cain-x said:

Same.

Soon someone can explain what they do - but I assume it is a work in progress if I read a little bit inbetween the lines in the changelog. It'll be a complex web of magic like the Iray Shader - it is probably someone on the DAZ dev team that will build out a proper Filament shader.

Next, the timeline will actually pause when the spacebar is pressed...

Speaking of the timeline, the only way I get the spacebar to work properly is if you do play/pause via spacebar on a pane that is undocked. So what I have done is undock the Viewport and the timeline so I can do this - its a funky workaround but it works in a pinch.

The spacebar is taken by the Universal Tool and derivatives for pinning nodes, and that can't be remapped. (Pity as I would, when we perhaps get the ability to use alphanumeric keys as modifiers with the updated Qt, to have used space for Viewport pan (LMB) and dolly (RMB)).

Same.

Soon someone can explain what they do - but I assume it is a work in progress if I read a little bit inbetween the lines in the changelog. It'll be a complex web of magic like the Iray Shader - it is probably someone on the DAZ dev team that will build out a proper Filament shader.

Next, the timeline will actually pause when the spacebar is pressed...

Speaking of the timeline, the only way I get the spacebar to work properly is if you do play/pause via spacebar on a pane that is undocked. So what I have done is undock the Viewport and the timeline so I can do this - its a funky workaround but it works in a pinch.

jbowler said:

jbowler said:

How do I define the color mapping for "Object ID"?

I don't know if this is a 4.22.1 bug or something I don't understand but it is similar to the problem with convergence maps (they always come out 0, even though they are TIFFs, not PNGs.)

It's a 4.22.1.41 documentation bug.  Here's the relevant snippet from the change log:

• Added support for controlling “Object ID” when NVIDIA Iray is the active renderer

  • If a DzColorProperty (user) property named “Object ID”, with the property group path of “Display/Rendering/Iray” is added to a node with geometry, the value of this property is used to control the color of that object in the “Object ID” canvas

So the property has to be added by hand, the "Create Advanced Iray Not Properties" script will create it.  However it is not called "Object ID" - that's the bug - it's called "Iray Object ID", even though it is in the .../Iray property group.  This is not something anyone would discover by accident; I spent a few hours trying to guess what it was (since spelling errors seem to be common in the documentation) before trying the script.  I guess I should have tried that first but the property is useful independent of Iray (like Material ID).  E.g. an Object ID canvas can be rendered corresponding to a Filament render and it's probably going to be close enough.

It's not necessary for the render to converge for either of the "Material ID" or the "Object ID" canvases; "Render Settings/Progressive Rendering/Max Samples" can be set to 1 and the result is, so far as I can see, exactly the same as if it's set to 20,000.

The use of color mapping is somewhat odd given than a name (of an object) isn't a color and that objects (DzObject) have simple 1D numerical IDs but the level of indirection (the mapping) has some potential uses.

I can't say I have noticed a lot of errors in the change logs or othe documentation (and I am geenrally better at spotting others' than at catching my own - such as "Create Advanced Iray Not Properties" above :) ).

It is a specifically Iray property, however, not something that affects or is used by Filament.

DzObject isn't related to ObjectID - the latter is a colour, so it iss et by a colour property.

jbowler said:

How do I define the color mapping for "Object ID"?

I don't know if this is a 4.22.1 bug or something I don't understand but it is similar to the problem with convergence maps (they always come out 0, even though they are TIFFs, not PNGs.)

It's a 4.22.1.41 documentation bug.  Here's the relevant snippet from the change log:

• Added support for controlling “Object ID” when NVIDIA Iray is the active renderer

  • If a DzColorProperty (user) property named “Object ID”, with the property group path of “Display/Rendering/Iray” is added to a node with geometry, the value of this property is used to control the color of that object in the “Object ID” canvas

So the property has to be added by hand, the "Create Advanced Iray Not Properties" script will create it.  However it is not called "Object ID" - that's the bug - it's called "Iray Object ID", even though it is in the .../Iray property group.  This is not something anyone would discover by accident; I spent a few hours trying to guess what it was (since spelling errors seem to be common in the documentation) before trying the script.  I guess I should have tried that first but the property is useful independent of Iray (like Material ID).  E.g. an Object ID canvas can be rendered corresponding to a Filament render and it's probably going to be close enough.

It's not necessary for the render to converge for either of the "Material ID" or the "Object ID" canvases; "Render Settings/Progressive Rendering/Max Samples" can be set to 1 and the result is, so far as I can see, exactly the same as if it's set to 20,000.

