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Thank you MEC4D for this beautiful page of information.
I had decided it was time to take a peak and see what 'filament' is about before downloading the beta ... I was thinking such a word should be referring to a type of hair. Filament as in threads, you know. So now I know it doesn't. It's been a long week, golly, it's been a long year, anyhow I did get a good laugh picturing people getting instructions from any "lizard of the family Gekkonidae. They are small, carnivorous, mostly nocturnal animals with large eyes and adhesive toes enabling them to climb on vertical surfaces." {it's okay, I know it is also used as an alternative spelling for get-go}
You welcome , in this case the Filament name came from the metal filament in electric bulb that emits light .. Google came with this name as it is Google's child.
Of course hair is made from protein filament, and so are heat resistant synthetic filament hair fibers, we have here Filament Hair Salon lol
Don't expect full render engine of Filament in this beta, this version of Filament is only a Drawstyle so a lot of stuff don't going to work like in iray , you have only 1 distance light and 6 spot light that can produce shadows , the rest will not , if you like to setup your scenes with spot light it can be done with interesting results, but mostly for simple preview of Enviorment and PBR shaders before rendering in Iray
I agree with you regarding this year .. what a waste but on the other hand a lot of new exciting stuff in computer world that keeps me busy
The DS has Iray Realtime, although there is no access to it. Why can't just connect it instead of Filament, as a preview-render?
Filament in its current form is completely useless for me personally.
Here is some real time test render in Filament with all PBR values , no skin shaders or textures just proper color values for my Dwarf
no bad for a Draw Preview
Iray Real-Time renderer is an OpenGL render mode and it is not in Daz Studio as many other features that are missing in D|S for reason I have no idea
Filament is also not full render engine but just PBR Drawstyle mode , it is not in DS to make renders but to help settings scenes for Iray, view Environment maps set PBR shaders , so a lot of positive things compared to the ancient old OpenGL that was completely useless for this tasks .
thanks so much
However, we will need to make changes to the scene for the correct preview, which is clearly too much for normal day-to-day work.
Left - Filament / Right - Iray (and to be honest, I prefer the grainy, but more correct Iray-preview; and when working with a pose - Smooth Shaded OpenGL)
Therefore, it is not yet clear how Filament can replace OpenGL, if for a much more correct preview it is much easier for us to switch to "Iray-" or "Iray Interactive-preview". Perhaps it would be even easier in "Iray Realtime-preview", but we didn't see this mode (as you rightly noticed - for unknown reasons)
With menu > Create > Filament (something) node, you can create a 'correction node' and adjust the power of HDRI / spotlight / distant lights. That gets you closer.
Fil doesn't replace previewing in iRay to check colors etc. But if you're, for example, spending 10 minutes to pose the figure, iRay is much too slow for me and OpenGl is butt ugly. Same if, for example, you want to finely position a spotlight so that a shadow falls over half the face. Fil does that with 60fps, iRay more like 1-2 fps.
It's also faster than OpenGl in bigger scenes (but be careful with settings... interface... quality something. Max Quality is easy for the GPU to calculate but that just EATS VRAM. Quality 2/4 or 3/4 is easy on the Ram, though).
The dwarf looks surprisingly good for 'no textures'. You could have 20 of those figures in a scene I guess, if no textures are involved (and probably no clothes). Does the iRay render look similar to this, or better/worse?
(next: reading Mec4d's latest posts)
The surface’s response to light in Filament and Iray is quantified by a function called the Bidirectional Reflectance Distribution Function (BRDF), that is based on microfacet theory. REFLECTANCE
See Filament as a simple PBR game engine , it will not produce fine result especially on a shaders that use SSS or with extra functions that works in Iray only , it needs to be rendered , that the difference between Real-Time and actual Render Engine
This thread is more for educational purposes for users that want to upgrade their skills and make things looking better for both Filament Drawstyle and automatic in Iray.
I am just here to explain simple stuff regarding PBR and how the system works and what needs to be used and what can or not and how to find proper alternatives .
Beside the SSS skin if a simple Metallicity based shader doesn't look right in Filament , it is not a good shader to begin with .
