Now on a technical side and GPU usage

Filament still use the card when moving the scene with a Stonemason bigger set

• 60% of Card Power same as iray
• 1200Mhz GPU clock 150Mhz lower than iray
• 3000 Mhz Memory clock same as iray
• 2.35 GB of VRAM same as Iray 
• 10-19% GPU usage compared to 99% in iray
• I used card for that don't run the display

I had hard time to rotate the huge scene around where it move smooth like a butter in Iray even on a CPU

It is slower than Iray or OpenGL when get about bigger scenes and camera movement , sorry Animators your dream just crashed 

So if someone else told you again that they are so happy about Filament that they don't need a proper graphic card or system , let them dream , they gonna chock faster with Filament than actually Iray once they reach their limitation.

Real time render engine is hungry for power and memory ,  just like a game engine 

Now imagine if D|S had a full Filament engine ,  nobody plays PBR based games on CPU , but you can still render with it in iray , it need less resources than real time rendering engine 

And if you want your images to looks like 30 years ago be my guest , you will only make a bad name for Daz Studio and yourself

sorry I was just shocked what I just saw in the forum thread , the Earth becomes Flat , an Armagedon of 3D , have a mercy !

@Mec4d: thanks, once more, for the deep dive. I've read it all twice and experimented some more. (Aren't you the guy who said 'bah it's all so easy who needs info'? :P )

With limited experience it's intransparent, I've spent much time trying to get a handle on the iray Uber shader, skimmed the MDL spec and other things, but nothing tells you, for example, what Glossy_layered_weight vs. Glossy_reflectivity is, how it interacts with the dual_lobe_* parameters and the top coat; all trial and error. And yeah, it doesn't combine with metallicity. Erh, of course not, never! (I tried it out, it doesn't. ah. ;).
Now there's a new bunch of rules how all that interacts with Filament. I don't have to know those details, but I prefer to.

I see three user groups for Filament:
#1 better preview for iRay (most of us)
#2 just like the different, less realistic look (might convert some 3DL die-hards)
#3 would prefer iRay but won't pay the price (regular laptops, animators)

I'm firmly #1. I care about
a) pretty. Seriously that's quite important to me, I look at this preview a lot and I prefer to see pretty graphics. Fil is a very big step forward over OGL.
b) close enough to iray so I can set up as much as possible in Filament (now works for me, for posing; hdri dome; rough shadows; basic lighting) which is great because it is so responsive.
For #2 and #3 I imagine that Fil in Daz will do nice things when a scene is created for it. Not Unreal nice but pleasant.

Open issues right now (those can't be solved by the user, right)?
- hair with cutout opacity (flickers on and off)
- transparent stuff and skin does not give a similar preview currently.
- lights are harsh when you have no dome (every light is a point light to Fil -> hard shadows, high contrast bump maps).
- no emissives. Scenes based on that kind of light will be dark, you'll need an extra Fil light that you have to toggle off for iRay renders.
...and yah, it could be a bit more stable, I'm having more issues than usual. Might be fighting with the other engines over the VRam.
 

That's all I can think of. I'm quite happy now that I found the Fil Options node.

Wendy look on the screenshot 

in the first image you can adjust the Ambjent Occlusion , make sure your objects in the scene are not pure white  or pure black 

you can adjust the resolution, bias and power of the Ambient Occlusion 

in the second image you can add Distance light and create shadows 

Use Environment maps that don't have a sun for this option for better result .

Create new distance light , click on it and go to Parameters , under Light/Shadow select shadow type  from the menu or there will be no shadow

Next select Filament Options Node and under Scale : adjust the Enviorment to lower values if you don't see shadows or use the Distance Light scale to Incrase the light to your liking .

The Tonemapping in Filament options node is to adjust the overal brightness of the scene under Filament 

All options under FON don't affecting Iray final rendering , it is all separate 

When I want to calibrate  the light conditions in Iray and Filament I only use the Iray's Tonemapping and Filament AO settings (Screen Space) and use HDRI without sun for easy setup

where is this Filament Draw options node?

I found tonemapper and environment load with the advanced iray render settings under render presets in my library

my drive:\My DAZ 3D Library\Render Presets\iray

Some shaders may looks weird under Filament , especially the one that has more advanced settings and not just a simple basic shaders , Specular/Glossiness shaders with a top coat may looks like ice on top of the surface but still render correctly in Iray. Adjusting them to Filament may not render fine in iray and you should not do that.

Filament will show some simple shaders just fine and very accurate but once it get more complex it will not works as it is just a draw mode and not final render engine .

