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After reading thru the forum, it seems most of us are trying to use Filament in the way we *wish it would work instead of maybe what it was intended for, as a fast preview renderer for scene setup or animations. After playing with it and seeing it's limitations, that was my conclusion anyway. I may still use it for a final render here and there when I know I can Photoshop it to death but I'm going to stop trying to make it do things that just aren't feasible to do. At least right now. I *love it tho for quick scene composition; absolutley love it for that so it's still a win for me!
@KindredArts Any suggestions on getting Iray Distance Fog/Mist to work with Filament? I already have them.
I think one needs to be aware of and work around limitations like anything in real life
expecting everything to work out of the box in doing creative stuff is quite absurd when you consider filmmakers and artists don't
they all cheat they have lighting rigs, reflective umbrellas, crop stuff out etc
software is dumb the user has to make choices
It's not the efford we have to put in it... It's the workflow that breaks and breakes and breakes again and is way to complicated since day one i found DAZ and this was a few years ago.
You also should "say" what you are using and what you've maybe discovered to make it better. Because this is the way to give people the "power" to actually do something with this program. Else it is just showing off and nothing more. And this is my point. Daz could be more, could be faster, could be right from the start a "setup the scene and render crazy nice images..." But it still (after years) just isn't!
And without in depth tutorials, sharing and a steep learning curve, it's just trail and error and this is frustrating... Adding another render engine means just more of that frustrating learning by figuring it out in days or weeks.In comparison, I could also name Photoshop, as an example of how incredibly extremely important the user is. Especially the sharing of ideas, brushes, new filters, plugins and so on was exactly the same like with Blender, even it wasn't free.
BTW, i don't want to make Daz a bad thing, i just want to point out where everything is going and what Daz maybe could improve "first" before adding more things that are half done...
My Scene: Connor finds... (setup around 30-60 minutes)
GM8 Standart...
Skin/Character: Owen 8
Eyebrows: Old SHB self created (Parameters: Render Line Tesslation Sides 4, Preview PR Hairs ON, Visible ON, Visible in Render ON, Visible in Viewport ON)
*NOTE: Render Line Tesslation Sides NUMBER seems to thicken the hair, without changing it (you may try it for other hairs that look "thin"?!)
Beard: Old SHB self created (Parameters: Render Line Tesslation Sides 2, Preview PR Hairs ON, Visible ON, Visible in Render ON, Visible in Viewport ON)
*NOTE: Render Line Tesslation Sides NUMBER seems to thicken the hair
(don't work here, looks awful... the "old" shader seem to break if i change the RLTS down/up but it looks "right and nice" just when i load it without a change)
Clothing: Alt Style Outfit
Pose: Z CHA 12 Genesis 8 Male (Hands and Arms modified)
Scene Environment: Standart DAZ Alchemy Chasm
Scene environment options Standart: Environment Intensity 0.0025 (night, dark mood / around 0.050 is midday i'd say, 0.025 evening/moonshine)
Light #1: Distant Light in front, over his head, 5 meters away, slight rotated to the sky
- Ilumination: ON, Color: 255, 255, 226, Intensity: 25%, Photometric Mode: ON, Luminous Flux (Lumen) 1500, Temperature 1500
Light #2: SpotLight from behind right, in his neck, 5 meters away, straight
- Ilumination: ON, Color: 255, 131, 93, Intensity: 125%, Photometric Mode: ON, Everything else standart. Luminous Flux (Lumen) 25000, Temperature 1500
4 Planes, with some quick and dirty shader settings and a marble texture on it. Placed one after the other, rotated to simulate some mist looking suroundings
2 more lights at his feet, lighting the "mist" a little more up... (planes had metallicity around 0.70)
Rendered with the Filament Viewport render on 16:9, 1920x1080
Sceene without the character (because it's a payed one) ready to render to download... here
Just load Alchemy Chasm, load a model with a proper skin and pose it on the spot... (..if you like it ^^)
Textures are free textures from Polygon... therefor credits and my gratitute to Andrew Price
(...who shows you also the power of blender with photorealistic evee btw)
Oh... and my first 3 renders where not saved... another nice experience (...even when i did it the manual way...) Maaaannnn... you know?!
