Richard Haseltine said:

battfield said:

In conclusion, the problems to be solved by the Filament engine have not been improved at all.
Problems with hair transparency, emissive information not being reflected, etc. First of all, I think Daz needs to work on this problem as hard as possible.
They need to be able to draw that pressure on the operation to either make PBR buildable in the shader builder or release an official FilamentShader.
I call it the do-it-yourself disease, as is often the case in creative fields, but I know that relying on it will not help you make progress or progress.

結論から言いますと、Filamentエンジンで解決すべき問題点は全く改善されておりません。
髪の透過問題、エミッシブ情報が反映されない問題など。まずDazはこの問題に全力で取り組まないとダメだと思います。
PBRをシェーダービルダーで組めるようにするか、正式なFilamentShaderをリリースするか、そのプレッシャーを運営に描ける必要があります。
クリエイティブな分野によくありがちですが、自分で何とかしろ病と呼んでいますが、これに頼っては進歩するものも進歩しないものと心得ます。

Please do bear in mind that Filament is billed by Daz as a drawstyle, not a as a Render Engine.

Since when does Daz release shaders for "drawstyles"?

AnotherUserName said:

kenshaw011267 said:

FSMCDesigns said:

AnotherUserName said:

Maybe. Primarily, my father in law is going to make HO scale people, buildings and stuff for his train set. I want to get back into diahrama (spelling) making. Got some zombie invasions planned :)

Now that is a cool use for 3D printing. I always liked doing dioramas when i was younger and always wanted to do a HO train set up. best of luck!

I use my printer for making minis, terrain and buildings for playing wargames and RPG's at scales from 28mm to 1/300th. Going bigger is easier than going smaller. 

As to problems with using Daz assets, there can be a variety of issues. You need to make sure the figure is closed and is supported properly, the slicer will have a setting to add internal and external supports, external supports are more a thing with filament printing but I've had it come up a few times with resin prints as well. You just cut them off when the print is finished. People modeling specifically for 3d printing tend to handle this stuff before hand.

Also there could be an issue that the newer gen stuff has much lower poly counts. This could result in holes in the model as far as the slicer and printer are concerned. This could be why G2 worksand G3 and G8 don't but I don't know. I only use a few Daz assets for printing. I mostly use stuff I got modeled specifically for gaming.

Interesting. I wouldnt have thought there would have been any issues with G3/8. I wonder what would happen if you increased the polly count via hexagon or blender?

I honestly am just speculating. I do not know for sure.

kenshaw011267 said:

FSMCDesigns said:

AnotherUserName said:

Maybe. Primarily, my father in law is going to make HO scale people, buildings and stuff for his train set. I want to get back into diahrama (spelling) making. Got some zombie invasions planned :)

Now that is a cool use for 3D printing. I always liked doing dioramas when i was younger and always wanted to do a HO train set up. best of luck!

I use my printer for making minis, terrain and buildings for playing wargames and RPG's at scales from 28mm to 1/300th. Going bigger is easier than going smaller. 

As to problems with using Daz assets, there can be a variety of issues. You need to make sure the figure is closed and is supported properly, the slicer will have a setting to add internal and external supports, external supports are more a thing with filament printing but I've had it come up a few times with resin prints as well. You just cut them off when the print is finished. People modeling specifically for 3d printing tend to handle this stuff before hand.

Also there could be an issue that the newer gen stuff has much lower poly counts. This could result in holes in the model as far as the slicer and printer are concerned. This could be why G2 worksand G3 and G8 don't but I don't know. I only use a few Daz assets for printing. I mostly use stuff I got modeled specifically for gaming.

Interesting. I wouldnt have thought there would have been any issues with G3/8. I wonder what would happen if you increased the polly count via hexagon or blender?

FSMCDesigns said:

AnotherUserName said:

Maybe. Primarily, my father in law is going to make HO scale people, buildings and stuff for his train set. I want to get back into diahrama (spelling) making. Got some zombie invasions planned :)

Now that is a cool use for 3D printing. I always liked doing dioramas when i was younger and always wanted to do a HO train set up. best of luck!

