I dont' know why but in iray mode, suddenly everthying looks like it is in "clay" mode or "smooth shaded." mode.  If I switch to filament, it is fine in that render engine.  Also, if in iray mode I hit render, all I get is a blank canvass.  

How it looks in iray mode:

Same character when I switch to filament 

It first hapened when I was on DS version 4.14.  I upgraded and now I still have the same issue. 

When I first upload a character, I'm getting error messages such as this:

Any idea what may be causing this?  The issue occurs for every character I have tried, even when I pull up previously rendered scene subsets.

Thanks

Marcus Severus said:

@ Daveso  this is a belated thanks for replying to me a while back.  At that point I was going to finally build my printer before getting back to you.  Then one day passed and one more etc.

Anyway I built the Ender 3 Pro on Saturday and only today got to try my very first print.  I'm amazed at how well it turned out but disappointed that the white filament fails to show it well in the pictures I'm attaching. 

Although there are many videos online showing the same test models printed over and over again, I took the plunge and tried printing something I downloaded a long time ago - from Sketchfab, I think.   I had found it zipped up on my hard drive recently and had tried it out in Carrara.

I'm showing two pictures of it from Carrara (where the light shows the detail - it isn't a huge detailed mesh, however) and two pictures of the print with a drinks can to show the scale.  I took minimum time over setting up the model (slicing, etc.) because I was certain I was only setting out on a path of many failures.  I'm still surprised that it came out OK

Looks great, good job! Fun, isn't it?

-- Walt Sterdan

In spite of leap-frogging over your post, AnotherUserName, I have to say that I'm following your progress with interest.  The model I made had support structures between the base at the back of the dress but none at the front.  The structures snapped off very easily and left little sign of having been there.  Where there were no structures at the front, the extruder dropped a few 'hairs' of filament which I removed with a craft knife.

Your model has a pose with much more need for support stuctures and I don't think (from my position of total inexperience) that you can overdo it.  Your print will take several hours, depending on its size, so it's right to give it a fighting chance in my opinion.

I bought 3d Coat to learn to sculpt and print the results, so I'm perhaps less likely to need to prepare DAZ models.  I did trysculpting, though on a Poser figure, building both clothes and hair on the bare figure.  The results are pathetic but I'll show a picture to illustrate a possible way to add hair to a (bald) figure.  Just sculpt - but take a great deal more care to do it well than I did.  (You can sculpt in Blender or Sculptris for free).

@ Daveso  this is a belated thanks for replying to me a while back.  At that point I was going to finally build my printer before getting back to you.  Then one day passed and one more etc.

Anyway I built the Ender 3 Pro on Saturday and only today got to try my very first print.  I'm amazed at how well it turned out but disappointed that the white filament fails to show it well in the pictures I'm attaching. 

Although there are many videos online showing the same test models printed over and over again, I took the plunge and tried printing something I downloaded a long time ago - from Sketchfab, I think.   I had found it zipped up on my hard drive recently and had tried it out in Carrara.

I'm showing two pictures of it from Carrara (where the light shows the detail - it isn't a huge detailed mesh, however) and two pictures of the print with a drinks can to show the scale.  I took minimum time over setting up the model (slicing, etc.) because I was certain I was only setting out on a path of many failures.  I'm still surprised that it came out OK.

@ Daveso  this is a belated thanks for replying to me a while back.  At that point I was going to finally build my printer before getting back to you.  Then one day passed and one more etc.

Anyway I built the Ender 3 Pro on Saturday and only today got to try my very first print.  I'm amazed at how well it turned out but disappointed that the white filament fails to show it well in the pictures I'm attaching. 

Although there are many videos online showing the same test models printed over and over again, I took the plunge and tried printing something I downloaded a long time ago - from Sketchfab, I think.   I had found it zipped up on my hard drive recently and had tried it out in Carrara.

I'm showing two pictures of it from Carrara (where the light shows the detail - it isn't a huge detailed mesh, however) and two pictures of the print with a drinks can to show the scale.  I took minimum time over setting up the model (slicing, etc.) because I was certain I was only setting out on a path of many failures.  I'm still surprised that it came out OK.