The use of color mapping is somewhat odd given than a name (of an object) isn't a color and that objects (DzObject) have simple 1D numerical IDs but the level of indirection (the mapping) has some potential uses.

this

I have Carrara, iClone, Unreal, Twinmotion after all if I wanted to render elsewhere 

but for quick loads, add aniblocks and render Filament fits the bill but the mapped opacity and lighting issues are frustrating 

avoiding the maps certainly works but then you need lots of geometry to draw on with the geometry editor to assign to a new surface to add a transparent shader without cutout opacity (I do this sometimes, on props or use fibermesh  hair on heads)

I looked in Shadermixer and found the new Filament bricks but have absolutely no idea how to use them 

So a few days ago I decided I needed a couple of exterior sci-fi environments. I bought Utopia Labs https://www.daz3d.com/utopia-labs .

It's an older product with only 3DL materials, but I have had luck using older products in Iray before.

(TL;DR version: how to light this for an Iray render? Suggestions needed. The whole sad story is below.)

After I spent several hours adding some cameras and creating the scene I wanted, I added a daytime HDRI for the sky and went to Iray preview it in the little preview viewport. Things were barely visible; the "ground level" of this set is actually a courtyard at least 2 floors below Daz Studio coordinate "ground level." So I supposed not much of the light from the HDRI was getting down into the large opening over the courtyard. Switched HDRI to a bright summer day sky from Orestes  "Summer Day" set. Light was a little more but not that much better.

So I decided to be "super-genius" (cue Wile E. Coyote getting a package from Acme) and thought, "I wonder if the 3DL to Iray Converter utility I own converts lights to Iray as well?" I checked the documentatiom and it said it did.

Step One was run Scene Optimizer on the scene since I had numerous G8 figures in the scene; reduced all textures to maximum of 2k size (the building itself -yes the whole thing is one gigantic object - already had textures lower than that).

Step Two was save scene and then run the 3DL to Iray Converter script. Did NOT save scene again just in case of unfortunate results.

Step Three: clicked to switch the little previewer viewport from Texture Shaded to Iray, NOT the main viewport.

Step Four: spent 20 minutes staring at an all-white version of the scene in the secondary viewport. Every so often a little message would appear at the bottom advising me of "Iray generating native CPU code" or something to that effect. Eventually I was able to click the secondary viewport back to Texture Shaded, the system was bogged down doing calculations and generally non-responsive.

Step Five: I suddenly rememebered that the set was one gigantic object, and there were no separate lights; where did the 3DL version get it's lighting from? Checked the building surface and the WHOLE GIANT BUILDING was now an emissive surface with a value of 1000 kcd / square meter. So Iray had been calculating about a kajillion (totally a thing in this case)  light paths and bounces and the  effective completion time was probably infinite.

Step Six: bravely I ventured forth and clicked the secondary viewport to Filament draw style. Almost instantly I got a preview in that washed-out style of Filament. Very carefully DID NOT save the scene, so the last save was before I ran the 3DL to Iray Converter. Exited Daz Studio,

Step Seven: pulled up Windows Task Manager and watched for at least 30 minutes while the system unloaded all of the memory allocated to Daz Studio. Something like 10 hours after I started building my scene, I shut off the PC.

Epilogue: so what to do now and light my scene? Leave it as 3DL materials and add my own Iray spotlights and spend who-know how many additional hours getting them all positioned and tweaked? Maybe try making a giant ghost light plane and position it as the "ceiling" of the courtyard? (Never actually used ghost lights before, but own some products with them; that is why I am still using older Daz Studio version 4.16.03 to not have to re-buy ghost light kits.) Use a giant ghost light plane and add some "off-screen" spotlights similar to a 3-point light setup? (Not that I have actually done that precisely, but have been able to fudge it in the past. Lack of art or photography background, you see.)

Anyhow, any advice would be welcome. Thank you anyone who made it this far.

True today, but hoping Filament closes this gap and save us time from doing all of the converting and back and forth (especially for animations). The toon render stuff DAZ devs are working on for Filament also sounds great as I work with custom rigged anime/game characters (non Genesis/DAZ characters). 

A possible option is to export to blender with diffeomorphic, then use eevee which is much more capable than filament. Then iray materials are limited under eevee, same as they're limited under filament, but transparency and base material attributes work fine. As for emission and GI it is possible to bake light maps for scenes.

In general, daz studio is good to mix figures and scenes to make the content you need. But then for anything else than "basic pose and rendering" you have to export to another more advanced application as maya or blender. There's no other way.

Peter Wade said:

The thing I find most annoying with filament is that hair sometimes dissappears, is that part of the tranparency/opacity issues you mentioned? I can usually fix this in stil images by adjusting the camera angle, it snaps back into visibility at certain angles. I don't do animations, I expect it must be worse making sure that the hair stays visible through all of the movement.

Emissive surfaces would be useful since a lot of the sets sold at Daz use emmisive surfaces for their lighing. But I don't want to see too much of filament's rendering speed sacrifced for more features.

