I added a dForce dress to the animation. Everything went pretty smoothly (other than the dress taking 50 minutes to simulate! lol oy! It rendered really fast with Filament once the simulation was done though.). I haven't tried combining both dForce AND Spring Dynamics on the same object. I'm not sure if it would work or not, one might override the other). I'll have to experiment with it later. :)

(Make sure your audio is low - Youtube added the soundtrack at a pretty loud volume. Next time I think I'll just add audio before uploading.)

 

Seriously, how did you get dforce to work in the animation? I cant find a tutorial for that anywhere and have been desperate to do it XD

Set up the animation how you normally would. Then add dForce clothing. And in the Simulation Settings tab where it says "Frames to Simulate" change it from "Current Frame" to "Animated (Use Timeline Play Range)". Then Simulate. That should add all the dForce movement as keyframes to the animation timeline. You can then render out the animation how you normally would.

I recommend saving fairly often and in stages. And definitely save the scene as soon as you have the animation set up how you like it (before you add the dForce clothing). And I recommend saving it as a separate version before you run the simulation. That way if there are any issues with the simulation you can just load up the "clean" animation version again and try again.

Do you put extra frames in before the main part of the animation to let the clothing 'settle' on the figure?

Yeah. I usually try to start the animation around frame 5 and/or just don't keep the first few frames of the animation. Since I render out the animation as a series of images it's easy to just exclude the first few frames when putting them together in a video.

I added a dForce dress to the animation. Everything went pretty smoothly (other than the dress taking 50 minutes to simulate! lol oy! It rendered really fast with Filament once the simulation was done though.). I haven't tried combining both dForce AND Spring Dynamics on the same object. I'm not sure if it would work or not, one might override the other). I'll have to experiment with it later. :)

(Make sure your audio is low - Youtube added the soundtrack at a pretty loud volume. Next time I think I'll just add audio before uploading.)

 

Seriously, how did you get dforce to work in the animation? I cant find a tutorial for that anywhere and have been desperate to do it XD

Set up the animation how you normally would. Then add dForce clothing. And in the Simulation Settings tab where it says "Frames to Simulate" change it from "Current Frame" to "Animated (Use Timeline Play Range)". Then Simulate. That should add all the dForce movement as keyframes to the animation timeline. You can then render out the animation how you normally would.

I recommend saving fairly often and in stages. And definitely save the scene as soon as you have the animation set up how you like it (before you add the dForce clothing). And I recommend saving it as a separate version before you run the simulation. That way if there are any issues with the simulation you can just load up the "clean" animation version again and try again.

Do you put extra frames in before the main part of the animation to let the clothing 'settle' on the figure?

Note: If I write too much, there are a couple of not terribly important
***Question:
  inside...
 

I just got my first Stonemason "Architecture" set (Streets of Steampunk).
Am impressed, looks great, both from a technical and an artistic viewpoint.
(I looked a bit into how it's put together, and the bits and bolts look squeaky clean to me. I could probably create something like that myself; it would be finished around 2040).

PERFORMANCE

1 Mio vertices, 4GB VRam, quite efficient for a scene with that much detail.
My RTX2070S will handle ~8 Mio vertices and 8GB VRam (my rule of thumb).
But... iRay preview is *crawling* at ~1 frame per second.
My rule with "8 Mio verts is ok" is based on dForce hair.
Maybe there are other considerations, maybe the shaders can't keep up with all the shiny materials?

update: it was a new 8k HDRi that murdered the card (wasn't aware of the res, the product never mentions it).

***Question 7: shouldn't an 8GB card be able to handle an 8k HDRi?

 

***Question 1: does anything other than "number of vertices" and "memory" impact the "greyshaded iRay preview" performance?

***Question 2: I assumed a crazy expensive 3090 would handle about any scene that fits into 24GB, like 3 Steamvilles and 20 figures. Is this really the case?

Note: I switched from 4.14 to 4.12 - the old DS version handles Steamville gracefully??
Either iRay degraded, or my 4.14 settings are messed up.

Filament to the rescue. It runs it at 60 fps, as always.
For science, I threw figures at the scene to see how far you can push Filament.
Piece of cake.

Test Render (iRay):
The result was MAJOR upheaval in Steamville. See Exhibit A (attached pic)

STYLE:

For a 'real' render I'd need suitable clothes. I don't have any Victorian stuff.
(I have a selection of bikinis, because 1 bright beach HDRI + 1 figure + 1 bikini was about all I could render on CPU back then).
Now DAZ would surely prefer I raid the store and spend hundreds on a dozen steampunk outfits (need some males, too).
Too much for one "just for fun" render. I'd spend maybe 15 on a hero outfit and 20 on a bag of background wardrobe.
I'm more liberal with figures and hair, since you can use those in any scene.

