Filament Render 

I messed up the soundtrack but too lazy to fix and reupload

when I do a proper animation I will be fussier

I made a freebie for Halloween 2023.

This is a cup with a cat-shaped handle which I made for halloween 2023. It's in DAZ Studio, Blender, Obj and STL format (the last for those who want to print the cup with a 3D printer).

This is my first freebie, I hope you find it useful.

Below is the rendering and photo of the cup printed with a 3D filament printer.

link
https://www.thefantasiesattic.net/halloween/2023/index.html
day 1

Render

Photo

link to gallery

mr_wan said:

I thought I'd join the ranks by sharing my install report:

Installation

• Distro: Arch
• DE: GNOME 44.5
• WM: Wayland/x11 (works on both)
• Kernel: 6.5.3-zen
• Lutris 0.5.13
• Runner: wine staging 8.15-2
• nvidia-driver 535.104.05-1
• nvidia-libs 0.7.11 (https://github.com/SveSop/nvidia-libs/)

What works

• DIM and CMS
• CPU rendering (exclusive, haven't tried mixed)
• GPU rendering (exclusive, haven't tried mixed)
• Filament viewport (including it since I saw a post saying it didn't work for them)

What doesn't work

• dForce simulation (reports that "A valid OpenCL 1.2 device could not be found.")

I'll try the new nvidia libs which SveSop just released and a few other runners, but any hint or help regarding dForce is greatly appreciated.

Welp, turns out I was missing the OpenCL package for nvidia, so I just installed opencl-nvidia and now everything works including dForce. Yay!

I have been using Daz on my mac book pro M1 and it works well for the most part  but filament and deforce simulation does not seem to work the renders are really nice not bland like when you just use on mac.

I think the sheer volume of products being pumped out might be partly to blame. A new DAZ character used to be an *event*; people would be eagerly anticipating it, and there was even a popular thread trying to guess what character woudl be next through hints from things like morphs included of clothing that came before the launch. If you put out a new character once a month, there's a whole month of people discussing the character, showing what they've done with him or her and so on.

Now?

A new DAZ original character comes out this week, you've got a week or so before the next one hits, so purchase, install, render and post quickly before the next one hits.

With one new base character a month, I think a larger percentage of the users purchase it; simply from a fiinancial viewpoint, it's easier to purchase every new base character or their bundle once a month than once a week, so more people will do it.

As mentioned above, how often does anyone who's been here for any length of time really want to join in on another "what is art?" thread, be it 3D, DAZ Studio, AI, etc. Hard pass.

I was excited about the Filament renderer, but as a Mac user I'm still waiting after three years, so that enthusiasm has wained. 

I was excited about DAZ Studio 5 possibly making it possible to follow through on my plans for animation but, again, *years* go by and it's hard to maintain any enthuiasm or even hope that it'll do what I need it to. I thought I might look into switching to Maya and asked yesteray if the bridge still works, as there's been no response to other queries for months but I'm not holding a lot of hope there either.

If DAZ Studio 5 came out tomorrow, I expect things will be fired up for a while but I'm not sure if even that will be sustained once bugs are found and fixed and people relax back into just doing their own thing. With no official posts regarding what to expect it's difficult to be enthusiastic. I mean, so far, years later, all we actually know feature-wise is that Mac users will have Filament and we all get Omniverse. I'm finding it hard to whip up any enthusiasm any more and without even any hints, speculation is not only no longer fun, it's descouraged because without details from the company, speculation these days tends to turn darker much faster. That might be in part to the tone of the world itself these days.

The best part of the forums these days -- besides seeing people helping other people with their problems -- is new artwork being posted in a handful of ongoing threads. That's always a plus in my day.

Every now and then something acutally, really new, usually a utility or plug-in is released and that causes a bit of buzz, but a new DAZ base character? In most cases, it's not really an event worth celebrating.

