I made a little very short Filament animation with Bette. I put it in my Dropbox. Can you see it?

I see it - Very cute! :D I like that smile at the end. :)

I made a little very short Filament animation with Bette. I put it in my Dropbox. Can you see it?

have you got it in the Filament draw mode?

Bette renders nicely in Filament with a little tweak to the skin to darken it, because Filament isn't using the SSS or translucency, as far as I can tell.

That's Filament!? Awesome! Nicely done!

Thank you. Yes that is Filament. I deleted the opacity maps on the toon hair and the dress.

Great idea. Makes for good toon hair! I do hope that the transparency thing will eventually be something they can fix. :) For now, though, deleting the opacity maps sounds like a nice work around - at least for toon type renders. This came out really cool.

Bette renders nicely in Filament with a little tweak to the skin to darken it, because Filament isn't using the SSS or translucency, as far as I can tell.

That's Filament!? Awesome! Nicely done!

Thank you. Yes that is Filament. I deleted the opacity maps on the toon hair and the dress.

Bette renders nicely in Filament with a little tweak to the skin to darken it, because Filament isn't using the SSS or translucency, as far as I can tell.

That's Filament!? Awesome! Nicely done!

Bette renders nicely in Filament with a little tweak to the skin to darken it, because Filament isn't using the SSS or translucency, as far as I can tell.

Here is something funny I stumbled upon today. an Iray render does not treat the camera the same way a viewport render does. In the filament render (viewport) it looks like that farmer's wife's carving knife got him! Poor guy. It is the same camera. I only changed render engine.

I don't know if I should laugh, cry, or throw up... :s

Here is something funny I stumbled upon today. an Iray render does not treat the camera the same way a viewport render does. In the filament render (viewport) it looks like that farmer's wife's carving knife got him! Poor guy. It is the same camera. I only changed render engine.

Is anyone else also having issues with changing the HDRI map in the Environment Settings -> Environment Map? I have only gotten this to work once but now it always defaults to DTHDR-RuinsB-500 map.

Try rotating the environment map once you swap it to a new one. It seems to sometimes not "read" a new HDRI until you change it's position a little - or switch to Iray preview for a couple seconds and then back to Filament. Those options seem to help it update to the current HDRI.

Could someone please remind me, is DOF possible with Filament? I'm trying to do "still" render (I just wanted to see what Minotaur 6 looked like in Filament), and I'd quite like to blur out the background. 

No, it is not possible - at least when I tried tinkering with the Focal Distance and with DOF turned on. Works fine in 3Delight.

Could someone please remind me, is DOF possible with Filament? I'm trying to do "still" render (I just wanted to see what Minotaur 6 looked like in Filament), and I'd quite like to blur out the background. 

Animators for DAZ Studio must make a small subset of the user base - which is unfortunate as DAZ lowers the bar for entry into 3D animation. It has had the tools for over a decade and I have used it. I am one of those who hope that Filament will get fleshed out more - it has great potential for new and old animators.

For machinima, its a game changer. The hair, light shadows and transparency limitations are concerning but I am hoping there is more development on this front. Thanks to the DAZ devs for thinking about us.

So, let's set aside the whole "used DS ever since 2001, when it was a barely stable internal Alpha build that Taylor was still patching like mad" bit for a second. Also set aside that I've used Poser ever since Curious Labs still existed and everyone was going gaga over that newfangled ERC thing that had just come out. 
So - why DS? Well...