***Question 3: do you have any tricks how to populate a bigger scene, so that clothing items are not obviously duplicated?

I can dabble with the colors, but the shape is usually quite fixed. This will look like a clone army unless you buy many many items.
With a bit of adjustment, Western style might fit in, not much else.

Note: it seems most products are 'high fashion', the kind of stuff people on the street don't / didn't wear.
Too bad, since 'plain clothes' haven't really changed that much between eras. (otoh, people tend to not make renders of me in my jogging pants)

TECH:

The iRay render fell back to CPU (8 Mio verts, ~10GB, 5 lights + skydome). Slow but it will get there...
Oh. It took *massive* amounts of system RAM. 75GB of committed memory. Major SSD thrashing.
(I just ordered an upgrade from 32 to 64GB. Canceled that, ordered 32 to 96. RAM is cheap, fortunately).

***Question 4: why does CPU rendering use SO much more memory than GPU rendering?
The scene just barely doesn't fit into 8GB VRam. CPU needs 75GB Ram. Local issue?

Note: I know I know, I *could* optimize the scene a lot. Part of why I'm considering a 3090 is the luxury of not having to fiddle with it.

Note: Filament still handles the loaded scene like a piece of cake, for posing all the pieces (with texture quality '1 notch below max' though; max eats VRam like nVidia gave it away for free).
Too bad I cannot really guess from the light preview what I'll later get in iRay.

 

LIGHT:

I'm not quite satisfied with the light.
Problem is, for light work, I first need to redudce the scene to something my Gfx card can handle in quasi realtime.

***Question 5: is there a good workflow to keep a large scene manageable, like "put everything very relevant to the main scene in one group, everything else in another" ?

***Question 6: is there any way to alter the lighting strenght of the skydome, *without* altering the apparent brightness of the dome?
As in, sky should look the same, but illuminate the scene more or less.
(guess I could edit the brightness of the sun in an HDR capable editor, is there an easier way?)

 

Yes I will buy but like everyone else who have commeted there has to be a significant improvement .  My own personel oppinion is that if Daz is going to continue to promote the bridge's to other software it has to up its game with the figures it wants to promote. Which will mean a break in backward compatibility.

So we might get a version of studio that will be able to use the old and the new version of genesis Like we have now  V4 all the way upto V8 but with the obvious that G9 stuff will not be backward compatible  until the 3r party venders come along with their magic.

But may be the new generation will have the ability to use more of an industry standard shader  like blender or arnold going down the node route. My hope anyway and many other goodies that studios would expect to have or that Daz can impliment them to be a head of the game .

  Or we have a 2 tier studio one bought with G9 and a free one for all those who do not want to take the leap. But My Own Opinion is that if Daz wants to push their figure line of products into the big wide world and not just be the big fish in the little pond there will have to come and soon to make G9 a lot more attractive to freelance and small to large studios alike.

Otherwise they might end up stagnating  studio all together, and just go for making figures compatible with all the major software platforms  or I fear they will get left behind  go down the route of the poser figures and poser itself  blowing around in the tumble weed

Or Maybe their business model just suits them fine and bieng the hobbist software for people to cut their teeth in the CGI world ?

 

The bridges cater to people who render outside of DAZ. Currently products in the DAZ store are including mainly Iray materials, and maybe in the future, Filament materials. People who export the figures to other spots will not render with Iray so they wouldn't care for Iray shader setup, they have to create their own shaders. It's difficult to downright impossible to have renders look good if you only use Iray material setups in other engines, you have to at least build your own shader network and work with your specific engine's properties. So yes, while it's probably possible for DAZ to develop a more advanced skin shader for Iray I doubt it would benefit people who render outside Iray.

Then also, I'm eager to see whether DAZ ups their game regarding figure details. Some figures, even HD characters, have surprisingly little details at highest subdivision levels so I could see some overall improvement here. But then, this is not something for which you need a new figure generation.

I added a dForce dress to the animation. Everything went pretty smoothly (other than the dress taking 50 minutes to simulate! lol oy! It rendered really fast with Filament once the simulation was done though.). I haven't tried combining both dForce AND Spring Dynamics on the same object. I'm not sure if it would work or not, one might override the other). I'll have to experiment with it later. :)

(Make sure your audio is low - Youtube added the soundtrack at a pretty loud volume. Next time I think I'll just add audio before uploading.)

 

Seriously, how did you get dforce to work in the animation? I cant find a tutorial for that anywhere and have been desperate to do it XD

Set up the animation how you normally would. Then add dForce clothing. And in the Simulation Settings tab where it says "Frames to Simulate" change it from "Current Frame" to "Animated (Use Timeline Play Range)". Then Simulate. That should add all the dForce movement as keyframes to the animation timeline. You can then render out the animation how you normally would.

