive the feelings of the audience. Most of all have fun doing it, it helps a lot.

Uh .. and backup. Seriously. That's the most important thing. You don't want to lose your work.

I've been using computers non-stop since 1981, so saving my work in almost part of my DNA, but thanks, it's never bad to remind someone, especially with work like this.

I'm going to run this first set of tests in DAZ Studio, mostly because that's where all of my assets are at the moment and my initial plan is just to see where my main problems arise with DAZ before looking at other software. Part of me likes the look of Maya, though not free, while the other part is drawn towards Blender. An added incentive to Blender is Apple's support for Blender, and I'm eager to see what sort of performance one gets with a high-end Apple Silicon machine once Cycles with full metal support in the next month or two.

I tested a couple of 14-hour renders with an m1  iMac and cooling does not appear to be an issue. The fan did run for probalby a good part of it but it's an unbelievably quiet fan, and with the huge empty areas inside the iMac for air flow, after 14+ hours the computer's back was still cool to the touch.

I'm testing with OpenGL, Filament and 3DL for now, keeping it simple. Thanks for the suggestions regarding the lighting, I'm keeping it pretty basic for now, but after your suggestion I did purchase and try "Interior Light Pro for Filament and Iray" with Filament. Unfortunately, while the package worked very well with iRay, I could not for the life of me get it to work with Filament. I checked a couple of suggestions in the forums but still no go. As my time off is very limited, I abandoned Filament for now but will probably take a run at it again once DAZ Studio 5 comes out and it's available on the Mac.

Again, thanks very much for the helpful suggestions. I'll review them again once I'm done with an eye to using some of them moving forward.

-- Walt Sterdan 

@wolf359 -- Thans again for your earlier information and these suggestions, it's always appreciated.

As above, I'm going with DAZ only for now, mainly because my very restricted time off doesn't allow me for too much extra testing, like exporting my assets to and learning Blender (it's the first two weeks off I've had in a very, very long time, and some of it really has to be spent away from computers; as well, my son is coming home for the second week of my holidays, which will also slow down my testing).

So far, I've gathered all of my assets prior to Monday and starting Monday I've generated about 4 minutes of animation (some parts rendered two or three times to allow for different camera angles). I've hacked and slashed them into just over a minute of very bad animation which I'll try to upload to my unused website in the next day or so. 

While I originally planned on using just a MacBook Air for everything, with my vacation time already getting eaten by non-computer time I relented and have done all of the animation set-up on the MacBook Air but have been testing higher-end renders on my m1 iMac. I agree that at least two computers is a good idea, and I have three I can use if I need them. 

I'm currently testing 1080p at 30 frames per second; using OpenGL I can render a frame at roughly a half-second on the m1 iMac, or using OpenGL  or Filament on the Air or a 2012 iMac takes closer to a second a frame. 

Using 3DL on the m1 iMac cranks the time up to about a minute of animaton per hour.

As mentioned, I've just over a minute of animation hacked together; being generous, I'm going to say it's at "just a little better" than a normal animatic. I"ve already learnd that I really have to get timing down on simple actions like head turns and eye blinks. All of should be much faster than these initial attempts.

To speed things up, I'm using purchased sets, clothing and hair with custom toon characters. I saved each character in the movie as individual characters presets and then switched to the 32-bit version of DAZ Studio and spent about an hour using DAZ's lip synch to do the first half of all the lip synching; I would open up each character, apply each block of speech recorded for them and one-by-one saved each as a separate Pose Preset. Once I had the first few for each character synced and saved, I returned to 64-bit D|S and applied then rendered each clip, adding a couple of extra seconds before and after each clip. As mentioned, I rendered a speech pose, changed camera, renderd again, and so on. For this test, I kept adding them to the same timeline, but probably won't when it comes time to do this for real. I then opened iMovie, imported each clip, synced the sound to it as best I could (it still bites that I can generate a movie with the sound in 32-bit but not in 64-bit) and saved out the clip. I then linked a bunch of them, using one of the two or three versions to cobble together the animatic. It still has the extra spacing before and after the clips, as I'm expecting my daughter to eventually do the actual splicing in Da Vinci when she adds sound effects and soundtrack after I do the real renders. I also threw some very, very simple opening placards together as I haven't even thought about any designs for the opening title and act titles.

