Filament cat again, I added a light for shadows this time

The Filament renders I've seen so far are a great start. Most of them have been more artistically compelling than many of the Iray renders I've seen floating around online.

Maybe I play too many video games, but I simply don't agree. Look at this real-time screen shot from Assassin's Creed: Valhalla:

Now, something like this would be wort some excitement. And this isn't even Unreal Engine, it's "Anvilnext 2.0."

To implement a real-time render engine, Daz should have gone with an established engine. Nobody knows Filament. I'm sure they decided to use it because it is cheap and / or free. 

But you get what you pay for. 

The problem with the idea of cheapening the Daz brand is that a well-executed render isn't obviously done in DS; it could have been created in any 3D program, as far as people who aren't familiar with the assets and tools are concerned.

True. Which is why we should tell people we created it in Daz, and be proud!

I may have missed this in the thread - was anyone able to get softer shadows to work on DAZ Filament? I hope to get home ASAP to test the new 4.14 release - I've been playing only on the beta.

There is no "Filament download". If you mean Daz Studio, which link are you using?

I'm not that impressed with Filament. It sounds like there's a lot to do in order to set up scenes for render. If I want to lose hours doing that, I'll get Reality 4 out.

Is it possible to have "ambient surfaces" to fake emissive ?

I have been trying to give my flames glow,

not as much as I would like

I am guessing Kindred Arts fire product has the elusive settings but cannot buy anymore stuff this year

Personally, I'm "whinging" about it because I know resources at Daz are limited. I wish they'd put their efforts elsewhere. 

 because only things that are usefull to you matter?

Daz Studio's calling card is making near-photorealistic CG images attainable for those of hobbyist skill and above. I believe Filament actually cheapens the brand. When people start posting these and declare them "DAZ STUDIO RENDERS" nobody will be impressed, and it will turn people off to even trying Daz.

Also, now PA's are going to need to figure out how to optimize materials for both Iray and Filament, probably making the quality suffer for both.

I actively promote DS to everyone who follows me on Twitter because I think it's wild that it's not more well known, even as a tool for pose reference. Two main things stop people from trying it, in my experience:

• It looks super advanced and they don't think they can do it.
• Their computers aren't in good shape for rendering.

The first one I can address by being transparent about my workflow. The second usually involves $400 USD or more they don't have. 

The Filament renders I've seen so far are a great start. Most of them have been more artistically compelling than many of the Iray renders I've seen floating around online. The problem with the idea of cheapening the Daz brand is that a well-executed render isn't obviously done in DS; it could have been created in any 3D program, as far as people who aren't familiar with the assets and tools are concerned. But low-quality DS renders have a very specific look that's associated with amateur adult games and the like. 

DS becoming more accessible is a good thing. More people will pick it up and get hooked on posing characters and designing scenes, it may encourage them to make it a full hobby and invest in it, and their work won't be any worse than the first render I made in Iray and posted online, which was very bad (and I was so excited because I couldn't believe I had the power to make the character do the thing).

@Zilvergrafix very nice , as I said before  it looks great on all PBR materials but skin for now , and if you want to make skin looking better in Filament (without SS), you need to made it proper from the beginning and paint the nostrils dark , you need skin maps with Ambient Occlusion baked in , as it was early for games or use bent normals 

Is there a way to get strand based hair to render in Filament? I did a quick test and it works in preview but it disappears when rendered

line tessalation and make it really thick

makes for a damned heavy scene though

I tried that and it shows up um the Filament preview but still doesn't show up when the render.  Does it work for you?

 

it did on the beta not installed the latest yet, about to

Very cool results, thanks for sharing the info.  I just tried another test with my custom hamster SBH and it worked no problem. I just can't seem to get it to work with the dForce strand based hair. Maybe I just need to play with the setting 

Is there a way to get strand based hair to render in Filament? I did a quick test and it works in preview but it disappears when rendered

line tessalation and make it really thick

makes for a damned heavy scene though

I tried increasing the line tessalation and it shows up in the Filament preview but still doesn't show up when the render.  Does it work for you?