And i just realized, the ball i made was more transparent and glowy, before saving the scene. So this means something is off... because after loading it, it was strangely looking like a ball and the nice effect it had was lost in the nirvana...
Thank you for this. Most of my art circles are made up of people who use offbeat tools to make weird and unique experimental stuff and transformative works. Daz would be fantastic for that except for the thing where I have to explain not only asset purchasing (which can be mitigated with free community resources) but that you need a pretty good computer to get started. If DS were to take off in that subculture there'd be more people sharing resources, making tutorials, and joining the community. I want DS to be a tool people can use to try animation for the first time, or to make experimental games to share on itch.io or just to get used to 3D. In a lot of ways the look of Filament would be more comfortable than Iray because it looks like a video game from 1995, and many of those artists create work that references games they grew up with.
This is something I feel strongly about because if I hadn't ended up in the job I have now, about 90% of the software and hardware I use to make art would have been completely out of my reach.
Your renders are amazing but they are not the kind of thing I render - ever. You seem to be a master of the "epic" scene - all atmospheric effects and action but my renders are more mundane and personal. Human beings in close-up in a room or a street with a few props. So in my few experiments so far I have not been able to get the hair to look like hair rather than semi-transparent plastic, the skin to look like skin rather than a plastic doll or cloth with any level of translucency to look like cloth rather than almost fully transparent plastic. Moreover, I can't figure out how to use Photometric lights. I use spotlights a lot in IRay but if I move a spotlight in Filament more than a couple of feet from the figure's face, the drop-off is almost total. I have not been able to get HDRi images to work at all.
A quick video about how to handle those issues would be much appreciated.
I think Filament has its place but the materials are so different than Iray that you really can't set up a scene and get good renders out of both Filament and Iray. All the surfaces need to change, sometimes drastically. Plus lighting. So far the best I've been able to get resembles my early 3Delight renders from 10 years ago, before the AoA lights and some better shaders made those start to look a lot better --- okay, I'll admit it, a LITTLE better - my composition still was what it was unfortunately. Anyway lighting and materials - all the difference. Who'd have thunk it?.
Now I could undoubtedly work on a scent for a good bit and adjust the lights and materials to look better in Filament but then it's a Filament only scene, no longer suitable for Iray. That's not necessarily a bad thing depending on your needs. The speed is unreal compared to Iray and if you animate I could see it becoming essential once the learning curve starts ascending. I ony do still renders and since nothing I've gotten so far out if it is even close to looking as good as Iray for simple things like transmaps with all the surface lookingl like their made out of molded plastic I'll personally wait and see where it goes from here.
I'm absolutely blown away by Filament because hey, new free stuff to play with and I'll never say no to that. It's another spanner in the toolbox, and one that lets me render a scene in under 5 seconds. That's incredible by any measure. And I can see the same scene in the viewport as the final output, should I decide to keep with Filament as the render engine - I have that choice. Filament is one more option, and it's one that is only going to improve over time. You don't have to use it or even like it, but it's there should you want to use it (however you want to use it), and it's cost you nothing.
Is it perfect for every render and every scene? Absolutely not, but then neither is 3Delight or iray either. This is another option, and I'm very glad it exists. Thank you, Daz.
All of the images below were rendered using Filament. Each took less than 3 seconds to render, and I could make all of these (and more) in the time it would have taken to render just one of them in 3Delight or iray. Maybe they'd look "better" in iray but n my ancient laptop if the choice is between "good enough" in 3 seconds or 4+ hours for "better", I'll take good enough for all but the most precious of renders thanks. For those, I'll render in Filament first, adjust the lights then leave the iray version chugging overnight. Choice is a wonderful thing, don't you think?
Sorry, don't want to read the whole thread, anybody else having a (Filament) Environment + Tonemapper node in the scene which can't be removed/ deleted ?
Thats the new way of displaying those render options, I wouldn't mind them too much. These are the same fields you had in your tabs of Render Settings before.
People are expecting more from Filament because Eevee and Unreal set the bar of realtime rendering too high.
After DS 4.14 upgrade, Iray stopped working. Only CPU rendering without denoising feature is currently possible with this PC. Filament is really need to improve. Specially I like to know how to render hair better.
Nope, I had the same issue on shadows when did a test on a camera on distance being similar like a drone, a figure running in circles and the issue was present.
