There are no real showstoppers for me, but as well-documented as the 3DS and DXF file formats are, it is odd that you cannot import or export those. I work a lot with vintage computer graphics programs on the Amiga, and it would be cool to be able to render that stuff with Iray or even Filament.

I'm running 4.22.1.123 beta for most of my needs, and I think it's about the best version of DS I've used. It's pretty stable (for DS). Filament seems a bit better than some earlier builds, Iray seems pretty snappy - I'm using DS more than before and liking the results better. Some of it is the pleasure of finally learning to navigate quickly through a scene. That's a huge help! I'll eventually get around to 4.23 or whatever, but I'm not messing with it now. I don't care about paywall features because they'll get sealed off when I let Premier lapse. I don't want to phone home every time I use the program. I'd rather not go through that door. YMMV.

3Diva said:

The holidays have been busy, I'm sorry I haven't responded to everyone's comments! I do appreciate the kind words - you all put a big smile on my face!

Here are a couple of more. I'm SO GLAD I was able to get 3D Universe's Grumpy Santa Christmas freebie! I'm a big fan of most things "toon" and really like his toon stuff, so when I saw he gave the community his santa as a Christmas gift I was ticked pink! He looks great with Filatoon added to him!

 

This one is with the XI Dark Vampire Castle with Filatoon added to it. It's not very "holiday", and a bit late for it - it's more like a Halloween vibe. But I like how it turned out. I really like that we can render blooms in Filament rendering!

These both look great @3Diva! Grumpy Santa done in a Christmas Gnome style is awesome ;)

Seems like night scenes done using FilaToon aren't all that common - excellent work on this one. You've managed to keep loads of detail in there and the bloom on the windows really does make the image. Cheers!

- Greg

Valiska said:

Richard Haseltine said:

Valiska said:

It's one of these three, but which bothered me most when I was trying to render in Studio, varied:

1. Some of the fonts are too darned small on modern screens. The size is unfixable. Sometimes improperly low contrast is fixable, sometimes not.
2. The preview render, which used to be excellent, has been broken and unfixed for about a decade. If I saw messy slop like that in Blender I'd have half my polygons flipped. It means I need to make too many full renders, to know how the scene I'm building is coming along.

Which preview? I don't think texture Sahded or the other OpenGL views have changed - though not all GPUs give decent OpenGL support (Intel ones seem to have issues frequently, as they do with other applications).

(I intended the previous post, and hence this, to go in the 'What's the single most annoying issue' thread where this part isn't off topic, but apparently I posted in the wrong place.)

Moved it over

Any shaded preview, or Filament, seems to display certain items with major artifacts ... I see, I think it's textures with transparency, which is why the errors tend to appear in hair, old clothing, leaves, and characters' eyes. They render correctly in Iray. They export with Diffeomorphic to display correctly in Blender's Cycles or Eevee.
While this has been going on, I've had 3 different computers with Intel processors and different Nvidia GTX cards (and of course drivers).

When I first got here, these items showed up correctly in Daz preview renders. If I hadn't arrived early enough to see that -- if my first purchases were in the late 2010s instead of the early 2010s -- I'd probably have blamed the models and Daz quality control, and given up on Daz quickly. I possibly would have hastily guessed flipped normals in the models. I'd have been wrong.

Images: correct Iray render of Valkynne hair; incorrect texture shaded, Filament, and smooth shaded previews. (I hope these show up.)

As you can see, the texture shaded preview is so broken up that it's really hard to guess what the render will look like.

 

 

Richard Haseltine said:

Valiska said:

It's one of these three, but which bothered me most when I was trying to render in Studio, varied:

1. Some of the fonts are too darned small on modern screens. The size is unfixable. Sometimes improperly low contrast is fixable, sometimes not.
2. The preview render, which used to be excellent, has been broken and unfixed for about a decade. If I saw messy slop like that in Blender I'd have half my polygons flipped. It means I need to make too many full renders, to know how the scene I'm building is coming along.

Which preview? I don't think texture Sahded or the other OpenGL views have changed - though not all GPUs give decent OpenGL support (Intel ones seem to have issues frequently, as they do with other applications).

(I intended the previous post, and hence this, to go in the 'What's the single most annoying issue' thread where this part isn't off topic, but apparently I posted in the wrong place.)