For example I created ground shader with stones and water between , separately the surfaces was looking just fine at its own under Filament with proper PBR values for bars color and reflections , but when combined into one map the effect was not what expected , it needed additional control map to work proper with the water and stone reflective values as you may be surprised that Water has less reflectance than a stone , skin or plastic

that why things appear darker when they are wet and lighter when they are dry .

So if you work with Metals and Nonmetals as a separate materials you don't get in too much troubles setting it up , it is easy and values are everywhere online to test it out , just don't forget about the reflectance values of your materials , as much important as a right Albedo Values  

Under Metallicity/Roughness shader 

the common default reflectance of nonmetal material is 4% , by default D|S have this setting already what is 0.33 for the Glossy Layered weight and 0.50 for the Gloss Reflectivity 

that include materials like Plastic, porcelain , paint and most common surfaces as the range of the  reflectance is very small 

But when get about nonmetals materials like Ice, Water, Glass , skin or Diamond  it is little different 

Diamond is 16% vs 4%

Water is 2% vs 4%

Ice is 1.8 % vs 4%

Skin 3.5% vs 4%

and it may be not a big deal when you look at the object from front view , but once the light hit from the side or behing you will see the huge difference and your surfaces melting together under one plastic coat

like the little example below 

so I would not get too crazy focusing on Filament and how things look, it is estimated , it will never looks exactly the same as in Iray as it is just a DRAW mode and people need get over this . Waste of time , same as comparing 3DL shaders to OpenGL preview in D|S

Same with bump maps and normal maps , bump maps looking actually very accurate in both Filament and Iray at the same level, but not all Normal maps will , Normal maps with very fine details will looks fuzzy in Filament or even a Game Engine , it works best with Normal maps that have bigger elements and for the smaller details  go with bump maps and for the micro details you have roughness maps according to PBR book for the real time rendering .

I wish DAZ Team created a separate shader mixing option from the gecko , for Metallicity, Specular and Weighted as the way it is only confusing even more people that mixing up values of all shaders together even if it not works at all , using Glossiness specular with Metallicity etc.. and learning nothing from it 

When I see a promo shaders for Iray I can tell it is not good just from the promo already , the system in Iray give us opportunity to skip adjusting things , just throw it in and render , that was the goal , not adjusting it for each scene or lighting , that was the old ways that worked only for one scene and lighting. 

I guessing that why so much confusion with Filament Draw mode , we are back to the beginning of PBR , if you don't learn now you gonna stay confused forever and even more with future upgrades 

with "YOU"' I mean the users 

and coming back to the image I attached with combined materials on one map, you can see the difference in reflectance I was talking early about , and maybe not huge value changes but the final result change dramatically , not only additing details not seeing in top image , but also changing the overall look , based on true world values and not my eyes, as much as my eyes love the reflections in the water on top of the image but the rest is not they way it should because of that . 

That are the little things that should be not ignored just because someone don't care about or need it, that are basics , you skip the basics now , you get lost later .

No matter hobby or pro I think it is worth the time to learn the basics of your favor program other way it is just a hause of cards .

 

Thanks for those MEC4D, I've tried some adjustments because some surfaces look like a 'coat of ice' is on them, your PBR Swabs should help.

where is this Filament Draw options node?

I found tonemapper and environment load with the advanced iray render settings under render presets in my library

my drive:\My DAZ 3D Library\Render Presets\iray

Filament Draw Options node have their own separate settings for the light intensity and Environment under Filament only, and not affecting Iray rendering.

It is there to calibrate better the Filament mode so it matches better lighting in Iray in some cases . Or if you want to have shadows under Filament using Distance light or spot light you will need to adjust the settings of the Environment under Parameters of Filament Draw Options Node . 

The Tonemapper and Environment nodes you see under scene are for Iray and are a key to everything , if I don't use distance or spot light under Filament mode  I use only Iray Tonemapper node to adjust the lighting and setting and it looks exactly as good in Filament as it does in Iray without spending too much time on it .

Once you add Distance and spot lights , things going to change and the result will be not the same when rendered with Iray , for that you have the Filament Draw Options Node and all it's settings 

Once the Beta becomes a General release there will be for sure a manual regarding the all new options , for now everything can change until it is ready for the public general release ,so making manual now is not the right time , but some temporary guide for others would never hurt for now so they can beta test this build and not just messing around with it and complain about the cake that is not yet in the oven,  if you know what I mean.

Ah!

- "Filament Draw Options" node. THAT is one thing I was missing badly. Never found it before (came together with Tonemapper and Environment options in the Info panel. I ignore those because they don't make sense to me, they add nothing new?). Simple surfaces now look similar enough to iRay. Skin might need an extra tweak option or two to adjust for "should be darker due to subsurface material".

