Filament vs Eevee?
marble
Posts: 7,499
I'm wondering whether anyone has done a comparison. I've tried both and have not really been impressed with either although I'm sure that there is a lot I could learn about tweaking Eevee. I'm not so sure that Filament has much scope for improvement however, especially in the restricted mode in which it is employed in DAZ Studio. On the plus side, Filament is there in DAZ Studio so no need to get involved with exporters between applications. But, once again, Filament is just not up to the job of rendering anything remotely believeable.
I should say that I'm only interested in either for animations. There are options for export and I would appreciate any comments on the preferred method of producing a rendered animation in Blender. I have not even looked at the animation timeline in Blender yet but I am increasingly aware of the limitations of the DAZ Studio timeline. For example, I'm not sure whether NLA is possible (perhaps using Animate 2) because, so far, I've only messed around with Keymate and Graphmate. I belive that Blender is more sophisticated but I have real problems posing in Blender so I'm tempted to stay with the "amateur" DAZ timeline and export the animated scene, either using Diffeomorphic or Sagan.
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I'm of a similar opinion of Eevee and Filament.
As I mentioned in the Diffeo thread, I've just tried Eevee again and, while it is much better than Filament, the materials conversion using Diffeomorphic isn't quite as faithful as we get with Cycles. For example, I exported a figure with a Meipe geograft (always my test of usability) and Cycles rendered the materials almost as well as IRay. Eevee, however, didn't quite reproduce the skin tones on the graft to the rest of the character so I would need to learn how to do that using the Blender node system.
Yeah, not sure how people are even comparing Filament to EEVEE at all.
The more accurate comparison for Filament is Blender's Material previw in the viewport
Evee is from the output result more comparable to iRay, in terms of qualitly.
Filament is for me just a waste of resources.
I'm sure Filament will be improved and expanded to be more 1 to 1 with Eevee but DAZ 3D has multiple moving targets so they needed to get Filament out even if not 100% of the Filament features weren't available on initial integration with DAZ Studio.
Not discouraging anyone from using Eevee though or asking them to wait an indeterminant amount of time for Filament features that actually weren't promised by DAZ 3D.
The simple reason why Filament is "not there yet" is first of all DAZ Studio! Filament without it renders pretty insane good (in comparsion with DAZ Filament implementation) and can match even evee but not cycles or iray. What you would have to do is install it and render exported FBX files. The thing is - and this is only a strong hunch and therefor a guess at the moment - i think Daz Studio also cannot propperly convert the shaders and textures for an acceptable FBX format. Because if it would, we would not even have this conversation, since everyone would render in his faforite render engine.
Filament can do hair and can do emission, but Daz Studio's system on things like refraction alone is insanely stupid! This is why nothing really works out, when we try to transfer things. Daz Studio has overall "wrong" settings and this also forces a lot of people tweaking on every corner to get things "right", even if it would not be necessary. There will be a topic on this part, where i get into this comming up in the future... maybe this year!
Just take a look at this and you could feel like WTF: https://www.deviantart.com/gniiial/gallery
These use ALL the same skin, the same settings, tweaked to get in the right direction. BUT... if you would see the shaders and materials... you would cry how many money you spend on iray shading crap to get a better looking character! Because the shaders in general are iray. ALL of them... there is no special light, no special whatever. The Skin is from Jenni8 (the right character), the second right is the first version to both of the left ones. These are older versions. ATM I'am at version 3 of this render engine overarching workflow. Imagine a world where you just put the character you want into YOUR faforite render engine and it just renders like it should! (...surely you would need to make changes BUT only really decent ones on the diffuse/base color/albedo end)
And now let me tell you something... the world is already there a few years and it's called PBR shading! But Daz Studio fails to "see" it comming for years with it's very own way of trying to simulate everything with the wrong math in the shader system...
If you really want to know what Filament can do knock yourself up and get ready to be impressed: https://google.github.io/filament/Materials.html
The full version of Filament on Github is obviously much more capable than what Daz has currently implemented. However, I see very little in the Materials Guide for Filament which isn't already available in Blender Eevee. Transparency blending, refraction with absorption, clear coat, bent normals, AO, anisotropy, reflectance (specularity), IOR, emissive, and transmission are all possible in Eevee with Principled Shader already. I'm not sure what the "micro thickness" does, but refraction thickness is also possible with Eevee materials. I don't see any volumetrics in Filament so far, which Eevee can also do with very impressive results. There's a video on Youtube of someone creating a Mandelbulb using volumetrics in Eevee in real-time! That's what sold me on the thing. Also for animators, Eevee has object and camera motion blur. Not sure what Filament offers in that regard either.
The real difference here is that Google has Open-Sourced Filament as a real-time physically-based render engine intended for game dev on a multi-platform source code. The OpenGL API behind Eevee is tightly bound to the Blender source code and the primary intention with Eevee tends to lean more toward visual quality vs. speed and performance like most game engines (Filament). While Eevee is still extremely fast and NEAR real-time, not all the features are truly real-time like they would need to be in a multi-platform game engine. This means Eevee can implement settings and features that could never be "real-time" on platforms like Android (which Filament was created to support). That said since it is open-source, and Daz has adopted it, there's a lot that could be done if they really want to develop it.
Just don't count on Daz being capable of development with Filament as fast as Blender Foundation has developed Eevee. Daz is going to, no doubt, depend entirely on 3rd party support for the expansion of Filament's capability. So you will definitely need to purchase addons for most of the coolest features for Filament if you want it to do some of the things that Eevee can do RIGHT NOW for free.
As they both crash for me, I find them to be identical.
Sounds like you either have an older system that doesn't support the minimum OpenGL drivers, or your graphics drivers are just out of date. Both Eevee and Filament should run on most computers from the last 8 years! As long as your graphics drivers support OpenGL 3.3 or higher. Filament might even be more forgiving than that right now. You also need to be sure you have a 64bit CPU with a minimum of 4gb of system ram. I found that 4gb is still too low. 8gb minimum should be the actual lowest spec for RAM.
10 year old iMac with 16 GB RAM. Cycles now crashes too. On my Linux box, I only have 8GB RAM. Eevee always crashes. Cycles sometimes runs out of memory. The Nvidia card on the Linux machine has 4GB RAM.
I had a 2013 iMac until last year when I sold it for a good price (approx half what I paid for it when new) and used the money to upgrade the PC I bought 4 years ago just for DAZ Studio.
Ah, it's a Mac. I can't speak to the stability of any software package for Mac, but if you do a Google for "graphics drivers for Mac unstable" you will find a ton of threads, even on Apple.com, complaining about display drivers and software crashes related to graphics card drivers on the Mac, especially when it comes to hardware-accelerated video rendering. This goes for everything from video conferencing to graphics software apps like Blender. Apple blames the software, but the software companies are pointing the finger at Apple. Since these issues do not seem to be a problem on PC, I don't know.
As far as your Linux box having the same issue, that could be something entirely different, but again I find Nvidia drivers are notoriously unstable on Linux as well. AMD does a little better on that platform, but AMD drivers, in general, are a hit and miss too.
This ^. They really needed something better than multipass opengl, to get out of mesozoic.
Yeah, but Blender's material preview in the viewport is still Eevee now. You can turn on tons of features for the viewport and set resolution so that viewport is exactly the same as the actual render. There really is no "viewport" material preview that is different from the render. The only thing that changes now from viewport to render, with Eevee, is the samples.