Any shaded preview, or Filament, seems to display certain items with major artifacts ... I see, I think it's textures with transparency, which is why the errors tend to appear in hair, old clothing, leaves, and characters' eyes. They render correctly in Iray. They export with Diffeomorphic to display correctly in Blender's Cycles or Eevee.
While this has been going on, I've had 3 different computers with Intel processors and different Nvidia GTX cards (and of course drivers).

When I first got here, these items showed up correctly in Daz preview renders. If I hadn't arrived early enough to see that -- if my first purchases were in the late 2010s instead of the early 2010s -- I'd probably have blamed the models and Daz quality control, and given up on Daz quickly. I possibly would have hastily guessed flipped normals in the models. I'd have been wrong.

Images: correct Iray render of Valkynne hair; incorrect texture shaded, Filament, and smooth shaded previews. (I hope these show up.)

As you can see, the texture shaded preview is so broken up that it's really hard to guess what the render will look like.

It would be down to the available virtual RAM, virtual disk, and the virtual implementations available for your host's graphic card, I think. A virtual machine isn't supposed to allow direct access to the hosting environment's hardware or software, so you'd probably be limited to 3DL or Filament renders. I've not tried it personally though. I think others have mentioned trying it on Linux Wine but I don't remember their results and that's been quite a while back too.

todoterreno666999 said:

Hi guys.

I need help with this.

Meet my Filatoon character, Zack.

I took his shirt off so you can see my issue.

Now, I'm trying to render him with Filament (Viewport engine), but I can not manage te muscle outline effect on his body.

Any ideas on how I can render body texture lines in Filament?

Thanks in advance.

To get that look you'll probably need to go in and paint those hand-drawn-looking details into the character's texture maps.

The holidays have been busy, I'm sorry I haven't responded to everyone's comments! I do appreciate the kind words - you all put a big smile on my face!

Here are a couple of more. I'm SO GLAD I was able to get 3D Universe's Grumpy Santa Christmas freebie! I'm a big fan of most things "toon" and really like his toon stuff, so when I saw he gave the community his santa as a Christmas gift I was ticked pink! He looks great with Filatoon added to him!

This one is with the XI Dark Vampire Castle with Filatoon added to it. It's not very "holiday", and a bit late for it - it's more like a Halloween vibe. But I like how it turned out. I really like that we can render blooms in Filament rendering!

todoterreno666999 said:

Hi guys.

I need help with this.

Meet my Filatoon character, Zack.

I took his shirt off so you can see my issue.

Now, I'm trying to render him with Filament (Viewport engine), but I can not manage te muscle outline effect on his body.

Any ideas on how I can render body texture lines in Filament?

Thanks in advance.

Like Silent Winter said, look at the thread, but off hand you I think/guess you may need to make a Geoshell, copy the surface materials to it, then manually edit ALL the skin surfaces (regions I think they are called - you're basically going to pretend you are editing to make like like a mech android), dividing them out into subsurfaces with each subsuface set corresponding to the subsurface bounded by the set of dark lines. eg, you'd have two subsufaces for the pecs, two for the nipples, 6 for the abs, and so on.

Hi guys.

I need help with this.

Meet my Filatoon character, Zack.

I took his shirt off so you can see my issue.

Now, I'm trying to render him with Filament (Viewport engine), but I can not manage te muscle outline effect on his body.

Any ideas on how I can render body texture lines in Filament?

Thanks in advance.

miladyderyni_173d399f47 said:

Faeryl Womyn said:

I thought Daz was done with Christmas freebies, but there's another one today.

It is a nice throne, and has Iray along with Filament & Filatoon. Wonder what it would look like with wood shaders? One way to find out.  

I've been doing some tests and the shadows are being rendered totally pixelated... Is there any fix to that?

EDIT: kinda fixed... I was using some distant light and it was causing the pixelated shadow. Did some adjustment in the Filament Draw Options and it worked.

Faeryl Womyn said:

I thought Daz was done with Christmas freebies, but there's another one today.

It is a nice throne, and has Iray along with Filament & Filatoon. Wonder what it would look like with wood shaders? One way to find out.  