Filament give the opportunity for people to do things better and right for both Filament and Iray and learn their favorite software the proper way
Now if you throw your beautiful posed character into a Unreal Engine it will looks like in Filament , that should ring a bell
Not all shaders will looks proper even if they are accurate and looks great in iray , Filament is just a Drawstyle mode , but it preview simple PBR sets of shaders very accurate especially Metallicity based shaders
I tested all real-time PBR render engines simple and more advanced and they all produced the same result as Filament with a proper shader .
I believe if Filament have global illumination function thighs would be looking great , but even Evevee in Blender don't have it for that reason light looks estimated , not correct , the Directional Light do a nice job replacing the sun when using IBL for the scene , but sadly spot and point lights create not so pleasant reflections on the PBR surface and things looks more like in studio , indoor when using them like it was once in 3DL or old Poser4
but we can talk forever , sadly we wanted a Porsche, we got a bike .. but with a good dedication we can still reach the destination !
Please look in the menu of D|S for Create/New Filament Options Node click on OK with the basic settings, go to Scene tab, select it and under Parameters you will find control options for Lighting, Environment and Ambient Occlusion for Filament only.
What usually I do, I load my environment map for Iray, set up the right light under tone mapping , open Filament Options node , go to Parameters and under Tonemapping you will find ISO slider, set it up to 0.56 , it will +/- setup the same light condition you have in iray .
If you use spot or distance light you can control them from Filament option node as well to match your iray scene
BTW I love posing in Filament , I can easy get the right reflection I want on objects like metals without even firing Cuda cores , set the environment directions and all the other base settings then moving to iray
or just setup 200 shaders without firing iray ! it is good, you just need to find your own workflow with it and get deeper into the subject of proper material settings , it will pay off and iray will work better for you too and render faster .
People should learn all the stuff when iray arrived in Daz Studio, but most of them skipped it and now it shows how little everyone knows about the simple basics of a PBR that their engine uses , it is a mess !
Filament PBR Drawstyle is not broken , it is the lack of some people knowledge not knowing what they dealing with including iray.
Good look and if you need anything let me know .
Filament is not faster than OpenGL , I had a big scene it almost chocked so slow it was compared to OpenGL , Filament don't like models with a very high poly count , I could not render in real time my Zbrush hair , it was half million poly , it was not huge memory files but just not for real-time engine .
Also when you use Mipmaps option under Filament Options Node, it take 33% more of your memory but then move faster and things looks no more fuzzy . The Mipmaps generate small and big textures in your viewport and load them according of the distance from camera , so object that are closer will have higher resolutions than objects that are far in the back LOD , if you quick change things in the full scene you may experience slow down , as the system need to load proper texture resolution , if you uncheck the option it will works very smooth but the materials may flicker and looks fuzzy, too much details
I used my toon skin shader on my Dwarf from my upcoming shader collection for Iray , it looks better in iray since it use SSS and other settings not visible in Filament , you just see the right albedo , reflectance and roughness , no maps no bump maps or normals , only colors , just the way you can make murky water effect in iray without using IOR
I will have also some proper edited skin shaders that works in all lights conditions , but not want to go into it here in this thread, no place for that .
And yes having simple and correct shaders allow you to do more and faster , safe some VRAM in the first place and render fast without all the maps that half of it is not even needed under Metallicity Base shader
You will get dissent Filament look and perfect Iray look all the time .
I just wish it had emission, apparently the engine does but DAZ's implimentation either doesn't or it needs a dedicated shader brick
I miss it mostly , I usually not use Spot lights , it always looks weird to me in iray and the values are out of this world to make it right or proper , in some special cases only , so most of my scenes are dark in Filament
For that to work they would need to install the full version of Filament engine what render beautiful , and you will need a good card to render it out as you need in iray, that why they used the Draw style only
However I used a lot of Filament type render engines that have a draw style and they have GI and shadow catcher options , so if we can get this in the future would be great also for better preview of the PBR shaders and no more IBL lighting passing through objects as that bother me mostly not only in D|S Filament but also in other programs I use
Marmoset Tollbag have a very nice Filament like type real time PBR engine , with shadow catcher, light, HDRI and Global illumination , lens flare effect, bloom and don't need any Cuda cores for beautiful renders and animations(animation imported with fbx files) . I use it sometimes for paking Unreal PBR texturing package for export/import
There is nothing we can change or add , only the coding of the Filament plugin can do that, DAZ programming team is little I don't know if they have time for all of it as there is so many serious things to fix before that and bugs. But maybe one day
Also remember that only 6 spot light can have shadows and one distance light , if you iray scene have more it may not work or load correctly , also Filament consume a lot of VRAM and there is not an option to fall back
thread it like an Game engine , if you get too much of poly it gonna choke your system , and as I mentioned above it use LOD so additional 33% of memory consumption for textures unless you shut down the Mipmaps function under Filament Options Node but the image will be less pleasant
So this thread has turned out to be much more informative than I dared hope when I started it. The input is much appreciated.