- "Ugly big bump maps", that is related to Menu > Edit > Preferences > Interface > Texture Resources (default 50% Quality). 100% looks decent (and I don't think my GPU cares, this is no Crysis after all).

For a pro all this might look trivial, but to an amateur this isn't intuitive. I'm considering writing a "readme_filament.txt" on this topic, I'm not that qualified, but better than nothing.

(trying to figure out how to recreate the "occasionally drops Environment map" issue. The fix is to select "none" and then select it again, then it will re-load.)

Cool scene Wendy!

yeah but not Filament

I cannot figure out why it wouldn't load, it half loaded

I need to grab a capture to explain but busy rendering something else

is smaller texture maps than most new stuff and 3 are Poser legacy figures

First of all you need Filament in the viewport to be able to render out bigger render of the Filament, other way you will get OpenGL render only as it was there for so long I guess you never tried it before .

I have no issue with opacity map, it render exactly as I see it in the viewport , no matter what draw mode I use .

If you use cartoon shader preview the setting of cutoutpacity not really matter, as long there is an proper alpha map , assuming you using Iray shader for that , other viewport modes than Filament and Iray was made for 3DL shaders so it render as OpenGL as it was before.

Use 3DL shaders for the cartoon mode preview as Iray shader not really works with it at full  , however if you use opacity map it works, it only need to be black and white without middle gray colors for a true alpha, if the eyelashes alpha is not completely white on black it will not works . the proper cutout opacity values are 0 or 1 and nothing between it, that why it is called Cutout , opacity on materials don't excist in PBR iray shader

same when you render refractions like glass etc.. it need to have something behind it like a prop or Enviorment as it will not render in a vacuum space and not in Filament

looks below, cartoon viewport and cutout alpha map ( Iray shader as I was too lazy to change it to 3DL ) and Filament render out and the rest works fine , can you show image to see the problem you have ?

This falls under the category of, "Well, that's embarassing!"

I remember searching the forums with Google, looking for a way to render the "Cartoon Shaded" version of the Viewport draw. I found post after post where other people asking the same question were told they need PwToon or ToonyCam Pro. Not once did I see a response that said, "just set your render engine to OpenGL in the Render Settings."

And now that Daz has renamed the setting "Viewport", I "discovered" I can now render Cartoon Shaded. Only now you're telling me, that option has been available to me all along… This underscores why a manual would be really useful. (Even though I understand perfectly why a manual for a "moving target" is just not feasible.)

As always, thank you for your help. Hugs.

Filament is used as a draw mode not a full render engine in Daz Studio, it uses PBR shaders that are based on reflection, same as Iray shaders or any PBR shader. You don't need to create any separate shaders for use with Filament , it is not a thing and it doesn't use its own special shaders , you can compare it to Iray Draw mode Interactive . 

It uses Distance light and a couple of spot light but there is limitation , it also uses Environment as IBL so HDRI with sun will not produce shadows , only reflections of the environment .

The surface material in Filament don't reflect other surfaces or objects , so using emitter light shaders will not work, there will be no global illumination for the same reason .

Simple Metallic shader setting works fine as they do in iray

Metals and nonmetals surfaces 

Nonmetals:

Base Color maps (Albedo)

Roughness maps ( micro surface )

Bump/Normal maps 

----------------------------------

Metals

Metallicity map or value set to 1

Base Color ( specular)

Roughness map ( micro surface)

Bump/Normal maps

and that is all about , no magic there or special thing you believe you need .

It is a Draw mode to help you better set a scene for Iray, see where the Environment is etc.. as that was not possible before with OpenGL 

PBR materials should work across all PBR engines at the same level, but the quality of the final render depends on the end rendering engine as in our case is Iray, the final render engine .

You can use Filament to compose your scene, animation or a concept art scene , don't see it as your new render engine as that is not . It is the same as OpenGL preview vs  3DL rendering 

If DAZ team installed the full Filament render engine , things would be different but you will need a good cards to render things out as you do with Iray so make not sense 

Filament in D|S  is a real time PBR draw preview , there is no rendering time but FPS,  and it uses as much of a memory as anything you throw in the scene.

You can improve the quality of Filament Draw mode under Settings of Interface in DS as you would do for OpenGL preview for example performance vs texture details etc.. 

as with all PBR engines you should not use it with an empty space, your can load your environment map or IBL and use direct light or spot light to have a shadows of course you will need a ground to catch the shadows, you need to adjust the environment light ISO ( Filament option node need to be created for additional control of light and AO ) so it don't wash off the shadows from the spotlight, in short the light need to be proper balanced . 