Make sure you have the universal tool selected as some tools (like Node Weight Map Brush and Geometry Editor), when selected, will make Strand-Based Hair not show up upon rendering.

So filament don't work with Iray?
Then I guess it's a pass, I'm still learning iray. 

I'm not good with textures which I why I've stuck with Iray so far so I'm wondering if Filament is better than 3Delight with V4 textures and is much configuration needed to render with Filamant.
Steve.

Better?  Not from what I've seen so far.  3DL is an excellent rendering system that has been used for photoreal effects on many feature films, including District 9, Harry Potter & the order of the Phoenix 7 &Half Blood Prince, Terminator Salvation, etc.  When combined with AOL's Advanced Lights, 3DL can also be quite fast and can do a ton of things that Filament can't as of yet, like emmissive surfaces, and some truly amazing shader systems.  And a LOT of later V4 textures are built around those sttings and shaders. Of course, Filament is still very much a WIP, and lacks a lot of the basic abilities that it will no doubt eventually have, so that may change, but looking at the samples I've seen, I personally like the look of 3DL better than the current stage of Filament development.   What Filament really seems to be aiming for right now is a faster way to render Iray compatible materials for those who have older and less powerful computers, and who don't want to/can't upgrade to a newer NVIDIA card. 

Is there a way to get strand based hair to render in Filament? I did a quick test and it works in preview but it disappears when rendered

line tessalation and make it really thick

makes for a damned heavy scene though

I tried that and it shows up um the Filament preview but still doesn't show up when the render.  Does it work for you?

it did on the beta not installed the latest yet, about to

Is there a way to get strand based hair to render in Filament? I did a quick test and it works in preview but it disappears when rendered

line tessalation and make it really thick

makes for a damned heavy scene though

I tried increasing the line tessalation and it shows up in the Filament preview but still doesn't show up when the render.  Does it work for you?

Select the hair in the Scene Tab (the hair is usually parented to the cap for dForce hair so you'll have to open up under the cap to find the hair usually) then go to the surfaces tab and where it says "Line Start Width (mm)" increase that value to increase the line thickness. You might also increase the "Line End Width (mm)" as well if you increase the Line Start Width.

I tried this too and it still didn't show up in the final render

Is there a way to get strand based hair to render in Filament? I did a quick test and it works in preview but it disappears when rendered

line tessalation and make it really thick

makes for a damned heavy scene though

Is there a way to get strand based hair to render in Filament? I did a quick test and it works in preview but it disappears when rendered

Personally, I'm "whinging" about it because I know resources at Daz are limited. I wish they'd put their efforts elsewhere. 

 because only things that are usefull to you matter?

Daz Studio's calling card is making near-photorealistic CG images attainable for those of hobbyist skill and above. I believe Filament actually cheapens the brand. When people start posting these and declare them "DAZ STUDIO RENDERS" nobody will be impressed, and it will turn people off to even trying Daz.

Also, now PA's are going to need to figure out how to optimize materials for both Iray and Filament, probably making the quality suffer for both.

 

I am already doing that with my YouTube channel of crap with 30K subscribers 

You go girl! 

Not sure if I did this right.  BUT messing with the Tonemapper options gave me this result!  Not bad.  I have it set to iRAY render engine but perhaps with the three added nodes it switches over somehow to the Filament engine?  Not sure, still confused about all this!  

 

 

You have to have it set to Filament on the viewport and then on the Render Settings tab, set it from Iray to "Viewport". Then when you hit render it's an instant Filament render.

von Hobo said:

Wow! Really loving this Filament PBR Viewport preview. It's lighting fast!

Nice job DAZ!

It'd be useful if it actually matched the Iray lighting. 

..OK so O gather that FIlament is primarly best for animations.  As I don't bother with animating are there any other advantages to updating? 

The filament preview is pretty much as fast as texture preview but a lot closer to the Iray render.  Lighting seems to mismatch still; there are mismatches I haven't worked out what they are yet, but overall appearance particularly with expressions is a lot better.