Totte said:

I've found that on macOS, DS  6.25.2025.17807 crashes when you eiher save a render that is rendered to new window, or you try to render to disk, always, consistent, on both Apple Silicon and old x86_64 HW, so there is something weird in that build that wasn't in thre previous. I don't know how it behaves on Windows, but on macOS it's always CPU rendering, which might be a hint for Windows too.

 

For what it's worth, same version of DAZ Studio, MacBook Pro M4Pro, Sequioa 15.3 and I just did a Filament test render of an animation saving it in .mov format. No crash, and I'm still able to open the .mov file in iMovie perfectly, complete with Audio track in place. Still loving the Alpha.

I've been saving test images for the last couple of days without any crashing. 

UPDATE: I just rendered the same scene out in iRay, same result (albeit much slower ):

.mov file saved, then opened in iMovie complete with audio track in place, no crashes.

Been away from Studio for a while and catching up on things--one of which is the (relatively) new Filatoon shaders and the Filament renderer.  I have read and compiled as much information as possible on using Filatoon (casting shadows appears to be more tricky than IRay).  I have reproduced all the information below that I have compiled from various sources including this forum (I take no credit for any of this knowledge--I have no knowledge).  Even taking into account everything below, I still can't get a damn spotlight to cast shadows.  I can cast shadows with a distant light and adjust the intensity in various ways with no issues, but cannot get drop shadows to work with anything else.  If you were to hook me up to a lie detector test as to how closely I think I followed the process below, I would pass, but I have to be missing something and I don't know what it is and it's driving me nuts.

Here's what I have compiled and tried to follow to get cast shadows with a Spotlight (is any of this incorrect?):

Open a Scene and add the Basic FilaToon Environment, which spawns a Distant Light and Filament Draw Options.  Be sure to change Distant Light Shadow Type from None (default) to Raytrace.

1. Enabling and Controlling Shadow Casting:

• Shadow Caster: Ensure that the surface of the object you want to cast a shadow has the "Cast Shadows" setting enabled in the FilaToon Shader options.
• Shadow Receiver: Similarly, confirm that the surface receiving the shadow has "Receive Shadows" activated.
• Tweak Shader Settings: Within the shader settings, explore options like "Shadow Smooth" and "MatCap" to refine the appearance of your shadows. 

2. Light Source Configuration:

• Only one Distant Light works at a time.  Filament only "reads" one distant light (whichever one is highest up on the list in the Scene Tab) and if it's set to "Shadows >> None" it can override shadows cast by other lights.
• Point lights do not cast shadows.
• Spotlights can cast shadows, but you have to enable the Shadow Type you want in your light source settings.
  • Make sure to increase Ray Length to 100 (unless you are trying to do something fancy).
  • Also in Light/Shadow Type, switch to Raytrace (unless, again, you intentionally do not want shadows cast by the light).

Spotlight geometry does not do anything to the light or shadow. The only way to adjust spotlights is brightness and angle. (If you want a point light that casts shadows, use a spotlight with the angle increased to 180). If you light your subject with a spotlight and not the distant light, you will get the dark shadows.

If you are using distant light, keep in mind what parts of the scene might be blocking it. You can either hide those elements or go into the surfaces and set Cast Shadows to Off.

You may also want to adjust the Ambient in the scene to something darker to make the lighting look more contrasted.

3. Filament Draw Options:

• On Filament Draw Options, filter menu for Shadow. Up the Shadow Map size to 4096 or more (I find the default 1024 usually creates blocky shadows). Shadow Cascades bumped to 4 often helps, if you have a lot of stuff going on.
• Tone Mapping and Color Grading: Experiment with settings related to shadows within the Filament Draw Options, as well as Tone Mapping and Color Grading, to achieve the desired visual style.
• Experimentation: Combine different settings and lighting arrangements to discover the shadows that best suit your artistic vision. 

4. Additional Considerations:

• Light Rig Setup: Consider using specific lighting setups, like spotlights, and adjusting their ray length to influence shadow behavior.
• LUT Shaders: Applying FilaToon LUT shaders can contribute to smoother shadows and highlights.
• Filatoon Options: On the surface tab for your character's skin you'll see Filatoon options added after you add the shader. You can play with the Filatoon options the shader added [marked in purple] which do all kinds of things like add rim lights and increase the shadow strength as well as making the shadows hard or soft.
• Lower the intensity of the Distant Light so it does not wash out the Spotlight Shadows.
• You may need to play with the environment weight on items to control shadow darkness.

I'm trying to get a noir shadow look, if it helps.  Any suggestions to keep me from banging my head against the wall will be appreciated.  

Richard Haseltine said:

Actually you don't need that - and if you just purchased (within the last 30 days) you should ask for a refund - uber Point is included in the default resources package that is part of Daz Studio, if you have installed that you should already have it (though it is still a 3Delight light that will not do anything special in iray or Filament).

thank you sir  

Actually you don't need that - and if you just purchased (within the last 30 days) you should ask for a refund - uber Point is included in the default resources package that is part of Daz Studio, if you have installed that you should already have it (though it is still a 3Delight light that will not do anything special in iray or Filament).