Cinnatwist said:

Thanks for the response.
The metric butt-ton of content I have installed is concentrated on an additional SSD drive, connected to my PC with a USB-C input. There is some content installed in my C drive (OS drive), but that is a tiny amount. I'll note that the main change I've made in the past month is updating my OS to Win11, though the slowness has only occurred in the last few days. Maybe that? Again, I have no idea where to even start.
Mesh smoothing is enabled, but it has never had this effect before.

How is the performance after the characters have loaded. Is the interface sluggish? Can you easily rotate around the figures in texture / filament mode? Or is the program only slow to load the characters in the scene? The USB-C interface might be a bottleneck. I run my Daz Content off multiple M.2 SSD drives. The Daz application and content is on a separate M.2 from where I save my scene files. I also load some HDRI files from a second M.2 drive. Some people recommend having your OS and programs on separate drives.

I will be building a new computer soon that will have many fast M.2 drives along with a faster processor and memory. I have had all the components for over a 18 months but been too lazy to assemble it. The new machine will have 192 GB RAM, 36-CORE CPU, and a built-in GPU. I am going to try and run two RTX 3090s and see if the shared 48 GB memory can be used. I know others have had issues with textures rendering incorrectly in Daz with two GPUs. We'll see...

And of course Filament and FilaToons do not work on Mac OS. Which is a major disappointment. I love having that on the Windows computers.

Masterstroke said:

3) Better render technology. Iray is nice, but something faster and more realistic would be nicer.
2) The absence of better cloths and hair simulations
    and nr:
1) The absence of realistic joint bending and expressions technology for all characters.
    Including realistic muscle, bones and fat tissue simulation.
    (I just hate, to add tons of custom JCMs to characters to make a pose look more real.)
    I know, that is too much to ask for, but this is my honest answer to this question.

Full implementation of Filament would give us a lot for 3, much the way eevie serves Blender. But no, not for DS.

NR can be found in 3rd party solutions, though I find rendering oversize and downsampling helps a lot. It's what I usually do, anyway.

Cloth and hair simulation is a big ask - Would require something new, I think. So would improved joint-bending. Sure, you already know that!

windli3356 said:

animation? 1-5 hours for a 60 secs video at 1080P, forget about it

A 60-second video is a minimum of 720 renders, and that's if you're animating on 2s (12 FPS), meaning that you'd have to be rendering more than 12 frames per second to get a render under an hour, and that is incredibly fast. That requires not just hardware (more on that later) but also optimizing lighting, textures, geometry, etc.

I have one of the fastest PC money can buy  but still can't get used to how slow everything in Daz is

What render engine are you using? Iray and Octane can be GPU-accelerated, so they can potentially be much faster than 3Delight, which is CPU-only (I don't remember if Filament is also CPU-only or can also be GPU-accelerated). The trick to GPU acceleration is that it requires an NVidia GPU (at least for those two engines), so do you have one? If so, which one?

The biggest thing holding me back from using DAZ Studio more is the lack of a 64-bit lip sync option for Mac and the inabilty to render out a movie; it's a real hassle running my 2012 iMac just to use the 32-bit lip sync, then transfer all the work to a 64-bit machine to render in individual frames, convert the frames to a movie, then add the speech audio to the movie. Too many hoops for something that I used to do in 2012 in one fell swoop.

The second biggest thing is the non-release of DAZ Studio 5 and its Filmaent rendering engine for Mac. My goal is to take another run at 3D animation in the new year, but I'm no longer waiting for DAZ Studio 5, Filament, a 64-bit lip sync option nor purchasing new assets. Until DAZ Studio 5 is released, I'm considering DAZ Studio to be "done" for me and not worth further financial investment and only limited time investment. Too much of why I originally bought assets is no longer a vialble option. Maybe 2025 will turn things around for me, but after waiting over four years for Filament on the Mac and over three years for DAZ Studio 5, I'm not holding my breath.

3Diva said:

The FilaToon sharder works fine for transparency. I don't think it's an issue anymore.

Not sure when it improved, but I noticed filament opacity mapping seems to have improved even in 4.22

richardandtracy said:

Will confess I have zero interest in toon stuff as well. But I must say it's good that the Filament renderer is being developed. I had hoped more of it when it was introduced, and Filatoon is a useful tool aimed for it, maybe there will be other tools - coping with transparency better will be a step forward. Regards, Richard.