Just found a thing, using a iray head lamp blocker seems to enhance HDR/IBL accuracy.
Is that correct ?
Great renders on Filament, I haven't played with point lights in years!!
Iray / Filament comparison
Sorry if this has been asked before - from what I've been reading so far I gather that Filament gives a preview of the current HDRI positioning, is that correct? Much like what IBL Master does in Iray? I'd love that, it's really such a pain to rotate the dome blindly! So could someone please confirm? Thanks and cheers!
yes it does. but HDR looks in low resolution.
^^^ This. All day long 80)
I render on a potato. To get that level of quality in less than a minute means I can do animation. There was no way that was an option before.
Versus iRAY (Issues?):
From 5 minutes over over excited "testing" I found that DOF doesn't seem to work in Filament (anyone else??) - Have searched, couldn't find a specific comment?
It seems way "brighter" than iRAY scenes? But all of the shaders I use are iRAY, so is it a combination of iRAY lighting rigs and iRAY shaders?
Anyway ... This PP+ Member is a lil giddy with the new toy and is wondering what animation project to have a go at first ... As quoted above, Thanks Daz.
You use the shaders from Iray, but you can tweak them to fit Filament, yes.
use tone mapping to get the correct exposure for your scene. Use the nodes in the create menu,
Thanks for the quick response! Low res is okay, I'd just like to be able to check the general position of the HDRI without having to wait for the Iray viewport to start up. I set up my scenes on the (graphic chip only) laptop mostly and only hook up the external GPU for final renders because it's such a hassle. So Iray always takes time. Filament sounds like a really useful addition to me!
From my limited experimentation it does seem that DOF doesn't work.
I don't mess with tonemapping much in Iray because I do so many adjustments in post, but in Filament it really helps with lighting control.
The absolute first thing to do with a new scene when you're using Filament is go to Create->New Environment Options Node , select Environment Options in the scene, go to Parameters and set Environment Intensity to around about 0.3. Intensity 1.0 is much too high for Filament (at least, for this release of DAZ Studio). If you're going to add additional lights (such as Point Lights), set it as low as 0.15. Hope that helps.
After recreating the new characters, endless waiting multiple times because some of the products i used seem to "fool" around with daz... Also while loading the scene again, after closing the program and reopening it.
"Whispering Devil"
Beard, hair and eyebrown of prince charming here is SHB selfmade. The hair seems to glow at the back of the head, but changing the thickness again makes it look odd like black painted whatever. The GM8 model is standart with the same pose i made before. The Skin is "upcycled" GM8, nothing fancy or special, but still better quality than the normal skin. The eyes are also remade. The glowing ball looks now more like it was before, but also not really like it was at the time i had created it at first. Seems verry strange to me that these changes happen.
The GM3 Model (the devil) is a little morphed here and there, but pretty much the Damien Demon with his horns, eyes, skin, scaled up a little, with heath hair, helion pants, helion belt, a changed pose from Basix - G3M - 16 and the face expression is Night Creatures - Night Creatures Expressions 05. .
..just realized that the right arm is a little off, but even a simple posing and i hit the minutes long "lagg" even with a new reloadet scene.
Is it better to use Iray or 3Delight textures/materials/shaders as a starting point?
In my tests, on a close up, I can see G8F's mouth inside her head. Plus, some of my characters eyes are red (the sclera and iris).
I know I said that I wasn't going to bother... But I was interested in the rendering times, and what my own computer could do.
First test render using Filament
I watched the video by KindredArts and found it immensely helpful. The long and the short of it is, I LIKE Filament. A lot.
I have a default scene load which I have set up for IRay so that I don't need to go tweaking things before I start adding to the scene. I'd be very surprised if I'm alone in this so here's a question:
Has anyone created a default load scene for Filament and, if so, what are your environment, tonemapper and draw style settings?
Both the skin and the hair look great here, @3Diva!
- Greg
I just can't get the hair to look right - I can reduce the shine but not the transparency (at least not without deleting the transmaps altogether).
I have come to the conclusion that what you save in rendering time you spend on configuring the shaders.
time to render: almost 2 seconds!
time to make shaders look right (or even trying to) : AN HOUR!
my findings are:
I'm sorry but I've backtracked through the thread and can't find a post where the transparency issue is addressed. Any hints?