I did a lowlight render yesterday on my MacMini Pro M4 of Tiili and CJ Eska 9 and it took three hours approximately. That was fine, I had other things to do during that time. And the render came out great.

If I wanted to get a quick render I could render it on my Windows 11 laptop, but I would have had to wait an hour for a cumulative update to chugged its way. By the time it was done, my spine decided I was over sitting in a computer chair for the day.

If I want super quick, I can open the file in the Alpha on the Mac and render it in seconds in Filament and not get the effect I wanted.

Don't ask me why...at the moment everything goes right! I really don't know what's happened, switch on and now Filament works as It should do. I really didn't any change on settings and whatever. It's like It was a kind of joke  thanks for support!!!

The DSON Cache does not store the product details, they are metadata in the database http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/tech_articles/metadata/start

Where you launch the Edito metadata dialogue from is a matter of taste - for example, if you have 3Delight and iray (or Filament) materials and want to set their content type it can be easier to launch the dialogue from the specific sub-folder for those materials, then you can just seelct everything and assign it to the right type - otherwise you have to carefully go through the file list in the dialogue making sure you seelct all and only then ones to be given a specific type.

What happens if you adjust the Environment Intensity setting (in the Environment Settings node)? Iray and Filament are not entirely consistent there.

My Daz studio version is the last one (4.24) and I've got an NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4050. With Filament the scene is completely dark. The strange thing is that all the character details are in. It's kind they're hide somehow. Everything is under-intensified, but they exist. Just into Filament you aren't able to see them. If you switch into iRay everything goes out. Also my graphic driver is the last one. I really don't know what's happened 

Hi. After updating Windows I opened Daz and immediately noticed something strange. I didn't see the usual grid at the bottom. The panel lights up but everything is dark. If I load a figure in Filament I can't see anything. Everything has a black/transparent background. If I switch to iRay everything appears rendered normally. For my convenience I have always used Filament because it doesn't weigh down and is easy to move. Now however if I want to see my work I have to go to iRay. How can I go back to viewing everything only using Filament? Is there any tool to add? Help :):):)

lishonmartin97 said:

FrankTheTank said:

Well, I can't say I notice any difference between 4.23 and 4.24 If anything there seems to be a little bit laggier viewport in 4.24 so I reverted to 4.23. Also the Filament issue with emissives is still present in 4.24. I mentioned it here for reference. I hope that will get fixed before 4.x is abandoned and all effort is in DS 2025. 

How did you revert to daz 4.23?

As long as you kept back-ups of the isntallers just pop them in DIM's dopwnloads folder in place of the current versions, start DIM in offline mode, and install them.

FrankTheTank said:

Well, I can't say I notice any difference between 4.23 and 4.24 If anything there seems to be a little bit laggier viewport in 4.24 so I reverted to 4.23. Also the Filament issue with emissives is still present in 4.24. I mentioned it here for reference. I hope that will get fixed before 4.x is abandoned and all effort is in DS 2025. 

How did you revert to daz 4.23?

RexRed said:

The latest Nvidia Studio driver just fixed everything for me in V2025. The viewport is now in realtime, I think faster than it was in 4.24

I uploaded the latest Nvidia driver today and suddenly it worked. I also tweaked a setting in Windows. If anyone is still having issues, I will post the Windows tweak becasue I am not really sure which thing fixed it.

Now, when I orbit the viewport around all of the shaders uniformly display together in real time. With a figure in the scene and the high resolution Viking camp on a 5090!

In my mind the alpha, is now a beta 

*One issue still lingering, when I move objects around in the scene (in Iray), they move around well enough but they do not draw as they move. When I orbit the scene it draws in real time but the moving objects do not draw as they move in realtime.

*Another thing, when you selct an object, i.e. a figure, and click view frame, it does not frame very well. It zeros in a bit far from the target object sometimes.

Nvidia update didnt change anything for me. Viewport roaming is a little bit better (in not too complex scenes) since the latest Alpha update. Otherwise, as soon as you try to move something in the scene or touch sliders, its down to 5fps. My go to Test Scene is FN Lakeside House. This is barely usable in Alpha (even in Filament/TextureShaded) while it runs smooth in 4.24.

comradenikola92 said:

DoctorJellybean said:

To those who are experiencing viewport lag issues, maybe you could try the following as an experiment:

Make the property based panes that update a lot (e.g., Parameters) not visible, and see how that impacts performance. You don't have to close the pane, just cause another one in the same property group to be raised ("on top").