I use my printer for making minis, terrain and buildings for playing wargames and RPG's at scales from 28mm to 1/300th. Going bigger is easier than going smaller. 

As to problems with using Daz assets, there can be a variety of issues. You need to make sure the figure is closed and is supported properly, the slicer will have a setting to add internal and external supports, external supports are more a thing with filament printing but I've had it come up a few times with resin prints as well. You just cut them off when the print is finished. People modeling specifically for 3d printing tend to handle this stuff before hand.

Also there could be an issue that the newer gen stuff has much lower poly counts. This could result in holes in the model as far as the slicer and printer are concerned. This could be why G2 worksand G3 and G8 don't but I don't know. I only use a few Daz assets for printing. I mostly use stuff I got modeled specifically for gaming.

brainmuffin said:

gregsgraphics_cafd0962a0 said:

brainmuffin said:

As they both crash for me, I find them to be identical.

Sounds like you either have an older system that doesn't support the minimum OpenGL drivers, or your graphics drivers are just out of date.  Both Eevee and Filament should run on most computers from the last 8 years!  As long as your graphics drivers support OpenGL 3.3 or higher.  Filament might even be more forgiving than that right now.  You also need to be sure you have a 64bit CPU with a minimum of 4gb of system ram.  I found that 4gb is still too low.  8gb minimum should be the actual lowest spec for RAM.

10 year old iMac with 16 GB RAM. Cycles now crashes too. On my Linux box, I only have 8GB RAM. Eevee always crashes. Cycles sometimes runs out of memory. The Nvidia card on the Linux machine has 4GB RAM.

 

 I had a 2013 iMac until last year when I sold it for a good price (approx half what I paid for it when new) and used the money to upgrade the PC I bought 4 years ago just for DAZ Studio. 

gregsgraphics_cafd0962a0 said:

brainmuffin said:

As they both crash for me, I find them to be identical.

Sounds like you either have an older system that doesn't support the minimum OpenGL drivers, or your graphics drivers are just out of date.  Both Eevee and Filament should run on most computers from the last 8 years!  As long as your graphics drivers support OpenGL 3.3 or higher.  Filament might even be more forgiving than that right now.  You also need to be sure you have a 64bit CPU with a minimum of 4gb of system ram.  I found that 4gb is still too low.  8gb minimum should be the actual lowest spec for RAM.

10 year old iMac with 16 GB RAM. Cycles now crashes too. On my Linux box, I only have 8GB RAM. Eevee always crashes. Cycles sometimes runs out of memory. The Nvidia card on the Linux machine has 4GB RAM.

I guess you did not make a render yet. The loading time is not the only hiccup. I imagine there will be soon another update, to get the shading back to where it was?! If not and this will be the way, i think a lot of vendors have to update their products. But my guess is, that there went something wrong. Also the light is again stronger in Filament and the shadows behave in another, really interesting way.

richardandtracy said:

I have an Anycubic Photon, the earlier single post one painted black. I have printed 3 or 4 V3 models no trouble. There were no problems with the slicer, and if you have problems, the Chi-Tu-Box software does a good job. But the basic one that comes with the Photon worked well for me. The simple slicer does not thicken surfaces, it leaves that up to you - it means that clothing may need a bit of work in the obj file state. This non-thickening of surfaces could cause problems with modern G8 hair, unlike the older Jim Burton Las Vegas hair I used, which is effectively made up of tubes. I have written my own software to thicken surfaces, but it's too flakey to publish at the moment.

If you want to do HO models on it DO NOT GET A FILAMENT PRINTER. They simply don't give good enough resolution, a UV cure one like the Photon is needed.

The earlier Photon slicer can't take .obj files, so I wrote my own Obj-STL convertor, which is for Windows. You can download it from here for free if you need it: http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/misc/objtostl.html

One small warning with the Anycubic resin. I developed a fairly strong allergy to the solidified resin, with my skin stinging for hours after touching it, and it got worse as time went on - which rather put paid to my intention of making fountain pens with it. If you find this happening to you, change to the Anycubic plant resin or use the Monocure one. It's a shame as the Anycubic resin is the harder one and polishes better. Anyway, the resin paints well with modelmaking enamel paint, though acrylics are possible.