I'm just testing some green screening/picture-in-picture ideas and I'll try to add them to the first clip before uploading.

Regarding 20 minutes in a month being a little over-ambitious, I totally agree. My goal at this point isn't so much trying to make a great animation, but I'm looking at it more as "how bad would my animation be if I was doing 20 minutes a month?". My long-term goal is to help me decide if this is something I will actually want to do full-time once I retire. I can already see a lot of places where I could shave time off once I get more practice (again, my key frame timing is nothing less than embarrassing). I'm approaching it as designing a production flow that would allow one person to actually do 20 minutes of  animation in a month or less with a second person to do the post edits. I'm expecting to fall flat on my face, but so far I'm having fun and learning, so in that arena it's already a success. Production quality, not so much, but still fun.

Thanks again for all the tips and suggestions, all are much appreciated.

-- Walt Sterdan

Quixotry said:

That looks like you're viewing it through the Filament preview. Is that correct? [EDIT: Ah, I see that you've mentioned that in your first post. My mistake for missing it.]

I tossed Ashan's textures onto the figure in a scene I'm working on, and tried both preview modes and can confirm that Filament shows the seams, but the Iray version looks normal.

Yet another good reason not to use Filament. 

That looks like you're viewing it through the Filament preview. Is that correct? [EDIT: Ah, I see that you've mentioned that in your first post. My mistake for missing it.]

I tossed Ashan's textures onto the figure in a scene I'm working on, and tried both preview modes and can confirm that Filament shows the seams, but the Iray version looks normal.

DAZ_Rawb said:

Hi everyone. Drum roll please...

As Director of Technology for Daz 3D, I wanted to give you some big news.  The Daz Studio team has been hard at work on a massive foundation change for Daz Studio that will be released as Daz Studio 5! Our project has been the #1 priority for the team for quite some time now, and it's almost done. Since we know how important getting a Mac version of Daz Studio is to all of you, we are switching up our release plans (from our normal releases) to get you a look at the upcoming Daz Studio 5 as soon as possible.

Details of the upcoming Daz Studio 5 early-access Pre-Beta:
- Release timing for this early-access preview is coming soon, at the very end of this month (July) or sometime next month (August).
- This will be a pre-beta release. Normally we wait until the software is completely finished before releasing it.
- Major Update will be Daz Studio release running for Macs, no other major features in the Pre-Beta.
- All Plugins and some scripts will be broken. The SDK won't be available with this first release, but will be following it up at a later date. Some other less used features won't work at launch, but will be coming online throughout the year.
- 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.
- It will install into a new location, so you can run it along your current Daz Studio (release/beta) without problems.

As for the final Daz Studio 5 release:
- The timeline for this is to have it out near the very end of this year.
- Features and enhancements will be rolling in through the rest of the year.
- Anyone who has Daz Studio 4 in their account will be able to keep it. You'll be able to continue to download and use it for the foreseeable future.

I hope everyone is just as excited about Daz Studio 5 as we are.

I know there was a thread that beta will be delayed and all, but I was wondering if there is any updated roadmap to this (when pre-beta will be available to test with)? Also, what features in Daz Studio 5 that we could be seeing?

Like Genesis 9 figures, any updates to iray renderer and all.. Thanks.