I made a lot of comparisons on a simple PBR materials and it works just as expected 

If you create a proper simple PBR shader it should work fine in both Filament and Iray, but not all Iray's shader functions will work in Filament or looks the same as again it is a DRAW preview mode only, simple basic !

For example human figures where you're gonna miss a lot of shader settings like for example SSS and others.

A lot of programs use this type of draw mode to help the artist in visualization of the final shaders they are working on , it is estimated and not the final look but very helpful .

The lack of reflection between materials make it less usable as you may wish as it will never look right and should be not used for a final work, it is great to render out a preview animation as it is fast so you can catch up on little mistakes before final rendering . Setting up single materials without firing Iray , or see the environment location so you can properly set up your figures , especially for those that use CPU or low end cards for rendering, is gonna save some serious power consumption and time .

So that is all about, sorry if this spoiled your expectations , but it works the way it meant to do.

I was very surprised to see it as we already have Interactive Draw mode for Iray but it was not a real time rendering and heavy on GPU ,  Filament Draw mode is simple, PBR based  and in real time ,especially usable for people creating assets for games using D|S as the visual results are very closer .

I am throwing in some of my early comparison tests using Filament/Iray  base PBR shaders , as they looks mostly the same on a whole platform of software 

Thanks for those MEC4D, I've tried some adjustments because some surfaces look like a 'coat of ice' is on them, your PBR Swabs should help.

Ah!

- "Filament Draw Options" node. THAT is one thing I was missing badly. Never found it before (came together with Tonemapper and Environment options in the Info panel. I ignore those because they don't make sense to me, they add nothing new?). Simple surfaces now look similar enough to iRay. Skin might need an extra tweak option or two to adjust for "should be darker due to subsurface material".

- "Ugly big bump maps", that is related to Menu > Edit > Preferences > Interface > Texture Resources (default 50% Quality). 100% looks decent (and I don't think my GPU cares, this is no Crysis after all).

For a pro all this might look trivial, but to an amateur this isn't intuitive. I'm considering writing a "readme_filament.txt" on this topic, I'm not that qualified, but better than nothing.

(trying to figure out how to recreate the "occasionally drops Environment map" issue. The fix is to select "none" and then select it again, then it will re-load.)

Originally Filament is for IBL , PBR is reflection based system as everything is shiny in a real world.  Using Spot light or Distance light  will never works , as that is the same like you fire a spot light in a vacuum space , all you will see is a black object with a small specular reflection in the middle . And since surfaces materials don't reflect from each other under Filament Draw Mode  you need Enviorment map to experience the full effect of it and it needs 360 degree IBL to work proper , Distance light or spot light are additional stuff , as it allow you to replace the missing sun in your HDRI and add shadow , most PBR based programs with this kind of engines works the same way, HDRI and a Distance light with a shadow since it can't use the full potential of HDRI 

for the second part of your question Richard may have better answer as I don't know exactly what is happening in your case , it should not , maybe a bug I don't know

Excellent post, MEC4D, thank you. I'm now trying out some of the things you listed.

@Richard: I already run beta .60 so I have that change already. I was under the impression it is for regular lights, not HDRIs, but not sure.

In the meantime I figured out somthing that confused me: it looks like under memory pressure (iray render) both my 8k HDRI map and the spotlight gets dropped. When going back to Filament preview later, those are not (always) loaded again, so you get the default HDRI and no spotlights/shadows.

(BTW I hope I didn't come across whiney; that was just the essence of what I learned. Filament is cool)

I think M9 needs to step it up a notch if DAZ3D wants him to stay competitive.

This is the level of realism that should be expected in the near future, otherwise it's the same ol same ol.

"I don't want reality.  I want magic!" (I think Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE)  Please don't make DAZ figures PHOTO REAL.  There are 700 billion stock photographs available of every  concievaable subject costing next to nothing on the Internet already.  It's VERY VERY VERY easy to just buy a stock image and in Photoshop, composit into an image.  $200,000,000 movies still look phony. 

M4 looked like a cartoon. Every version after that was created to make these characters look more realistic. It's the whole basis of DAZ's platform. The program doesn't even need to handle extra geometry. It just needs to update how it handles hair, light and textures. That's where it falls flat and bogs down.

This Lightwave model (see pics) has almost identical geometry. How its uses it is next level.