I recommend saving fairly often and in stages. And definitely save the scene as soon as you have the animation set up how you like it (before you add the dForce clothing). And I recommend saving it as a separate version before you run the simulation. That way if there are any issues with the simulation you can just load up the "clean" animation version again and try again.

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.

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. I see a drunken da Vinci doing the Mona Lisa with a 4B pencil on the back of a coaster in a bar because he couldn't be bothererd to get his real canvas and paint-set out. Quickness isn't a subsitute for quality. Render in Iray and be done with it... don't expect people not to notice if you've taken a shortcut with some trickery.... they will.

Buzzwords, however nonsensical in context, do not an argument make.  There's no trading.  No one's giving up anything.  Filament is a render engine.  Including it provides options to people. 

But I must say that last weekend , I give a class in DS to my 5 years old step son , I could not believe my eyes , he managed to pose all animals in the scene after one time instruction , also he loved playing with airplanes and we made small animation in Filament to his amusement . The new hope !  little kids are so smart these days

Ideally Filament and iRay PBR materials would be 100% the same and the only difference would be iRay did the 100% light simulation model ray tracing while Filament only did a carefully selected 50% (or whatever of the subset it uses) of those ray tracing features to do render almost realistic renders in less than 5 seconds a render. A lot easier said than done though.

Even when I do get a RTX 30X0 GPU I will still plan on making scenes look good in Filament. If you want to animate or publish games the shortest path to porting what your DAZ renders look like to a game or animation is to use Filament.  

I believe that Eevee and Cycles materials are more or less compatible. I've rendered hair in Eevee and it looks ok - obviously not as good as Cycles (or IRay) but better than Filament. I do hope there is a way to improve it because I really want to use Filament to get more involved with animations. I'm still nowhere near having the know-how to do it in Blender.

There's another problem that I need to overcome too - the "glow" from nostrils and other "openings". 

Ideally Filament and iRay PBR materials would be 100% the same and the only difference would be iRay did the 100% light simulation model ray tracing while Filament only did a carefully selected 50% (or whatever of the subset it uses) of those ray tracing features to do render almost realistic renders in less than 5 seconds a render. A lot easier said than done though.

Even when I do get a RTX 30X0 GPU I will still plan on making scenes look good in Filament. If you want to animate or publish games the shortest path to porting what your DAZ renders look like to a game or animation is to use Filament.  

I added a dForce dress to the animation. Everything went pretty smoothly (other than the dress taking 50 minutes to simulate! lol oy! It rendered really fast with Filament once the simulation was done though.). I haven't tried combining both dForce AND Spring Dynamics on the same object. I'm not sure if it would work or not, one might override the other). I'll have to experiment with it later. :)

(Make sure your audio is low - Youtube added the soundtrack at a pretty loud volume. Next time I think I'll just add audio before uploading.)

 

Seriously, how did you get dforce to work in the animation? I cant find a tutorial for that anywhere and have been desperate to do it XD

thats how human works... complain on FIlament for being super simple AND Octane for being super complex and filled with 999,999 parameters that you need a Doctorate in Computer Graphics. 

Not so far even for everyday parameters (considering viewers who have no knowledge of 3d graphic hobby) 

Does anyone have any insight into why filament is not working for me and why did my Daz Studio switch to animate lite after I installed Das Studio 4.14? I attached an image of the Drawstyle drop-down menu in my Daz Studio. I the image you can see the Filament option is shaded out. I can't even click on it and again, how do I enable animate 2 in Daz Studio 4.14? It was working before the update.

So it was running the full Animate 2 from a serial number and lost that? With two oddities like that (I assume there are no others in Help>About Installed Plug-ins) I'd suspect some kind of data corruption

Holy Moly you guys!!!

Okay, some of you Daz 3D Devs may know me for the die hard Carrara user that I am - I am. I Love Carrara!

Well I've been incredibly hyped about everything that's been going into Daz Studio over the past years - ever since 4.0, but I never really used it as my animation/render studio - just all of the amazing, incredibly handy and powerful tools it has.

This whole Filament thing along with (I haven't found/figured them out yet) the new Animation tools has really got me jazzed.

When another Carrara user turned me on to the Beta with Filament, I gave it a bit of a try - not much time invested into it - but it was cool enough to get me to start putting a bunch of Daz Studio info on my site so that my readers and myself can learn and grow with this thing.

Well one of my awesome readers sponsored me a gift card, which I used to get a cool Genesis 8 Female character and hair for her just last night so I could install and try the new Daz Studio as soon as my Carrara renders were complete.

 

Oh Man!!! 

