Anfy said:

Siamo sicuri che ci sia stato un avanzamento tangibile in tutti questi anni?

Ti posso assicurare che sì, di avanzamenti ce ne sono stati. Non so se già eri entrato nel settore all'epoca, ma ti ricordi le spalle di V3 e M3? O come si piegavano le gambe di V4 alle anche? C'erano una pletora di morph (io avevo quelli di Meipe) per far sembrare umana V4 quando appena si spostava dalla posa ad "A".

Mettere seduta una con la gonna era quasi impossibile, per non parlare dei capelli che se appena inclinavi la testa diventavano "leggermente" improbabili. Già con la comparsa dei primi vestiti dinamici di Optitex le cose hanno cominciato a migliorare, poi con dForce siamo passati proprio su un altro pianeta.

Iray invece non è il massimo come motore di rendering, sinceramente preferivo il buon vecchio Luxrender con Reality che faceva da interfaccia e da convertitore dei materiali, peccato sia praticamente morto. Speriamo in Filament...

Anfy said:

Comunque, a parte gli scherzi:  

1) lavoravo oggi un'immagine con un personaggio di generazione V4 (con texture custom), è venuta benissimo con Filament a tempo zero e i dettagli mi hanno lasciato abbastanza, anzi parecchio soddisfatto. Per fare il rendering su 3Delight  e Iray, a risoluzione piuttosto alta, c'ha messo comunque pochi attimi il primo e 5-10 minuti con luci dedicate (non la classica headlamp) il secondo.

Con una Genesis 8/8.1 c'avrebbe impiegato forse ore.

Siamo sicuri che ci sia stato un avanzamento tangibile in tutti questi anni?

2) Ho installato nuovamente Carrara (ho la 8.0, non la 8.5) e Bryce (7.1, l'ultima), perché ho qualche contenuto vecchio di una decina d'anni: specie il secondo mi pareva di saperlo usare, ma era un ricordo ballerino. Che casino con quell'interfaccia "giocattolosa"!

Guarda che il modello in se non cambia i tempi di rendering! Qullo che può influire sono eventuali morph HD e gli shader.  Se usi degli shader semplici o dei materiali basi perfino quello scassone di G8 non ci mette molto a renderizzare.
E, si, Filament è eccezionale, spero che in DAZ Studio 5 lo sistemino per bene (insieme agli strumenti per le animazioni).

Quanto a Carrara è abbandonato da un secolo ormai, avanzamento ne vedi poco da quelle parti. E' estremamente potente e ha parecchie cose che a DAZ Studio mancano (ha un eccellente motore di rendering raytrace a mio parere) ma si sente che non è più supportato.

Comunque, a parte gli scherzi:  

1) lavoravo oggi un'immagine con un personaggio di generazione V4 (con texture custom), è venuta benissimo con Filament a tempo zero e i dettagli mi hanno lasciato abbastanza, anzi parecchio soddisfatto. Per fare il rendering su 3Delight  e Iray, a risoluzione piuttosto alta, c'ha messo comunque pochi attimi il primo e 5-10 minuti con luci dedicate (non la classica headlamp) il secondo.

Con una Genesis 8/8.1 c'avrebbe impiegato forse ore.

Siamo sicuri che ci sia stato un avanzamento tangibile in tutti questi anni?

2) Ho installato nuovamente Carrara (ho la 8.0, non la 8.5) e Bryce (7.1, l'ultima), perché ho qualche contenuto vecchio di una decina d'anni: specie il secondo mi pareva di saperlo usare, ma era un ricordo ballerino. Che casino con quell'interfaccia "giocattolosa"!

Roman_K2 said:

Looks very nice.

I wonder if Ivy or someone else could describe the Magic Pane set a bit more? So this is a collection of images applied to pane geometries, perhaps with transparency maps to create irregular edges between the layered panes where useful, and it's bundled up into a regular, DAZ Studio type of resource?

I particularly don't get the part about the "Iray presets". If I have scene A-B-C (or U-V-W) and I put a plane primitive into that scene and I apply a graphic to the plane - some imagery saved in the form of a .JPG file (say), do I thereafter need something special to the pane in the... Surface tab in DS say, before I render it using... Iray light set X-Y-Z???