I have nothing against photorealism, but is that what the average Daz customer wants?   A lot of people don't, or don't much care.  For people making comics or visual novels and even many people creating stills, realism doesn't seem to be a big priority.  Their focus is telling a story, not amazing people with eyeball reflections.  Excessive realism can be a distraction from the story.  In fact, a lot of them will be better served by Filament than by Iray once a decent set of shaders and conversion and other tools become available.  There are games with beautifully made cutscenes, but if the gameplay is crap, the game will still fail.  Meanwhile, lots of people still play WoW and Lineage and FFXIV.  MS Flight Simulator 2020 is pretty, but how long do most people really want to fly a plane to nowhere around?

Point is that I think it's presumptuous to say that Daz has to do this or that, just because it's possible.   It's their company and their customer base they have to deal with the decisions they make.  Besides, it's not like there hasn't been progress already.

There is no doubt they want realism in the way they look, looking at products offered, the forum's accolades for new products, the DAZ Galleries, and lots of other data. The customers want realistic 3D models. No doubt about it.

It's those that (still) like toons that are the outliers with regards to 3D. 

Gaming world: Compare the original Wolfenstein 3D to whatever the the latest version of Wolfenstein looks like. Where cartoons have had any resurgence it was because lack of capable hardware forced the issue, eg mobile devices have to use more toon-like lighting and geometry methods.

Disney even is remaking classic toons into realistic movies. You can argue all you want that they succeeded or failed but they did try to make them look more realistic and solely to make money on the 'realism' as we all already know the stories.

We also know the story for any first person shooter you care to name: good guy, bad guy, shoot each other. Each new GPU release gets hoarded and scalped because they are crucial to enabling more realism in such new releases in the same old games, rehashed with more realism.

I will be interested to see Genesis 9. I expect that dForce, SBH, more use of nVidia SDKs, and more realism is very much a part of it. I think that while they'll invent new mechanisms to use old hair, clothing, and such (it is SW) they will make new G9 hair, clothing, and such that it completely breaks backwards compatibility. They did it for going from V4/M4 to Genesis.

For gaming it has diminishing returns that the industry's been reckoning with. It costs an immense amount of money to keep chasing realism as a selling point. When the gaming market was smaller, that kind of thing used to be a point of pride--like, "Wow, this game is so realistic you need a cutting edge rig to play it!" and then that would mean bragging rights for hardcore gamers who could. Now that gaming is a mainstream pastime, there's a smaller audience that cares about that, and a bigger market that cares more about it looking good. 

I don't see realism talked about in the industry as much as immersion, and the former isn't 100% necessary for the latter.

Wolfenstein: The New Order still has what I would consider Daz-level stylization in its character designs. That not only helps communicate ideas, but a stylized game still looks good two years down the line, or even ten. The most photorealistic game I can think of is Death Stranding, a passion project (albeit a very expensive one that made a lot of money) made by a director who wanted to put his buddies and favorite actors in a game. The characters are still subtly stylized, with deliberate choices made in their skin textures and coloring and movements. But even so, once the novelty factor wears off, the models look weird when they do real human things in mundane situations. 

The Last of Us Part 2 is a good example of where I think the industry is trending and where big studios will choose to focus their efforts. The characters are realistic enough that they fit into environments that look like real places, but you probably wouldn't mistake a screenshot of one of the characters for a photograph. This is useful in storytelling because it makes them more-real-than-real emotionally and doesn't distract the audience as much when a character model moves in a way a human being wouldn't. The FFVII remake has very realistic elements, but the characters are stylized. Those examples aren't really toony, but this approach lets studios express an art style that sets them apart in the market.

To me, most Daz characters fall in that area and work well for it. I think the main advancement I want to see overall is anything that makes it easier to make deliberate choices about the way characters and their attached props behave in the scene. 

It would be not a long manual Wendy , too simple to bother with manuals 

The only thing I ever touch is the Filament Options node that you have to create to adjust the AO bias and resolution when working on a setup shader on a simple object in the scene , the rest like light I setup under Tone Mapping and enviorment so if I want render out in Iray it match my lights . Of course the spot and distance light will shine brighter in Filament than it does in Iray , as the reflections in Filament process it differently , that is only negative aspect I found about.

I also use distance light with shadows as that allow me to have better visualization of the shader in light and dark areas . As you know the base shader color can't be brighter than the light source what is 255 255 255 

You want stuff to looks nice, you need to follow the simple  PBR values , and don't use complex shaders like skin etc.. I tried it all long time before you get hands on it so I know the possibilities.

I prefer to use it with Metallicty/Roughness shader than Specular based shaders as the last don't always turns the way I want .

there is no manual 

You have a point here , that is the reason I reply to you as I saw your early posts .

If someone go fishing with a pan,  that is their choice, hammer may be used for more than just a nails but sadly Filament draw mode is not multi-functional new render engine , and not used in D|S the way everyone expected .

 it is not for rendering and definitely not for human skin shaders or any other complex shader as for that I still have to fire the Iray engine .