UPDATED TO ADD: The ONE new feature announced as "coming soon to DAZ Studio 5", Omniverse, has a thread posted about it that garnered 19 comments in roughly 24 hours, then... nothing since September 25. I really hope they've got something else up their sleeve to get us excited because if that's all the excitement their only new feature announces so far gets, DAZ Studio 5 might not get a lot of buzz going either.

-- Walt Sterdan

Drogo Nazhur said:

Just curious when folks got started with DAZ?

At the time of writing a little over 10 years ago.

My gf was the first to get into 3D graphics (it's a passion of hers) and I also got a good feel for it. Enough to grab the full "suite" back in the day: Daz Studio, Hexagon and Bryce, never really looked back. All the things I could do were amazing, and over time things only got better. Heck; this was a time before Iray & Filament; I was still messing around on my Windows 7 32bit computer! :)

Really fun days in hindsight: I once managed to create a scene but after all was said and done I was never able to load it again because my PC simply couldn't handle it due to its size. Even though, in context, it was hardly excessive; iirc 3 figures and a few props. Fortunately my later Windows 10 PC had no issues with that anymore.

In the mean time I 'replaced' Hexagon with ZBrush (quite a game changer) and I'm still quite satisfied with all the things I manage to do with Daz Studio.

WendyLuvsCatz said:

enable PBR preview and line tesselation 2 or 3 to see it in Filament 

That was the missing link for me.  Thank you!

enable PBR preview and line tesselation 2 or 3 to see it in Filament 

3DmentiaNull said:

Just getting started with G9, and when trying to load Pixie Hair only the hair cap is visable. Any suggestions? Not getting any missing files warning. It's d-force hair not strand based, correct? Is it useable in Filament? / Thanks / peace

That happens to me in the standard viewport.  I can see the hair in the AUX viewport though.  I haven't figured out what setting to change so that I can see the hair in the standard viewport, but you can switch to the AUX viewport to see it.  However, you preview changes in the render window that opens if you it turned on in the Render Settings tab for a stil image.  It's a slower method, but you can get a REALLY good look at it while it's rendering, and you can cancel it or back out of the save if you want to make changes.

Just getting started with G9, and when trying to load Pixie Hair only the hair cap is visable. Any suggestions? Not getting any missing files warning. It's d-force hair not strand based, correct? Is it useable in Filament? / Thanks / peace

you can render in Filament but it doesn't look anywhere near as good

The terms decent scene and a few minutes are rather vague. Depending on what is on scene and the target resolution I doubt most hardware configurations would take a few minutes to complete a render, specially using iRay. The 3060 has decent amounts of VRAM but it's not exactly a blazing fast GPU.

Render times are extremely subjective and if your focus is speed then compromises will definetely need to be made. If you want rather quick renders then iRay isn't likely going to give you that (Filament might but it's not the same thing)

Filament still the better choice for me for DAZ content alone as one can use Dforce etc

but tried this so could get an idea how the realtime render looks

DAZ iray definitely faster than TM pathtracing but it's a turtle race 

it will be great for mixing TM content and features with DAZ content though

Unreal Engine still the best choice but I lost all my projects on a failed drive so it will be some time before I get back to using that 

Ben Oaks said:

mCasual said:

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts9/mcjallblackexceptemissive

______________________________________________

Run the script

Click the "Do It" button

all materials except those with the 'Emissive' tag will have their Diffuse Color turned black

you can undo this after exiting the script

Edit / Undo / mcjAllBlackExceptEmissive

render the emissive-only scene from the same camera as your real render

use your favorite paint program to gaussian-blur the emissive-only render

push the lightness and contrast up

layer this on top of your real render using for example the "screen" effect

This script, and the tecnique work great for filament renders!  