Hi there
New Daz user, mid-level C4D abuser...
I purchased the Ashan 8 character, but on first load, in Filament view, the character has seams all over which are still there on export as .OBJ with material library...
No amount of subdivision will cure it at certain distances...Looking at the UV's, all appears OK, a good few mm of overlap and so on. And yet, the bugger will not display without these awful seams.
It *seemed* (hah, see what I did there?) as if exporting the OBJ at max mesh subD had helped, but not completely, and who wants a mesh that dense in a big scene anyway?
Any tips? Any Ashan 8 users with major seams in the viewport? *
Any help much appreciated.
* Rendered in IRay there are no seams :shrug: But I want to export and render in Arnold. So not much good to me atm.

Thanks for the info, gang. As for as viewing it with Filament, mostly when I try to view an HDRI map it just a fuzzy blob of nothing around my figures, no scenery.

Like JMtbank said use the Iray mode or you can also use the new filament view mode which is less heavy and can use it to orientate your scene. Keep in mind usually HDR maps will be designed for characters to be set at 0,0,0 or close to. You can also create your own HDRI lighting in programs like affinity.

marble said:

I can't join this discussion at anywhere close to your level but I'd like to make one small observation. Render time is probably the biggest deterrent for me when considering animations. Those quick animated loops that I play with are comparable to the little animated gifs so popular on social media. That's because no matter how many times I render the little animation, there's something I want to tweak and then render it again. OpenGL and Filament are just not in the class of Eevee but I have not yet learned how to animate in Blender. 

I was surpriced at how fast the (Iray) rendering went when I did some testing. A four second animation at 600x928/25fps (WxH) with one G8 figure plus clothing and hair took an hour and looked pretty good, so good that I could still take the settings down some.

Using 2070Super on i7-5820K/X66/64GB/W7 Ultimate

Auroratrek said:

Fair enough; so realizing I'm not trying to match the quality of a million-dollar-a-20-minute-episode-with-a-team-of-animators-and-a-giant-render-farm, who themselves cut corners due to budget and timeframe, what corners do you recommend I cut if my goal is to generate about 15-20 mintues of animtion a month on one or two lower-end computers, neither with an Nvidia or other high-end video card, a zero-dollar budget and with doing most of the work on weekends and evenings? What quality of render nad what render engine do you envision me using?

Honestly looking for suggestions; full-body animation will be at a minimum for most of the 20 minutes.

-- Walt Sterdan

Walt, in my experience, rendering is probably not your biggest issue with animation--my renders generally take many hours, but generally speaking, you spend your working time animating, and render when you're away from the computer. It's a drag when you have to re-render, but overall it works for me. That said, it sounds like Wolf gets gets fast speeds with sophisticated lighting etc. in Blender, so he may have more to say about this. Also, the time it takes to animate depends a lot on what you're animating, so the first consideration might be to pick a story/subject that's easier to do. A fantasy epic with a dozen main characters and huge battles is going to be a lot more work than a story about a lone guy stranded on a desert island. When you write a script, remember that anything you write, you have to animate. When I did Aurora, it wasn't an accident that it mainly involved two characters on a tiny spaceship. I wanted to do something "Star Trek", but the traditional Star Trek cast is half a dozen main characters, plus a ship full of extras, not to mention a big ship with many locations. There are shots with many more secondary characters, but most scenes are just the two characters. So, I'd say, the first consideration is to not bite off more than you can chew when you consider your story/subject.

I can't join this discussion at anywhere close to your level but I'd like to make one small observation. Render time is probably the biggest deterrent for me when considering animations. Those quick animated loops that I play with are comparable to the little animated gifs so popular on social media. That's because no matter how many times I render the little animation, there's something I want to tweak and then render it again. OpenGL and Filament are just not in the class of Eevee but I have not yet learned how to animate in Blender. 

I'm still learning about the HDRI, but I'm started using it more. One problem I have a lot of times I can't tell what the scene looks like until I render and most ofter my models are floating in the air, sometimes with their shadows. Is there a way to view it without rendering it first or viewing it in IRAY? Iray takes a long time to view sometimes. A couple of JDA HDRI's showed up in filament, but not all.