Richard Haseltine said:

You can drag by the top bar, you should see a line of the highlight colour up the edge when it's in the correct place. You could also just use Window>Workspace>Select Layout to reset the whole UI

Draw Settings controls Filament and the Iray preview, and has other display-related settings such as how nodes are highlighted as the mouse passes over them.

But where do I drag it? All I can do is dock it above, under or to the right of where it initially was

You can drag by the top bar, you should see a line of the highlight colour up the edge when it's in the correct place. You could also just use Window>Workspace>Select Layout to reset the whole UI

Draw Settings controls Filament and the Iray preview, and has other display-related settings such as how nodes are highlighted as the mouse passes over them.

Lady Littlefox said:

Honestly have not worked with Filament yet so the outfit and hair show some troubles with transparancies and cut outs getting silly, however the smoother graft appears to work perfectly except for one spot under the chin where it gets stretched a bit.   If you see the two green arrows, you can't even really see the graft edge line it's only under the chin where it seems to show up in filament... not sure why that would be, never seen that in the Iray renders... The rest of the graft appears flawless, just that one point along the grafting seam line appears to have a little fussing....
 

It is a known issue with filament, at least I have had the same problem with rendering Genesis 8 HD characters in Filament.

Filament renders shows brutally the seams under the chin and I have no skills to fix these issues myself.

Richard Haseltine said:

woyame1 said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Filament is limited in the number of lights it can handle.

Got you, but I can't get even one to be active.  I'm wondering if my GPU is too limited.  I am running Unreal Engine and getting some good work done in it, however.  

Do the lights work in an Iray render?

Actually got it to work.  Thanks for mentioning iray.  Setting up like an iray photometric was the key (mainly upping the Luminous Flus (Lumen) to the tens of thousands instead of the default 1500).  Also, it turns out the light cone must be touching the subject or there is no effect.  I appreciate your responses and suggestions.  I'll try to post back to show what I've done with it in the future.  

Honestly have not worked with Filament yet so the outfit and hair show some troubles with transparancies and cut outs getting silly, however the smoother graft appears to work perfectly except for one spot under the chin where it gets stretched a bit.   If you see the two green arrows, you can't even really see the graft edge line it's only under the chin where it seems to show up in filament... not sure why that would be, never seen that in the Iray renders... The rest of the graft appears flawless, just that one point along the grafting seam line appears to have a little fussing....
 

video

Carrara, Unreal and D|S Filament

if my fridge hadn't decided to cark it on a 42°C day I would have bought her and her hair, they fell into my cart several times

the renders here are soooooo cute 

one question though, how does she render in Filament with that body smoother?

woyame1 said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Filament is limited in the number of lights it can handle.

Got you, but I can't get even one to be active.  I'm wondering if my GPU is too limited.  I am running Unreal Engine and getting some good work done in it, however.  

Do the lights work in an Iray render?

Richard Haseltine said:

Filament is limited in the number of lights it can handle.

Got you, but I can't get even one to be active.  I'm wondering if my GPU is too limited.  I am running Unreal Engine and getting some good work done in it, however.  

I have had my renders sped up on my desktop but on my laptop it seems to be the same. With the introduction of filament, I've been experimenting with that to make ren

ders that are close to Iray quality since filament takes seconds and iray takes minutes/hours

Filament is limited in the number of lights it can handle.

The new M1 Macs are already seeing fairly frequent discounts. Keep an eye on something like dealnews.com for alerts.

As Richard has explained, it's going to be a few months before DAZ Studio is compatible with the M1 machines. When it is, you'll still be limited to CPU-only Iray rendering, which -- however optimized it is -- is likely to be slower than using a PC with an Nvidia card.

One thing that you could do (once the new version of DAZ Studio is ready) is to do your scene setup and test renders on an M1 Mac and then send it to a PC running Iray server for final render. DAZ's own Jack Tomalin offers quite a nice service of this kind, and I believe there are others.