For some reason I can't attach an image, so head to my gallery for a preview of what I did with it. 

mCasual said:

https://sites.google.com/site/mcasualsdazscripts9/mcjallblackexceptemissive

______________________________________________

Run the script

Click the "Do It" button

all materials except those with the 'Emissive' tag will have their Diffuse Color turned black

you can undo this after exiting the script

Edit / Undo / mcjAllBlackExceptEmissive

render the emissive-only scene from the same camera as your real render

use your favorite paint program to gaussian-blur the emissive-only render

push the lightness and contrast up

layer this on top of your real render using for example the "screen" effect

This script, and the tecnique work great for filament renders!  

Today I went to render the Easy Enviroments Lagoon Raft Scene and I loaded the included EXR for the enviroment map. My preview and renders became overlayed with a green tint.

Closed and restarted DS with an empty scene. Load iray and filament draw settings as well as the tone mapping settings and added a sphere. As you can see from the attached screen shot my mysterious green tint is still there. I thought it was a problem with loading the EXR file as an enviroment map.

Now I have no idea what triggered this and how to troubleshoot.

The attachment shows all the currently used environment settings.

Any ideas on the cause and the next steps for troubleshooting?

There are many products in the DAZ store which can be of help.  You are not required to purchase any of these products to create your images.  They are simply being listed for your convenience and/or inspiration.  The promo images are also excellent examples of atmosphere using props and/or lights.  Below is just a small sample. 

DAZ Studio - Iray

Iray Distance Mist

Iray Distance Fog

Atmocam2

Iray Storm

Plane Easy Atmospheres

Fast Fog Iray 2:  Electric Fogaloo -

IG Iray Dawn to Dusk 2 Atmospheric Lighting

FSL Rigged and Morphing Atmosphere Props and Shaders

Fog Camera

Time Inside Light Gels Bundle

Cinematic Light FX plus Atmosphere

Epic Props: Godrays & Volumetric Light for Iray

Atmospheric Smoke Camera

Iray Dust

SY dForce Rain Iray

DAZ Studio - 3Delight

Above the Fog for Iray and 3Delight

Simple Godrays

Expanded Godrays - Celestial Bodies

Heavy Rain for 3Delight and Iray

Daz Studio - Filament

Atmosphere for Filament

SY Atmospheric Blur Filament

Poser

Widow’s Woods:  Forest

RDNA Atmospherics – Fog Vol 1

Spooky Light Gels for Poser

Bryce

Bryce ATMO

Some other items that may be of help in this Challenge:

The Golden rules of rendering can be found:

Bryce  http://www.daz3d.com/golden-rules-composition-helpers-for-bryce
DAZ Studio http://www.sharecg.com/v/67783/browse/21/DAZ-Studio/Golden-Rules-Camera-Prop-v1.5 
Also, DS has a built in thirds golden rule. 

Here are various links to other things that may help you in this month's challenge. Credit is given to Szark for this wonderful thread.
Tutorials by Szark https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/2765/time-for-sharing-what-i-have-no-idea/p1

I dare say the alpha channel is the issue as Unreal Engine does exactly the same thing if it's used but a masking brick works

if there is an equivalent brick for the Filament shader available

kyoto kid said:

...thanks for the information, I have the base, a couple of the add on envirnments and extras for it.  Wonder if it's the instancing it doesn't like.

I dare say it is because Filament cannot cope with it either, it's the collapsed instancing that's the problem, Octane certainly copes with scattering, Carrara replicators export as Octane scatters so it's something on the coding level as Carrara and other apps see the instancing nulls so you could in fact populate them, in both Carrara and iClone I can infact duplicate stuff and send it to those nulls, this could be automated by someone who cared.

However just having Octane enabled apparently causes Ultrascatter issues too.

2 years ago when this thread started we didn't have apps on Discord and Google Colab using powerful Nvidia GPUs

now anyone with a phone can use AI based generators on a toilet break

so

a cloudbased DAZ app on the App store or Google Play with free posing in 3 outfits a day Filament drawcall with ads, pay for full iray cloud rendering is not crazy