Hope you get one,

Regards,

Richard.

I remember you talking about your reaction to the resin in an earlier post. I think for that reason alone, in considering my Father in Law, Maybe we should stay away from the Anycubic. Although I suppose a reaction could occure with any of the chemicals from any of the printer companies.

Resin is the way we want to go. I had misgivings about doing HO on a filament printer. We simply wanted to do as little post work as possible (just like my rendering :) and I cant see my F in L doing precision work at that scale.

battfield said:

In conclusion, the problems to be solved by the Filament engine have not been improved at all.
Problems with hair transparency, emissive information not being reflected, etc. First of all, I think Daz needs to work on this problem as hard as possible.
They need to be able to draw that pressure on the operation to either make PBR buildable in the shader builder or release an official FilamentShader.
I call it the do-it-yourself disease, as is often the case in creative fields, but I know that relying on it will not help you make progress or progress.

結論から言いますと、Filamentエンジンで解決すべき問題点は全く改善されておりません。
髪の透過問題、エミッシブ情報が反映されない問題など。まずDazはこの問題に全力で取り組まないとダメだと思います。
PBRをシェーダービルダーで組めるようにするか、正式なFilamentShaderをリリースするか、そのプレッシャーを運営に描ける必要があります。
クリエイティブな分野によくありがちですが、自分で何とかしろ病と呼んでいますが、これに頼っては進歩するものも進歩しないものと心得ます。

Please do bear in mind that Filament is billed by Daz as a drawstyle, not a as a Render Engine.

kenshaw011267 said:

You don't need to stick to the slicer SW that comes with the printer.

Any slicer that produces the correct file format output will be fine, in theory at least.

I have a resin printer and use chitubox and it is fine, easy enough to use with good enough results I've never gone looking for anything better.

Do you have experience with a filament 3D printer? I don't think I've ever known anyone who went straight to resin as their first printer, but with prices coming down so low I guess it will be more common.

we decided against the filament printer. My Father in Law wanted the least amount of cleanup on the models as possible since he was going to work in HO scale. So we are going resin instead.

brainmuffin said:

As they both crash for me, I find them to be identical.

Sounds like you either have an older system that doesn't support the minimum OpenGL drivers, or your graphics drivers are just out of date.  Both Eevee and Filament should run on most computers from the last 8 years!  As long as your graphics drivers support OpenGL 3.3 or higher.  Filament might even be more forgiving than that right now.  You also need to be sure you have a 64bit CPU with a minimum of 4gb of system ram.  I found that 4gb is still too low.  8gb minimum should be the actual lowest spec for RAM.

In conclusion, the problems to be solved by the Filament engine have not been improved at all.
Problems with hair transparency, emissive information not being reflected, etc. First of all, I think Daz needs to work on this problem as hard as possible.
They need to be able to draw that pressure on the operation to either make PBR buildable in the shader builder or release an official FilamentShader.
I call it the do-it-yourself disease, as is often the case in creative fields, but I know that relying on it will not help you make progress or progress.

結論から言いますと、Filamentエンジンで解決すべき問題点は全く改善されておりません。
髪の透過問題、エミッシブ情報が反映されない問題など。まずDazはこの問題に全力で取り組まないとダメだと思います。
PBRをシェーダービルダーで組めるようにするか、正式なFilamentShaderをリリースするか、そのプレッシャーを運営に描ける必要があります。
クリエイティブな分野によくありがちですが、自分で何とかしろ病と呼んでいますが、これに頼っては進歩するものも進歩しないものと心得ます。

I have an Anycubic Photon, the earlier single post one painted black. I have printed 3 or 4 V3 models no trouble. There were no problems with the slicer, and if you have problems, the Chi-Tu-Box software does a good job. But the basic one that comes with the Photon worked well for me. The simple slicer does not thicken surfaces, it leaves that up to you - it means that clothing may need a bit of work in the obj file state. This non-thickening of surfaces could cause problems with modern G8 hair, unlike the older Jim Burton Las Vegas hair I used, which is effectively made up of tubes. I have written my own software to thicken surfaces, but it's too flakey to publish at the moment.