My magic pane is pretty self explanatory .The pane prop geometry was made in Carrara 8.1 pro and converted for daz 4.11.  but will work in daz versions up to 4.12 after that I have no idea if the panes load or work because I have not moved beyond daz 4.12 myself. so I have not supported or nor updated it for Filament or daz 4.14 or 4.15

But the jest of  of this freebie  is as you described the Magic Pane set is a collection panes used to places different types of images as either backgrounds or foreground props.  I recommend using PNG formats for when creating your own trasnparent maps for the pane images to give best results. You can simple add your own images by appling to the pane geometries by clicking the pane and then just change the images under the surface tab.Some panes have transparency map layers to create layered effects to such as fog or lighting sun rays etc. Those are in PNG format as well 

Iray emissive panes are just that. lighten panes.  simply  click the pane and apply the emissive setting that is required for your render. . there is a invisible pane to give you ghost lights effect  to light a scene without any image at all.

 The iray pane setting are for use when you are rendering in Iray for best results when you are rendering scenes with iray characters or props in the scene.

As I said its pretty self explanatory. there is a read me file in the download.

 I use these panes all the time in animations it will save me a ton of gpu resources for detailed backgrounds

Play around with it and have fun.

Good Luck

SickleYield said:

I average two products a month (I do have a second one coming up for July).  I've released 12 products so far this year in 2021, so admittedly I'm one behind, but I hope to have three things out in August to make up for it:

SY Super Suits 2 G8

RSSY 3Delight and Iray to Filament

SY Fantabulous Fog Iray

SY Body Under Clothes Fit Fixer G8/G8.1

SY Fire Within G8/8.1

SY Cracked Creepy Dolls G8/8.1

SY Lamia G8/8.1

Fast Flames Iray II

SY Shadow G8/8/1

SY Leafy Crowns G8/8/1

SF Ball Jointed Dolls G8/8.1

SY Flower Crowns G8/8.1

I dunno what you were hoping to see, but I don't think I can go much faster than this and still sleep. ;)

Hey Sickle, I think you have a great release schedule, the number of rigged waters and fog products in my content library attests to that as well as the super suits and other stuff (very nice super suits by the way), I was wondering however since you took the plunge with the Lamia if you might ever consider making a Yuan-Ti add on or add ons for that. I don't know if you have ever played D&D or not but the Yuan-Ti are a serpentine race in the game and there are several different types, some of them you can do with the Lamia just as they are, others need a serpentine head and body, cobra-like hood large fangs (not talking vampire-like here, I'm talking more like the images that I am going to attach these will give you an idea of what Yuan-Ti are like if you don't already know. I don't own the rights to any of these images and all copyrights belong to their respective owners, I post them only as concept art. As you can see from the images there are several different variations.

I'd like to have:
- an Overview Image for each product displaying all kind of options and contents included (makes it easier to organize, memorize products I own) i13 last pizzeria Image might be a good example.
https://www.daz3d.com/i13-pizzeria
- Preview Image for Filament Render Style

- An information how straining an Item is on the hardware. Usually I don't face problems but recently I found that the Emmy Lou Dress and Alisa Hair slow down my PC a lot.

Searching:
- An Genesis 8 Female Generation Haircut equal to Denver Hair
https://www.daz3d.com/denver-hair
- A G8F similar to this Gunner in blue and red from Sword of the new World, Character, Hair and her Clothes:
https://www.pcgames.de/Sword-of-the-New-World-Spiel-36286/News/Neue-Bilder-zu-Sword-of-the-New-World-574060/galerie/599780/
- still searching an Dunkleosteus (prehistoric Fish)
- Loop Bunny and Teddy Bear made by Hypertaf

I am 95% confident that margrave is correct and it is miranda hair, just with custom shaders - maybe https://www.daz3d.com/fsl-realistic-hair-shaders-for-iray-and-filament as thats the ony product I can find with textured hair textures

my reasons why I think it is miranda hair

the artist has a couple other renders that definitely do use miranda hair and list it as used.

on the bottom left of the hair you can see a bit of the original curl shape

I wish there was an easier way to do this, I do animations

 in Filament to add glow I apply a black shader to everything else in the scene and white to my glowing surfaces  and render a second image series to use as a layer in post

iray you can at least use the advanced shader options to apply matt

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.