• Muscle Memory. I know where everything is, what it does, and how to use it. I have to admit that just to be fair.
• Cost, Part I. I only buy the add-ons I want or need, and over the past few years, I only had to buy them once.
• Cost, Part II. I don't have to shell out $200+ (and $150 for upgrades) just to get the base program like I do with Poser.
• Flexibility in the UI (because Jarom is friggin' awesome, that's why): I can peel off tool panels and shove them onto a different monitor entirely. I can arrange them any way I want, and remove what I don't want/need, only to bring it back later if desired. Poser comes close these days, but it's still too clunky and in many ways, still subscribes to the 1990s-era Kai Krause School Of Craptastic Interfaces. 
• Asset Longevity. I can drag in 2010-era NearMe figurines, or even 2003-era Aiko 3 stuff, no sweat... and I can give them SubD and soft-body collision, whip up decent morphs for them in-app, put on new shaders, and do lots of stuff that breathes new life into some seriously ancient stuff. Now, I'm fairly sure Poser can do some of that too, but I'm not going to shell out $200+ just to find out.
• It's actually built with a somewhat gentle learning curve. CG is not an easy thing to grok - at all. Put this way: You're making your head do on-the-fly trigonometric calculations in non-Euclidian Cartesian space, just to put a bit of tease into some assembly of polygons with big boobs (the engine code for that is 100% nightmare fuel.) Doing that in any application is a raging PITA to get the hang of... but DS actually makes it fairly easy for newbies to grasp. 
• The application is still very light on resources overall. The render engine will chow down on GPU cycles, sure. You can kiss 10GB+ of RAM goodbye sometimes. But - most of that memory is being eaten by the assets (esp. textures) being stashed in RAM, not by the application itself. 
• The UI lets you focus on the artwork, and not on the controls. This way you can focus on making it pretty, and in telling that story. That's purely intentional. The recent addition of the Filament render engine only enhances this.
• The open and free SDK lets anyone dig in to do more, if they want to do more. 

Lots of other reasons as well, but honestly? DS is the one and only reason why I still use Windows, and why I skipped on a MacBook Pro and went with my just-bought MSI laptop (becasue an MBP with a decent RTX mobile GPU seems to be lacking entirely these days.) 

I used Casual's TexAnim with Filament in the latest beta so that works 

Awesome

I used Casual's TexAnim with Filament in the latest beta so that works 

I really was curious how much improved 4.14 was and tried a scene that always crashed previously. Now in Filament the render crashes as well... BUT after that my pc stayed slow, programs crashed during saving and the internet was really slow. I checked taskmanager but couln't find anu process creating the slow down and crashes. Then after I restarted DAZ 4.14 and made a neat exit (the previous one was a crash during render) my pc was the old one again. Could it be possible that 4.14 allocated memory all the time? Perhaps allocated GPU all the time?
 

I checked that you could use the Iray Skin Manager with the new Filament (PBR). If you want to do so, you must launch the skin manager while you use Filament as the active viewport drawstyle (this way it will be added to the list of the drawstyles available).

I will add Filament "automatically" (i.e. no need to launch with a Filament viewport to have filament in the options) in an update to be soon developped.

I just submitted the update to enhance compatibility with DS 4.14 and above. Here we go for version 1.2.

Now, if there is no environment node, or no tone mapping node (well, more precisely no environment to modify or no exposure to modify), the script will not fail, but will warn you that you work with these limitations (absence of environment...).

The new version also includes the new "Filament (PBR)" in the list of available viewport drawstyles. If you select "Filament (PBR)" in the draw styles AND if you are in an old Daz Studio version where it does not exist, this is simply ignored. If you work with the new versions of Daz Studio you will be able to activate Filament (PBR) too.

This is a thread for discussing the Filament drawstyle included with DS. Any further attempt to discuss whether it should be included with DS will be summarily removed.

Thanks Richard,
I came here for advice on how to use Filament better, and instead for the most part, I've had to sift through 25 pages of a bunch of squabbling and ungratefulness for something that I consider to be a gift, just to find the smallest amount of advice on how to use it better.

I like to make animations, and prefer to do them in Iray. But Iray takes a long time to render. Filament allows me to render out a whole animation, analyze the action and camera work, and tweak it, render again in Filament, an on and on until it "plays out" how I'd like it to. Then, I take a few select frames here and there from key areas of the animation and try them as single renders in Iray, and adjust the colors etc. This way, I can make adjustments and improve movements and see how they look after I've "rendered' them and played them back as a finished movie. If all looks good, if the sound syncs properly etc, then and only then, is it worth rendering for several days in Iray knowing I'll get the proper results. Filament is a gift, and I for one am grateful and have no complaints :)

And this, surely, is how Filament is intended to be used. It's a tool for rapid prototyping, not final renders. And it's great. 

For most Daz animations you see, in fact, for most animations period, lack of photorealism and render quality are far down on the list of things that break immersion.  It's almost irrelevant.  The story, pacing, dialogue, consistency of style and characters moving naturally and appropriately are far more important.

I'd definitely agree with this - the priorities are very different between stills (where render quality is very important) and animation (where it is the quality of the movement that is paramount). It is therefore great to have render tools for both and I can foesee a lot more use of Daz Studio for animation going forward.