If you want to do HO models on it DO NOT GET A FILAMENT PRINTER. They simply don't give good enough resolution, a UV cure one like the Photon is needed.

The earlier Photon slicer can't take .obj files, so I wrote my own Obj-STL convertor, which is for Windows. You can download it from here for free if you need it: http://www.chestnutpens.co.uk/misc/objtostl.html

One small warning with the Anycubic resin. I developed a fairly strong allergy to the solidified resin, with my skin stinging for hours after touching it, and it got worse as time went on - which rather put paid to my intention of making fountain pens with it. If you find this happening to you, change to the Anycubic plant resin or use the Monocure one. It's a shame as the Anycubic resin is the harder one and polishes better. Anyway, the resin paints well with modelmaking enamel paint, though acrylics are possible.

Hope you get one,

Regards,

Richard.

Printing with PLA filament requires a lot of post-print sanding due to the filament lines.  Not the best option when printing high detail DAZ figures and scenes.  

You don't need to stick to the slicer SW that comes with the printer.

Any slicer that produces the correct file format output will be fine, in theory at least.

I have a resin printer and use chitubox and it is fine, easy enough to use with good enough results I've never gone looking for anything better.

Do you have experience with a filament 3D printer? I don't think I've ever known anyone who went straight to resin as their first printer, but with prices coming down so low I guess it will be more common.

N_R Arts said:

Daz has had an update (I downloaded it today). Does anyone know if there have been any improvements made to Filament?

(Unless there was no update, and DIM is messing with me - On both of my computers).

There was a minor update which was mostly bug fixes I think.

However, Filament supports shadows from the first 6 lights and i'm kind of pretty sure it was first 3 before (maybe). Though maybe not.

The real difference here is that Google has Open-Sourced Filament as a real-time physically-based render engine intended for game dev on a multi-platform source code.  The OpenGL API behind Eevee is tightly bound to the Blender source code and the primary intention with Eevee tends to lean more toward visual quality vs. speed and performance like most game engines (Filament).  While Eevee is still extremely fast and NEAR real-time, not all the features are truly real-time like they would need to be in a multi-platform game engine.  This means Eevee can implement settings and features that could never be "real-time" on platforms like Android (which Filament was created to support).  That said since it is open-source, and Daz has adopted it, there's a lot that could be done if they really want to develop it.

Just don't count on Daz being capable of development with Filament as fast as Blender Foundation has developed Eevee.  Daz is going to, no doubt, depend entirely on 3rd party support for the expansion of Filament's capability.  So you will definitely need to purchase addons for most of the coolest features for Filament if you want it to do some of the things that Eevee can do RIGHT NOW for free.

As I see that filament renderer Is something like an improved OpenGL  it does not even have any dedicated output and if you want to export a picture you have to render in a viewport.

It seems to be just as fast as OpenGL but it consumes a horrible amount of GPU memory so if you have filament viewport open and try to run iray at the same time most likely your rendering will fail.

Not sure how useful it is for photorealistic renderings as the quality is not as good as Iray or reality so you probably can't use it as a quick replacement.

The full version of Filament on Github is obviously much more capable than what Daz has currently implemented.  However, I see very little in the Materials Guide for Filament which isn't already available in Blender Eevee.  Transparency blending, refraction with absorption, clear coat, bent normals, AO, anisotropy, reflectance (specularity), IOR, emissive, and transmission are all possible in Eevee with Principled Shader already.  I'm not sure what the "micro thickness" does, but refraction thickness is also possible with Eevee materials.  I don't see any volumetrics in Filament so far, which Eevee can also do with very impressive results.  There's a video on Youtube of someone creating a Mandelbulb using volumetrics in Eevee in real-time!  That's what sold me on the thing.  Also for animators, Eevee has object and camera motion blur.  Not sure what Filament offers in that regard either.

Daz has had an update (I downloaded it today). Does anyone know if there have been any improvements made to Filament?

(Unless there was no update, and DIM is messing with me - On both of my computers).