My take away from all this is, however, a little meh where Filament is concerned. It seems to me that the primary objective of this Draw Style is for previews and, to be honest, I am still more comfortable with OpenGL for posing with the occasional flip into IRay preview mode for making sure that my lights and environment are set up correctly. Meanwhile there is just too much of a gap in quality between IRay and Filament to take the latter seriously as a render option and, clearly, it was never intended to be included as such. So, for me, it is as you were - pose in OpenGL and render in IRay. I will, however, continue to follow the improvements to the DAZ-to-Blender plugins and to get a feel for the render options in Blender.
The performance differences we see are curious.
About the biggest scene I have, that my 8GB 2070s can handle, is Stonemason's Fern Lake with 2 'full fat' figures, 1 transmapped hair, 1 rather brutal dForce long hair. ~4Mio vertices + 3.5 Mio vertices for the dF hair.
In a 3k*2k viewport, OpenGL does 20-30fps. Filament runs full speed (60fps) at all times.
My best guess is your card ran out of VRam. This kills my VRam: menu > Edit > Preferences > Interface > Texture Resources = Max.
Max takes more than iRay. That setting at 3/4 takes MUCH less memory, less than iRay. 1/2 is still fine, you lose details in closeup but for a preview it's ok (except bumps in harsh light, can be ugly).
Note: Filament doesn't like the yellow 'selection' overlay, slows it down a lot when on complex objects.
+1
some of the better indoor environments I have use emission lights exclusively.
I am glad you see it as you do, as it is nothing more nothing less ..that what I am trying to explain every time .. low base preview , the most usage personally I have from it is setting up my PBR base shaders , Not need to render images I have over 12000 Cuda cores for that .
I see it as a good opportunity for people to learn at the same time but sadly we hit the wall with limitation
For example , I setup PBR base shaders for skin , working amazing and it is simple , all values perfect and so the SSS , but once SSS is ON things change in Filament and my human become a ghost , do I need to make separate shader for Filament? not even thinking about it , there is not need for that, if I want 3DL style with glowing nostrils I can change the render engine .
So for now it is usable only for making base PBR shaders that can take some time and preview Enviroment , posing for the right reflections without running iray for some with low cards, and nothing will make it better as it already is unless the plugin have more functions .
But I am still going to use your thread to put more info that are as good for Iray as Filament and helpful for others , as long it don't turns into complaining thread as I am not working for DAZ and have no interest in defend something I did not created, sharing just the truth independently !
so going back to topic , see image , perfect PBR skin to the last value .. works in all light conditions the way it should , medium soft type of skin.. and then see Filament on the left .. that is when we hit the wall and the magic is over with Filament .. picture says 1000 words , you can still create second version of the skin without SSS, but then it will looks bad in iray .. the case is closed regarding human skin with SSS, it is not award winning Unreal Engine to begin with. I was hopping at last for some colors to see through .. but somehow it don't , only the left nipple show up where I forgot to change the SSS
Fern Lake use Instances , I was editing the iray shaders for this set for Stonemason
I use 12000 cuda cores and 12GB of VRAM , it move smooth like butter in iray for me also in OpenGL .
Try to use the City streets of London in Filament , you see the difference , it is heavy textured, the Mip Maps getting crazy when moving it around slowing it a lot unless unchecked .
Of course the Perfomance vs quality of textures settings play a big role, but why I need a fuzzy image for ? do you get my point ? it will render out fuzzy too
Ok P.S to marble's reply , I adjusted the ISO scale in Filament to almost zero as my own HDRI even without sun are powerful light source , still a zombie land, that how death people looks like , great for Halloween !