The state updating is not what is hammering down the viewport, it is the poor implementation of the raster-based viewports which oversaturate the ancient OpenGL API with draw calls in complex scenes, which was one of the big reasons for the push with Mantle->glNext->Vulkan and DX11->DX12 and Metal on Apple, among other things. OGL and DX11 simply never had proper support for multithreading, dispatching of draw calls from different threads is heavily synchronized and you end up being bottlenecked on a single core of your 16-core CPU not being able to keep up with the hundreds of thousands to millions of individual draw calls. I have the fastest consumer processor (9950X3D) and the fastest consumer GPUs (5090s) and it's still 5-9 FPS without hiding everything (ie performing "view frustum culling" myself).

There are techniques that can help here, but using OGL from the getgo for this rewrite was a bad call, plain and simple. Right now I don't see any degree of culling being performed or any of the basic rendering optimization techniques, when I get the time, I'll actually profile the filament renderer with graphics debugging tools and see what is hammering it exactly.

Have you not seen the stuff about RHIs in the change log? I think this may be somewhat relevant https://www.qt.io/blog/graphics-in-qt-6.0-qrhi-qt-quick-qt-quick-3d

DoctorJellybean said:

To those who are experiencing viewport lag issues, maybe you could try the following as an experiment:

Make the property based panes that update a lot (e.g., Parameters) not visible, and see how that impacts performance. You don't have to close the pane, just cause another one in the same property group to be raised ("on top").

The state updating is not what is hammering down the viewport, it is the poor implementation of the raster-based viewports which oversaturate the ancient OpenGL API with draw calls in complex scenes, which was one of the big reasons for the push with Mantle->glNext->Vulkan and DX11->DX12 and Metal on Apple, among other things. OGL and DX11 simply never had proper support for multithreading, dispatching of draw calls from different threads is heavily synchronized and you end up being bottlenecked on a single core of your 16-core CPU not being able to keep up with the hundreds of thousands to millions of individual draw calls. I have the fastest consumer processor (9950X3D) and the fastest consumer GPUs (5090s) and it's still 5-9 FPS without hiding everything (ie performing "view frustum culling" myself).

There are techniques that can help here, but using OGL from the getgo for this rewrite was a bad call, plain and simple. Right now I don't see any degree of culling being performed or any of the basic rendering optimization techniques, when I get the time, I'll actually profile the filament renderer with graphics debugging tools and see what is hammering it exactly.

echristopherclark said:

Oh, I didn't feel ignored. More like I worried that I'd stopped all other conversation with my dumb questions. I was embarrassed.

Anyway, thank you for the help! The rim spotlight luminance was too high to begin with and that solved most of it. I'll try the surface suggestions you mentioned next!

I'd vote for turning down the Bloom value in Filament Draw Options before messing with the individual surface settings. Changing Bloom is quick and easy and has a big impact.

Your questions aren't dumb at all. It may just be that nobody knew an answer to the first one, so nobody responded. FilaToon fever has given way to DS 2025 Alpha fever. There is always a new thing to distract from the previous new thing. Forum threads tend to go stale after awhile. Then there is the issue of all the forum Gateway Errors, that prevent people from reading or posting in the fourm. That also kills activity. Don't be afraid to revive a stale thread with a new relevent question.

Iray, Filament, and the two solid/bounding box mods are not supported as they don't work in the same way.

Sorry, if I'm late to the party here, but I am really impressed with the filament real time rendering since the 2025 alpha.
Have there been actual improvements lately, or am I making this up?

echristopherclark said:

Wow, I am a thread-killer I guess. But at the risk of resurrecting something just for it to die again, I'm coming across another weird problem that I'm hoping someone might be able to help me solve.

When using a spotlight as a rim light, I'm getting this weird effect where the eyes and the insides of characters mouths are getting so bright they appear to glow. Anyone know of any fixes for that?

@echristopherclark Im sorry you've felt ignored here! What is the luminance value of your rim spotlight? It may be unnecessarily too high There are some things you can do in the surfaces pane to mitigate the glow problem, though. Several objects have a Shadow Threshold of -1. Changing that to 0 will help immensely. Start with these:

Base Anime character, Mouth Cavity surface, change Shadow Threshold -1 to 0
Genesis 9 Toon Floating Iris, all surfaces, change Shadow Threshold -1 to 0
Genesis 9 Toon Mouth,  Teeth surface, change Shadow Threshold -1 to 0
Genesis 9 Toon Eye Socket, Eye Socket surface, change Shadow Threshold -1 to 0

You can also lower Bloom Strength in the Filament Draw Options node. That alone my be enough to resolve your glow, without resorting to surface changes.

Note also that the Genesis 9 Toon Floating Iris object's Highlight Lower and Highlight Upper surfaces have emission turned on. That will glow when Bloom is on. You can turn off the emission by setting the Emission Color to black, or just reduce its Luminance rather than turing it all the way off. It just depends on the look you want and the strength of your Bloom settings.

I attached an example scene with Base Anime Masculine surfaces adjusted.

I would like the HDRI to show in a redrawn, low-res way in texture shaded view so I don't need to use filament to adjust it.