Original idea for Filament was to bring it to Android phones and system so people can enjoy better VR and other stuff , and the full engine do nice job , but we don't have it all in D|S, again it is just a draw mode for PBR materials based on reflections only .If you want to have great results you need to stick with the PBR values and settings , of course not for human skins or complex surfaces . It is basic !

You think Eevee in Blender does a better job ? nope , there is no global illumination and a very simple engine , the light is not accurate , it is just for preview and not final render engine and can't compare with final cycles render .

Who knows maybe the future bring us a real time full game render engine to D|S but it is not Filament and not now .

I use Filament type of engines in my other programs and they do exactly the same as in D|S so I don't expect anything more here but happy to see it for now as for me the old OpenGL is totally useless and hoping only things get better in the future .

Thankyou - especially @MEC4D - for the detailled responses. I didn't expect anything further after Ivy's variation on the RTFM theme but both threads are helpful to understand the concept. In my experiments so far, I have found Filament to be clunky as a viewport draw mode so prefer OpenGL even with all its drawbacks. I wonder why they went with Filament rather than updating OpenGL which, I gather, is far better than the version we have in DAZ Studio.

My main hopes for Filament were as an alternative to IRay for short animations (IRay is just not practical for a couple of hundred frames). But my animations have humans fairly close to the camera and they don't look good in Filament. Skin, in particular, looks pretty poor so I was hoping that someone would know how to make skin look a little more realistic. I came to similar conclusions with Eevee in Blender but I have since seen some pretty good Eevee approximations although I'm not yet skilled enough with the Blender node system to tweak it myself.

Excellent post, MEC4D, thank you. I'm now trying out some of the things you listed.

@Richard: I already run beta .60 so I have that change already. I was under the impression it is for regular lights, not HDRIs, but not sure.

In the meantime I figured out somthing that confused me: it looks like under memory pressure (iray render) both my 8k HDRI map and the spotlight gets dropped. When going back to Filament preview later, those are not (always) loaded again, so you get the default HDRI and no spotlights/shadows.

(BTW I hope I didn't come across whiney; that was just the essence of what I learned. Filament is cool)

-Filament does not use HDRI only IBL   , HDRI don't works , it use IBL for Ambient light ( Reflections Only )  so HDRI loaded that have sun will not works and not produce shadows .

-Filament don't show 300% brighter , all my HDRI maps I used in early testing show the same brightness in Iray and Filament ( beside the one that have sun in Iray ) unless you adjust it using the Filament option node what will set the calibration off and never match the Iray light settings , I only use Tone mapping to adjust the light so I have closer result in both .

When you using Direct  light and spot light the scenario change as it looks much dimmer in Iray so harder to get the proper results , I wish for improvement 

- Filament will show lower resolution of the actual Environment map and in IBL , if it is is blurred it will show blurred and if normal details it should show normal details at lower level of resolution kinda as Iray Interactive mode

-Again the Spot light create funky light and worse effect than OpenGL preview, the fall off is horrible , PBR is based on reflections only , that maybe it don't works the way we expect it to work in Filament, it has own limitations

-emitters are shaders , Filament don't reflect other objects surfaces so emitters will not works and there is no global illuminations , again only reflections from IBL environment and Spot light /Distance light and that is, same for SSS and other Iray shader functions, limited and basic . 

-shadows works from Distance light and Spotlights, it need to be activate under Parameters /Light /shadow , but if you have environment map on you need to adjust it to lower level so it don;t wash off the shadows

- IBL will pass through objects , again it is only for PBR reflection based engine , not fund rendering and works same way as in other programs I use , you can use AO settings  in Filament to limit it a bit 

- I did not experienced any hanging on , you may adjust settings under Interface in D|S , it depends on your system and graphic card too , it is real time rendering based on the frame rate of your system , I see sometimes things turning blue when loading shaders or maps from the library , just for a second .

and I agree that having the ability to see the Environment map without firing Iray or your GPU is a big advantage compared to OpenGL, a big improvement and I hope it only improves .

Interactive Iray mode does a lot more than Filament , but it is not as light on your system as Filament  , other way what is the point of having it if  you can use Interactive mode anyway to get better results before final Iray rendering .

It was meant for better preview than the old OpenGL offers and not for rendering .. it's not full render engine 

Filament is very simple , there is no need of an understanding more as you have already with Iray.  Follow the PBR rules and you will find your ways in both Filament and Iray

Well, since we now already have a thread focused on Filament lights, here's my limited understanding so far:

- Filament does HDRI (yay!) but it's about 300% brighter than iRay, so I must turn it down for my scenes. It will easily overpower all other light sources.