Edited by Moderation Staff

So, in about nine months (I'm counting time from this https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/451486/daz-studio-macos-big-sur-compatibility#latest) you have an alpha version that might be released by the end of July (which wasn't) or August (which we'll have to see if it really happens) and we'll have a release candidate by the end of the year with features and enhancements that we'll get through 2022 (hence my release candidate thing, no speculation, just calling things as I see them). Am I excited about the news? Well… I would like to be, really (you can't imagine the effort I'm doing to be excited). But I'm not.

I know that a rewrite of this magnitude of a complex software is not an easy task but this timetable just doesn't really get me excited. Will I be using Daz in the future? Maybe (I would like to), but I won't be buying any new stuff from Daz untill I see something really working. Sorry.

So I made a quick homemade render queue that changes the orientation of a few objects after each render but randomly the renderer would output a blank/black image at times.

I tried sleeping and calling processEvents() but nothing seems to work. Any idea as to how to fix this issue?

var oRenderMgr = App.getRenderMgr();
var oSelectedNode = Scene.getPrimarySelection();
var oRenderOptions = oRenderMgr.getRenderOptions();

// Rotates node via given DzQuat.
function rotate(quat, node) {
    //...
}

rotate(someQuat, oSelectedNode);
processEvents();
oRenderMgr.doRender(oRenderOptions);

It happens for both 3Delight and Iray. I'm not sure about Filament.

With some minor adjustments you can get pretty decent results with Filament.  The most important one is probably reducing the strenght of the lighting, compared to the settings for Iray.  Here are some experiments I did a while ago:

The case with these images is that I plan to use them to print t-shirts using a print-on-demand service to sell them. The DTG printer degrades the image a bit so I think the images don't need to be photoreal in this case. I think people will wear the t-shirts anyway. My laptop is slow rendering with Iray (some renders may take 10 hours) so it will benefit from "Filament's" real-time rendering.

In the future, I plan to render comics, and in that case, photorealism will come very handy. I will need a desktop for that and for now I don't have the money. That's one of the reasons why I want to sell t-shirts, to get the money to buy a new PC. I hope people like the t-shirts and the business goes well.

I don't know, I never use Filament because I don't like my renders looking like a mobile game. I don't think you're ever going to get better results than the promo pictures for the converter, though.

Here are some Images. Do you think that the "Filament texture converter" will fix this? If so I might buy it!

That's why people don't use Filament.

If by "inaccurate" you mean it doesn't look like the Iray promo images, it's because Filament is basically a video game renderer. It's designed to render dozens or hundreds of times a second on Android phones, so it skimps on the complex light modeling Iray does. You're going to need to to some serious tweaking to the materials, or invest in the Filament texture converter, if you want to get decent results.

l_riefkohl_ferrer_1923365ed0 said:

I'm not using filament. I'm using a distant light, not an HDRI. Do you mean is the "Draw Ground" on? If yes it is on. Ask if you need more info.

Is the character in an environment? Is there anything around them to actually catch the shadow?

Is the character not casting a shadow at all, or is the shadow just very faint? If so, the distant light's settings may need to be tweaked. The light a light, the softer the shadow.

I'm not using filament. I'm using a distant light, not an HDRI. Do you mean is the "Draw Ground" on? If yes it is on. Ask if you need more info.

What are you using to render - Iray, 3Delight, Filament, or the OpenGL preview (e.g. Texture Shaded)?

When using filament, colors look washed out and inaccurate and some spots look white. I'm using a laptop. Ryzen 7 3700U CPU, 12 GB RAM, AMD Radeon RX Vega 10 integrated graphics.

Iray uses photoreal light and shadow by default, so it should look realistic.

You need to either post some screenshots or explain more.

Are you using Filament by mistake*? Are you using an HDRI? Is the ground plane on? What kind of lighting do you have?

* Nobody uses Filament on purpose. *rimshot*