The is huge difference of setting maps for SSS and for none SSS workflow so not surprised by the result
and even worse with dark PBR skin , so you see there is no middle Filament and skin SSS settings
If you going to use older type maps like we do for Victoria and Michael in early days where the light was baked in the textures you may have a nicer result
Or you need to add a bunch of point lights and Distance light to make the stuff works better in Filament only , possible yes but not worth the all work as the result is already fine in iray without it , but just to show off , No SSS Filament same materials , the magic come from Point lights and Distance light , to have a good result with white skin like that you will need to set the Albedo much darker for white skin . For the dark skin you can use a Float color 0.15 and the add the desired tint to it without adjusting the monochrome brightness ( grayscale ) just the hue and saturation . in my case the final sRGB color was Red: 108 Green: 97 and Blue: 95 on top of a standard M8 textures that have accurate albedo brightness , as I massured it
and you can have your Filament preview without SSS , with light skin it is not that easy as it will not work in both iray and Filament , dark skin uses less Transulency due to melanin and will looks better in Filament with all the point lights.
Ok guys, I understand you. Create - New Filament Options will probably save us from the obscurantism that I see. I'll check tomorrow
It's just that the problem now is that GETSX and I got into a car accident in mid-September. They let me go home with only a broken left arm, he is still in the hospital (3 days of resuscitation). For now, I'm just telling him what I see, he answers the phone. It's difficult, but real.
Thanks )
oh dear, sending healing vibes
Well I can't speak for DAZ 3D but as a customer of expensive computer hardware and (cummulatively) expensive 3D models I would like Filament to evolve into a 3D render engine with an option for realtime shortcuts for fast renders for AMD, intel, and nVidia GPUs. However the ray tracing hardware and "AI" capabilities of GPUs are advancing so fast that maybe a full fledged PBR renderer that is crossplatform on hardware and OS platforms is more in order instead of Filament as an EEVEE type realtime renderer. I don't know if Filament ultimately has that capability although Filament in 'realtime' PBR mode is fast enough and looks good enough to run on most modern mobile hardware if RAM amounts are increased. I couldn't tell you if Unity, UE4, and Crysis are using Filament in their crossplatform engines though.
The ideal asa a business is to increase use of your products so Filament or a similar renderer and it's crossplatform support are most definately needed.
Sorry to heard that, sending best wishes and wish you both speed recovery !
Filament was made by Google to be used on mobile phones for better VR experiences and is nice full render engine , but not the way it was used in Daz Studio.. Unity, UE4, and other don't use Filament , but all PBR render engines run by the same theory, everything is shiny as everything reflect everything.
Real time render engines are limited when processing geometry so for intensive scenes in Daz Studio it will never works. If you want Real Time award winning engine, use DAZ bridge to Unreal ,Unity or other platform, nobody will come to DAZ studio for that , it is too ancient , and the platform not for this kind of workflow and when it finally get there, it will be ancient again .. I am guessing not enough resource and people to do that fast enough.
As far as processing heavy geometry is concerned DAZ is pretty poor at it itself. Also I didn't realise filament's implementation in DAZ would be just a preview tool. Thank you for that.
Filament actually has a few huge advantages. it being open source and platform agnostic.
Well I fear that DAZ Studio will be going the way of Poser in a couple of years then.
Filament was developed at google as a side project, It's neat, and allows a developer to get 3D rendering with PBR very quickly. It's really cool and can render some nice images, Unity, UE4 and Crysis all use their own proprietary rendering engines.
While its not realistic to expect filament to match iray keep in mind that this new update will give you viewport Ambient Occlusion, Realtime Shadows, and Order independent transparency. Those will pull the current viewport out of the 90s and make it far more usefull.
As I would love to see the Full Filament engine in Daz Studio, sadly it is just a Drawstyle mode with limitations , the full engine would open an opportunity to users that don't own Nvidia Hardware to make some dissent art that would looks visually much better and render faster than currently Poser offer.
Filament has a huge advantage , it is clean, it is simple and uses simple PBR based materials, that is where industry is moving towards .