- The dome is sometimes drawn in detail and sometimes as a blurred light source only. No idea how/when/why.

- Spotlights work BUT each spotlight has a light cone. With iRay/Textured the lenght of the cone does not matter, but with Filament, light just stops abruptly at the end of the cone. I must resize my lights.

- it doesn't do emissive surfaces.

- it doesn't do Subsurface scattering, and typical G8 figures use that heavily. Surfaces with low/no SSS (incl. at least some 3DL skins) look better in Filament.

- Shadows apparently can work but I have not seen it so far. Objects do not stop HRDI light. Nostrils tend to glow.

- Filament preview likes to hang occasionally, sometimes for many minutes

I'm hoping DAZ will keep improving it. It's so FAST. Posing your camera so that the scene is in harmony with the HDRI background is way more fun in Filament.

 

Thankyou - especially @MEC4D - for the detailled responses. I didn't expect anything further after Ivy's variation on the RTFM theme but both threads are helpful to understand the concept. In my experiments so far, I have found Filament to be clunky as a viewport draw mode so prefer OpenGL even with all its drawbacks. I wonder why they went with Filament rather than updating OpenGL which, I gather, is far better than the version we have in DAZ Studio.

My main hopes for Filament were as an alternative to IRay for short animations (IRay is just not practical for a couple of hundred frames). But my animations have humans fairly close to the camera and they don't look good in Filament. Skin, in particular, looks pretty poor so I was hoping that someone would know how to make skin look a little more realistic. I came to similar conclusions with Eevee in Blender but I have since seen some pretty good Eevee approximations although I'm not yet skilled enough with the Blender node system to tweak it myself.

Well, since we now already have a thread focused on Filament lights, here's my limited understanding so far:

- Filament does HDRI (yay!) but it's about 300% brighter than iRay, so I must turn it down for my scenes. It will easily overpower all other light sources.

- The dome is sometimes drawn in detail and sometimes as a blurred light source only. No idea how/when/why.

- Spotlights work BUT each spotlight has a light cone. With iRay/Textured the lenght of the cone does not matter, but with Filament, light just stops abruptly at the end of the cone. I must resize my lights.

- it doesn't do emissive surfaces.

- it doesn't do Subsurface scattering, and typical G8 figures use that heavily. Surfaces with low/no SSS (incl. at least some 3DL skins) look better in Filament.

- Shadows apparently can work but I have not seen it so far. Objects do not stop HRDI light. Nostrils tend to glow.

- Filament preview likes to hang occasionally, sometimes for many minutes

I'm hoping DAZ will keep improving it. It's so FAST. Posing your camera so that the scene is in harmony with the HDRI background is way more fun in Filament.

On the first, there's in the change log that looks relevant

Tweaked default values for tonemapping and scene lighting for the Filament (PBR) DrawStyle to better reflect values used by the NVIDIA Iray renderer

http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log#4_12_2_58

Filament is used as a draw mode not a full render engine in Daz Studio, it uses PBR shaders that are based on reflection, same as Iray shaders or any PBR shader. You don't need to create any separate shaders for use with Filament , it is not a thing and it doesn't use its own special shaders , you can compare it to Iray Draw mode Interactive . 

It uses Distance light and a couple of spot light but there is limitation , it also uses Environment as IBL so HDRI with sun will not produce shadows , only reflections of the environment .

The surface material in Filament don't reflect other surfaces or objects , so using emitter light shaders will not work, there will be no global illumination for the same reason .

Simple Metallic shader setting works fine as they do in iray

Metals and nonmetals surfaces 

Nonmetals:

Base Color maps (Albedo)

Roughness maps ( micro surface )

Bump/Normal maps 

----------------------------------

Metals

Metallicity map or value set to 1

Base Color ( specular)

Roughness map ( micro surface)

Bump/Normal maps

and that is all about , no magic there or special thing you believe you need .

It is a Draw mode to help you better set a scene for Iray, see where the Environment is etc.. as that was not possible before with OpenGL 

PBR materials should work across all PBR engines at the same level, but the quality of the final render depends on the end rendering engine as in our case is Iray, the final render engine .

You can use Filament to compose your scene, animation or a concept art scene , don't see it as your new render engine as that is not . It is the same as OpenGL preview vs  3DL rendering 

If DAZ team installed the full Filament render engine , things would be different but you will need a good cards to render things out as you do with Iray so make not sense 

Filament in D|S  is a real time PBR draw preview , there is no rendering time but FPS,  and it uses as much of a memory as anything you throw in the scene.