Long term, I believe that there's little chance that Apple and Nvidia will kiss and make up. Quite aside from the fact that there seems to be quite a lot of ill-feeling on both sides, Apple is reportedly moving to creating more powerful GPUs of its own for laptop and desktop computers based on Apple Silicon. These will be optimized to run Metal, which is Apple's own 3D technology. Future laptops/desktops from Apple will probably have new CPUs that are more powerful than the M1 and high-end Apple Silicon GPUs.

I don't think Nvidia will ever produce an Iray that's optimized for future Apple GPUs (or CPUs), both for reasons mentioned above and because it would be helping Apple eat its lunch. Even if Apple and Nvidia weren't mad at each other, there'd be no incentive for Nvidia to do this. But makers of other rendering engines -- Octane, 3DL, Filament, Renderman, Cycles etc. -- might well have an interest in making a renderer that was optimized to use the Apple GPUs. If that happens, it'll be a long way in the future -- first, they'll want to see what the Apple GPUs are capable of and how to work with them, and then they'll actually have to do the hard work of rewriting their code. They may decide it's not worth it. But someone like, say, Octane, who make their money selling software licenses, would have a possible incentive to do the work, unlike Nvidia who very definitely don't.

One final note: be aware that the M1 Macs have limited and non-expandable memory. The memory is actually integrated with the processor and for the current versions of the M1 it's limited to 8GB or 16GB. While they're said to be more memory-efficient than other architectures, I still think that 8GB is way too little for 3D work and even 16GB is marginal. So you might want to wait and see what Apple rolls out this year and whether it includes a more powerful CPU and a 32GB option (which they will no doubt sell at an eye-watering markup).

Ivy said:

It took me a hour to read all the comments on this thread . But I am able to say all my questions have all been answered I had.  I was thinking of upgrading. But it appears. its best I stick with 4.12.0.86 for a little while longer.

Gosh the more forward daz tries to go the more backwards it seems that things get.   I have no interest in genesis 8.1 for animation, because all that extra trappings of morphs is not needed or will hardly even noticed during animation unless you render 4k image series (good luck with that if you think rendering at 1080 takes long to render.).  unlike still rendering images, animation images move to fast to really appreciate defined facial movements or body peach fuzzy. most game engines & 3rd party 3d apps or won't use or load all that crap anyway.

But i do have some interest in the new Filament & iray , PBR shader improvements,  to improve animation quality.  but not at the cost of having to start from scratch finding new work around's to get studio to fit back into my work flow with all the issues reported here.

YIKE!

Thank you everyone posting your comments very helpful information.

I feel the same way. I'm still on 4.12.0.86 too, there's no way to animate anything in the new versions, animation tools are broken beyond belief. 

I would love to experiment with Filament, I feel it's a awesome feature and it could become my new render engine for my animations... If I were able to animate my scenes...

Genesis 8.1 is something that I find really unnecessary. Where's the need for a whole new figure to add a feature that could be added with a simple plugin/script? Also, why add more bones to an already bone-overfilled figure when I can simply use the sliders or the PowerPose to make the same action? The Scene tab looks like a nightmare!

I just started using filament and cannot get the photometric lights to work.  They load into the scene fine.  I checked the option "Apply Active Viewport Transforms" when I created them.  The problem is they have no effect whatsoever on the scene.  Photometric Mode is 'on'.  Can anybody tell me what I'm doing wrong?  I have a PC.  I'm running an i7 3rd gen 3.7 GHz, with 32 BG RAM with an EVGA GTX 970 (4GB).  Any help would  be greatly appreciated.  

Visuimag said:

Ivy said:

Visuimag said:

Lighting really does matter, but I'll say, the new skin works much better with nearly every type of light (at least to me) than any Genesis 8 skin

Have you tried it with filament yet?. I be interested to see the results if all those new face morphs and skin details, peach fuzzy will give you photo realistic images with filament?.

Haven't tried it with Filament yet. Actually was gonna give it a spin shortly! 

That be cool