 

Okay, I have a lot of Steph videos to watch so I can wrap my head around where things are. I used Filament just fine for getting an animation put together, but not well enough to run it for the render, so I switched to Iray. OMG!!!

 Little Lara Thorne and her Bronwyn Hair are fricken Spectacular! Dropped in an HDRI for both lighting and an environment and set up Iray for speed - something I just kinda started picking up on how to do... kinda.

Well my animation is rendering at roughly a minute per frame, give or take, and the results look fantastic!

Filament is amazing! Even if I stick with Iray for my final renders, Filament looks gorgeous at its absurdly fast render speed!

I know I saw Steph working in a Graph Editor and some other new animation tools. I have to look into that stuff and see how far this adventure takes me!

 

Now I need to get my hands on Linday's Classic Long Curly Hair with dForce and I bet I could make a Daz Studio Genesis 8 Female version of my Rosie character (My hero, fashioned after my lovely wife)! Lara makes a stunningly similar Rosie 8 - on the right is Rosie 5, a cross-generation Genesis 1 Female (click the image to see the intro video of her)

 

Wow. Just... Wow!

Great Job! Thanks Team Daz 3D!!!

...was going to ask about the hair until I watched the video (very nice i may say). So it was generated in Carrara? 

Been looking to rebuild my Merida character (who's also quite a "kitbash") and hair like that would be ideal. 

I even have a meager system for this stuff - 

• Ryzen 2nd Gen 2700 octa-core
• GTX 1660 6GB
• 64GB RAM

So I'm running Iray using both GPU and CPU and it's running great!

I had one crash, but it truly felt like it was my fault, switching from Iray in my viewport to Filament right in the middle of a bunch of setting changes - Iray was busy busy busy.

Installation via DIM went without a hitch, but I just installed the latest nVidia driver to run the Beta. I wonder if that made the difference.

...save for the GPU (Maxwell Titan-X) that meagre system is far more of a beast than than mine: (6 core Westmere Xeon and 24 GB DDR3 1333 memory) 

WOWEE! Spectacular  and I want to know how your acheived it...................tell me, tell me, tell me, pretty please?  

thats how human works... complain on FIlament for being super simple AND Octane for being super complex and filled with 999,999 parameters that you need a Doctorate in Computer Graphics. 

Does anyone have any insight into why filament is not working for me and why did my Daz Studio switch to animate lite after I installed Das Studio 4.14? I attached an image of the Drawstyle drop-down menu in my Daz Studio. I the image you can see the Filament option is shaded out. I can't even click on it and again, how do I enable animate 2 in Daz Studio 4.14? It was working before the update.

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. 

LOL What are you even talking about? No one is trading anything for anything. We have ALL THREE - Iray, 3DL, AND Filament. Nothing is being sacrificed for anything. You can choose to render in whatever render engine you want to. We just have more choices now. I don't care that you don't like Filament. I'm not asking you to. What I am asking you to do is have some respect and decency for those people who maybe do like it and do want to use it. We don't all have to like the same thing. But you don't have to try and tear other people down just for having the "audacity" to like something that you don't.

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. I see a drunken da Vinci doing the Mona Lisa with a 4B pencil on the back of a coaster in a bar because he couldn't be bothererd to get his real canvas and paint-set out. Quickness isn't a subsitute for quality. Render in Iray and be done with it... don't expect people not to notice if you've taken a shortcut with some trickery.... they will.

Many of us here are hobbyists. Many would not claim to be artists, let alone masters. A master might be willing to wait 3 months for an animation to render in Iray. I'm not. 

Actually, I'm the only one who sees my DAZ Studio output and I enjoy creating stories with pictures - for my own pleasure. I really don't feel the need to produce a great work of art and I don't have the time to wait for IRay animations. Stills yes, animations - not a chance.

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. I see a drunken da Vinci doing the Mona Lisa with a 4B pencil on the back of a coaster in a bar because he couldn't be bothererd to get his real canvas and paint-set out. Quickness isn't a subsitute for quality. Render in Iray and be done with it... don't expect people not to notice if you've taken a shortcut with some trickery.... they will.

don't tell me what to do mate 

the masters all used charcoal sketches BTW and I don't think much of the Mona Lisa TBH

also those French Impressionists could have used much better resolution for their renders 

From what I can tell Filament is much faster than 3DL. 

Filament isn't a joke at all. It's quite fun to render animations with, imo.

Well that may be the case, but trading something better for something worse than we already have because it's quicker, but not as good as we had already have seems a zero sum game. I see a drunken da Vinci doing the Mona Lisa with a 4B pencil on the back of a coaster in a bar because he couldn't be bothererd to get his real canvas and paint-set out. Quickness isn't a subsitute for quality. Render in Iray and be done with it... don't expect people not to notice if you've taken a shortcut with some trickery.... they will.