You can improve the quality of Filament Draw mode under Settings of Interface in DS as you would do for OpenGL preview for example performance vs texture details etc.. 

as with all PBR engines you should not use it with an empty space, your can load your environment map or IBL and use direct light or spot light to have a shadows of course you will need a ground to catch the shadows, you need to adjust the environment light ISO ( Filament option node need to be created for additional control of light and AO ) so it don't wash off the shadows from the spotlight, in short the light need to be proper balanced . 

I made a lot of comparisons on a simple PBR materials and it works just as expected 

If you create a proper simple PBR shader it should work fine in both Filament and Iray, but not all Iray's shader functions will work in Filament or looks the same as again it is a DRAW preview mode only, simple basic !

For example human figures where you're gonna miss a lot of shader settings like for example SSS and others.

A lot of programs use this type of draw mode to help the artist in visualization of the final shaders they are working on , it is estimated and not the final look but very helpful .

The lack of reflection between materials make it less usable as you may wish as it will never look right and should be not used for a final work, it is great to render out a preview animation as it is fast so you can catch up on little mistakes before final rendering . Setting up single materials without firing Iray , or see the environment location so you can properly set up your figures , especially for those that use CPU or low end cards for rendering, is gonna save some serious power consumption and time .

So that is all about, sorry if this spoiled your expectations , but it works the way it meant to do.

I was very surprised to see it as we already have Interactive Draw mode for Iray but it was not a real time rendering and heavy on GPU ,  Filament Draw mode is simple, PBR based  and in real time ,especially usable for people creating assets for games using D|S as the visual results are very closer .

I am throwing in some of my early comparison tests using Filament/Iray  base PBR shaders , as they looks mostly the same on a whole platform of software 

I think M9 needs to step it up a notch if DAZ3D wants him to stay competitive.

This is the level of realism that should be expected in the near future, otherwise it's the same ol same ol.

"I don't want reality.  I want magic!" (I think Blanche Dubois in Tennessee Williams STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE)  Please don't make DAZ figures PHOTO REAL.  There are 700 billion stock photographs available of every  concievaable subject costing next to nothing on the Internet already.  It's VERY VERY VERY easy to just buy a stock image and in Photoshop, composit into an image.  $200,000,000 movies still look phony. 

M4 looked like a cartoon. Every version after that was created to make these characters look more realistic. It's the whole basis of DAZ's platform. The program doesn't even need to handle extra geometry. It just needs to update how it handles hair, light and textures. That's where it falls flat and bogs down.

This Lightwave model (see pics) has almost identical geometry. How its uses it is next level.

I have nothing against photorealism, but is that what the average Daz customer wants?   A lot of people don't, or don't much care.  For people making comics or visual novels and even many people creating stills, realism doesn't seem to be a big priority.  Their focus is telling a story, not amazing people with eyeball reflections.  Excessive realism can be a distraction from the story.  In fact, a lot of them will be better served by Filament than by Iray once a decent set of shaders and conversion and other tools become available.  There are games with beautifully made cutscenes, but if the gameplay is crap, the game will still fail.  Meanwhile, lots of people still play WoW and Lineage and FFXIV.  MS Flight Simulator 2020 is pretty, but how long do most people really want to fly a plane to nowhere around?

Point is that I think it's presumptuous to say that Daz has to do this or that, just because it's possible.   It's their company and their customer base they have to deal with the decisions they make.  Besides, it's not like there hasn't been progress already.

There is no doubt they want realism in the way they look, looking at products offered, the forum's accolades for new products, the DAZ Galleries, and lots of other data. The customers want realistic 3D models. No doubt about it.

It's those that (still) like toons that are the outliers with regards to 3D. 

Gaming world: Compare the original Wolfenstein 3D to whatever the the latest version of Wolfenstein looks like. Where cartoons have had any resurgence it was because lack of capable hardware forced the issue, eg mobile devices have to use more toon-like lighting and geometry methods.

Disney even is remaking classic toons into realistic movies. You can argue all you want that they succeeded or failed but they did try to make them look more realistic and solely to make money on the 'realism' as we all already know the stories.

We also know the story for any first person shooter you care to name: good guy, bad guy, shoot each other. Each new GPU release gets hoarded and scalped because they are crucial to enabling more realism in such new releases in the same old games, rehashed with more realism.

I will be interested to see Genesis 9. I expect that dForce, SBH, more use of nVidia SDKs, and more realism is very much a part of it. I think that while they'll invent new mechanisms to use old hair, clothing, and such (it is SW) they will make new G9 hair, clothing, and such that it completely breaks backwards compatibility. They did it for going from V4/M4 to Genesis.