Also turning the surfaces on the hair Top Coat Weight in the surface/mat setting also improve this.

On side note, look like there has been more work done on Filament - they've added some new stuff like emissives. Quite excited. http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log

I only saw one line blurb about Filament opacity:

• Expanded Shader Mixer support for switching between materials according to opacity or boolean result in custom Filament brick networks

I'm not too sure what that means, really - but I hope it is a step in the direction I am praying for. Thank you, devs :) 

enemyhq said:

Why does Daz3D only offer support for NVidia chipset GPU's?

Uhm, they don't?  Iray is fully geared towards NVidia, but that's because the tech was also developed by NVidia, so that's an obvious result.

However, 'Studio' provides more render engines than that. There's also 3Delight as well as Filament, both of which are not tied into NVidia. I also still keep the Lux render option around; an open source render engine which has nothing to do with NVidia.  (they're now called LuxCoreRender for some reason).

jimlin said:

Richard Haseltine said:

I assume you mean activity, the tabs along the top in some layouts. Switch to another tab, set the Drawstyle (the sphere icon to the left of the view picker - the button that probably says Perspective View of Default Camera for an empty scene) to nVidia Iray or Filament, and see what happens. I suspect one of them will trigger the crash.

thanks again for you responce  as soon as i swich to a new tab i get fatal error it also does not matter what drawstyle i use 

follow up I changed layout  now  when opening DAZ I get fatal error 

Richard Haseltine said:

I assume you mean activity, the tabs along the top in some layouts. Switch to another tab, set the Drawstyle (the sphere icon to the left of the view picker - the button that probably says Perspective View of Default Camera for an empty scene) to nVidia Iray or Filament, and see what happens. I suspect one of them will trigger the crash.

thanks again for you responce  as soon as i swich to a new tab i get fatal error it also does not matter what drawstyle i use 

I assume you mean activity, the tabs along the top in some layouts. Switch to another tab, set the Drawstyle (the sphere icon to the left of the view picker - the button that probably says Perspective View of Default Camera for an empty scene) to nVidia Iray or Filament, and see what happens. I suspect one of them will trigger the crash.

The options nodes are created only on rendering/previewing using Iray (or Filament) - presumably in this case it is your DrawStyle causign them to be added. One option would be to save a scene containing them, and set that to load by default (Edit>Preferences, Daz Studio>Preferences on a mac, and set the scene tio load in the Start Up and Scene tabs), so there won't be a change; you could also opt not to have Iray/Filament draw be your default.

Some people still prefer to use 3Delight. Others use Filament. Not everone is married to Iray. Some people export to other programs to render. That is why there are so many bridges, I suppose.

you really need software to make them 'watertight", there are many out there

various slicer softwares, they will save the stl you need

in fact many 3D printing services will do it too

I had a very bad experience with a useless home 3D filament printer which is basically landfill now taking up room in my laundry as a impromptu table  so would never do it myself again 

(my printer worked BTW but has DRM and now refuses to recognise the legitimate filament cartridges so unusable, the customer support is nonexistent for people outside the USA, they basically told me to F off)

The thing I find most annoying with filament is that hair sometimes dissappears, is that part of the tranparency/opacity issues you mentioned? I can usually fix this in stil images by adjusting the camera angle, it snaps back into visibility at certain angles. I don't do animations, I expect it must be worse making sure that the hair stays visible through all of the movement.

Emissive surfaces would be useful since a lot of the sets sold at Daz use emmisive surfaces for their lighing. But I don't want to see too much of filament's rendering speed sacrifced for more features.

That is the Texture Shaded drawstyle, which isn't very good for showing advanced settings - click the sphere-with-a-swirl to the elft of the big button labelled Perspective View at top-right of the Viewport and select nVidia Iray (or Filament possibly) to get a more accurate rendition, or do a quick render.

Wish I had more time to experiement. Just getting the transparency/opacity issues fixed would go a long way. Lights cannot pass through any mesh, even ones with opacity set, like glass. In my work, I deal with vehicles and glasswork... so filament is a showstopper for that kind of rendering. Iray is good at what it does but even at the lowest max sample setting and denoiser turned on, it is still too slow for the turn around I need.

I am seeing more Filament work done in the changelogs http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/change_log and from the post https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/8620281/#Comment_8620281

Looks like the Shader Mixer has got some new FIlament specific brick (nodes) for future use. Does it mean that it will fix all of those opacity issues (especially with hair and light)? I am a big fan of Filament as it would give animators a much quicker renderer in their toolbox.

Also hoping these are on the roadmap for Filament:
- Add motion blur
- Allow softer shadows from lights - support more light types and emissives
- Fix the Environment Map not updating if using a non HDR image

That would make Filament good enough to be used in actual work. Photorealism is not always needed. I'd happily pay for such functionality.