Bu it is easy to say than do, maybe the full engine requires own shaders system to do the job proper , I am surprised it works with MDL the way it do even if there are limitations for some material settings like Translucency ,SSS or Displacement , but who knows that the future will brings us, at last we going forward and a great opportunity for many to learn proper the usage of PBR based materials not just for Filament but also for Iray.
Each character I own needs a clean up , everything is messed up, wrong channels and settings mixed values of Specular with Metallicity workflow and Weighted in one surface , how it even passes the quality control , it is a little mess . Some folks have the idea that if they don't do realistic renders they can throws and mix everything they want into it, literally clogging the engine resulting in much longer rendering time and less pleasant results , no matter it is a cartoon, stylized or photo realistic render forgetting that a an engine need a proper informations to process the data correctly and fast as everything matter . 5 years passing and no much progress on the end user side , make me think why DAZ would even bother to bring new stuff if the users don't know how to use it or even bother to learn with excuses they don't do photoreal renders. Bad excuses !
I heard ( not saw) that Poser got back from the ashes ? Physically Based rendering and materials in Blender style.. well we gonna see soon enough if that is real and true, I mean with my own eyes
The fact that you can export basic Genesis in FBX format and have it poseable in Poser and render in new light, may attract back some old users again , but without proper figure system it may be less attractive plus you have to pay for it , so why new user want to spend money if they have free software option on the market that do the stuff a lot better .
So far nothing can bite the Genesis system inside Daz Studio, unless you don't care that your exported Genesis you're going to render in new Poser has its elbows so sharp, it can cut the glass of your monitor when you move it around. New D|S to Poser bridge ? I don't think so , but never say never .. there are going to be new opportunities if that all is true to the words. We see..
I did not said that , you putting words in my mouth LOL
That's true , I saw reall pretty cool stuff coming from the full engine .. I posted some links in the early conversations about , but a lot of people read the pages regarding the full Filament engine and trying to figure out why it don't works in Daz Studio the same way .. the fact that it works even with MDL shaders partiality is a huge surprise and working just perfect as a draw style.. beside the mentioned Translucent and SSS and lack of Global Illumination make it less good, however who knows what future updates brings us , you never know . I would be already happy with at last shadow catcher and GI , it would already improve a lot on the visual aspects
The industry moved to PBR fully atleast 10 years ago :). It's PBR in viewports as an artist aid that new.
Not they don't , not all of them and majority of the professional software don't use it fully as it don't give them the total and full control of the materials they want, you wanna a list ?
you taking my words out of context again , over 4 years in D|S and majority can't even set proper PBR material , nothing moved where it should long time ago.
I work with PBR long time before iray was even introduced to D|S , I know what is going on in the industry as I follow it for over 20 years on a daily basic , that's how I do my living .
PBR is "commonplace" these days, i.e. most engines (all?) support it. Anyway it is possible to do subsurface scattering in PBS implementations, though of course it depends on the shader. I don't know about the Filament model (uber shader?). Unreal Engine allows you to select the shader type to include SS if you want and you can set an SS profile. I gather there are post-processing techniques for improving it too, though I didn't read up on that yet.
So far I like what I see though. My only problem is sometimes my characters become invisible in PBR mode and I can't seem to make them visible at all (though they still work in iray and the old viewport OpenGL renderer).
Unreal use award winning engine, I know you can add SS , nothing to be compared with Filament Drawstyle mode that is a very lightweight version in D|S and not there to replace any other engine . The full Filament engine use material definition format loosely based on JSON
I guess the DAZ team programmers did a good job with it as it working very accurately with iray shaders, I hope they going to add more functions in the future to expand the shaders function and add GI and shadow catcher .
I have the same problem with my characters, once they use 3DL shaders they become invisible , mostly G2-3 or any older props that use 3DL , I have to convert the shaders to Iray CTRL click and replace the shaders and everything showing up again in Filament . Even sending stuff from Zbrush via GOZ make it invisible as it automatic use 3DL shader by import .
I redone many stuff akready but still over 900 to go .. I would be very surprised if 3DL shaders worked fine in Filament .
If you experience a freeze or problem while changing the shaders turn the Mipmpas function under Filament options node for the time of editing , it will speed up the flow , same for animations