I'm Sorry, Filament. I guess you really do Rock!!!
Dartanbeck
Posts: 21,568
I'm sorry for hating you so quickly.
I just though that you were what you were, and were set up to just work right out of the box - silly frickin' me!
What a great little renderer you are!
All I had to do was to rotate the dome a bit differently than usual (for Iray), make a few tweaks here and there - kinda noting along the way which things you ignore, and... Wow! You can really do some fun, can't you?!!!
Post edited by Dartanbeck on
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It might be a lot to ask, but if you ever had the time and energy to document what you've learned about working with Filament, I think people here might very much appreciate it.
Perhaps you might like to post a few renders. Sorry for my scepticism but I have yet to see a Filament render that I would be happy with (I'm talking about those others have posted, not my own efforts). I've since disabled Filament which is sad because I had such high hopes that it would be the DAZ Studio answer to Eevee.
I think DAZ 3D should create a dictionary of iRay to Filament shader material conversion presets and then inturn develop a Filament to USD PBR material dictionary exporter (for Unity, UE4 (UE4 is a DAZ 3D sponsor come to think of it), Blender; particularly Blender & UE4).
I have pretty much given up on discussing it with others though I use it a lot myself along with lots of other software most would find not realistic enough.
I like that I can render a 2160 UHD animation in less than a half an hour and pop it up on Youtube with an Audio library tune just to maintain viewership.
if I don't upload something every week when I finally do I get barely any views so it's fodder and some like to listen to music with something to look at, there are a lot of channels which just do this with one unoriginal image and Audio library tunes too, at least mine is something I rendered.
I don't care if people like it or not because they rarely get any dislikes compared to stuff I put lots of effort and time into.
this was my last video for just that purpose.
"Time" being the hardest part of that equation for me.
I will be getting there though!
I do love it! So I'll probably try to fully document how I tweak everything by hand to make it start to pop!
Like going from Carrara to Daz Studio, which takes considerable effort to forget about looking for similarities, Filament is an excellent 'addition' (nobody's forcing us to use it - why disable it?) to the toolset that requires a bit of 'thinking outside the box' tinkering to figure out how to make it look really good - and some scenes might be difficult to ever get to that stage.
It's hard to explain briefly other than that - so I will try to do some in-depth looks at this 'faster-than-the-eye-can-see' render engine.
...@ Dartanbeck : sent a PM.
Knowing that I was going to try for a Filament render, I saved the Iray version off first, so that I could mess it up really good without worrying.
First thing was to Create > New Filament Draw Style Node (or whatever it's called)
There are several ways to reign down the over-blown lighting.
Shaders -
I don't have enough time to get too in-depth here, but:
Texture Maps - Some nodes of a shader work well with Filament, except that Filament will ignore any sort of map - So only use colors or values
So when we see ultra-powerful scattering going on, go into the shaders and tone them down beginning with removing the maps and lowering the value or darkening the color
Alternatively - leave the map in, since it's being ignored anyway. I don't do this, but you can.
Transparency - I thought for sure that I was told that Transparency doesn't work in Filament. It does, but I think it ignores maps here as well - so if you need something transparent, try using a nice transparent shader, knowing that it will make the entire surface of that material transparent. Remember: If we need to create new material zones to differentiate here, we can do so with the Geometry editor, then make one transparent and the others not, etc.,
For advice on creating new material zones: The Material Zone~ Geometry Tool Tutorial & Shaders (Awesome tthread by Novica!)
I was amazed at how well the bump maps work in Filament when I zoomed way in on Rosie 5, who uses V4 Elite: Reby Sky maps.
Because of the use of V4 maps (I think, because I've seen this behavior in earlier beta versions of Carrara), I need to untick "Create Fast MipMaps" in the Filament Node, which gives her a more bumpy, less glossy appearance at a distance, which I really kind of liked! It made her look kind of like I drew her with really good art tools.
Although I haven't tried it yet, I think we can resolve this by going in and tweaking the shaders for Filament.
I'll report back later when I have more time, and after I've experimented further.
The Big reason for the first post and this thread, is because of how nice it has been simulating hair in dForce, creating animations, etc., etc., all in a really decent looking render - in real time!!! So Cool!!!
Cheers all
The major drawbacks of filament from what I can see, it's the lack of global illumination that's unacceptable for a pbr engine even a real time one, and it can't handle transmapped hair that's unacceptable for daz assets. That said it's not that you can't use it or something. Below some settings that may work fine enough for the HDRI and some occlusion, you have to unlock the occlusion power.
As for eevee it can handle GI and transparency fine, othen than other things.
Filament is fine with transparency especially refraction, it's cutout opacity maps that are the issue
Nope, filament totally ignores refraction it's not supported at all, that is, the material is always thin walled. Unless you mean reflection that's of course supported. Also seems to ignore the glossy color that I didn't expect.
As for eevee it gets some support for refraction too.
yeah is all or nothing but the refraction slider still does work with cutout opacity at 100% giving a much better result.
reflectivity works and I do use glossy snd roughness but again I think it's either on or off nothing inbetween
Please pictures with settings. I don't see any refraction here. If you do know what refraction is.
well I have seen distortions behind a solid curved surface with it if that's what you mean, admittedly not in your image but in sets I have rendered possibly with thickness not single poly.
I am on my ipad at the moment but if I remember I will check on my computer with a solid wineglass or something (not a crappy single poly model like some sets have)
video
yeah it might be wishful thinking on my behalf but iray didn't fare much better on the distorting
I included my Carrara modelled goblet
my settings
About all I can use it for is for quick background renders I can turn into postworked stuff. Its absolute pants at doing hair.
I love using it for setting up my animations!
On my Saved Character scene files, I include a Group called Render Options, where I keep my Environment, Tone Map and Filamant render option nodes.
I set up my Filament options to my needs so it's always ready to go.
After simulating my Classic Long and Curly dForce Hair, by Linday, and it looked great, I had to come in here and start this thread.
It does have some game-changers in it that (so far) disallow me from actually using it as a beauty-pass render engine that I've noticed After starting this thread, but I still love using the engine!
There isn't any refraction in your images. And iray of course supports full refraction. Refraction is when light bends inside glass, so you see distorted images looking trough.
Again, filament doesn't support refraction at all. As for eevee it gets some support for refraction but it's limited.
This product is a really nice solution for hair in Filament:
https://www.daz3d.com/fsl-realistic-hair-shaders-for-iray-and-filament
I've used those on hairs that I always had trouble with in Filament, and for me they turned out really nice.
I've also had good luck with a couple of other hair shaders/styles but I couldn't say for certain if it was the shaders I used, the way the creator modeled the hair, or some other factor because I was doing a lot of experimenting with settings. But when I tested the "Realistic Hair Shaders for Filament" product I made sure not to do a lot of changes so I'd know for sure if they were working, and I they work great for me.
Really nice to see people trying out Filament
Personally, I really like it. I think it's especially good if you're an animator (I am). I'm a bit of a 3Delight fangirl, and I'm not all that interested in Iray, but I do really like Filament. I do highly stylized work, very cartoon looking, so 3DL works amazingly, but Iray is... not really suited to the look I'm going for. Filament, however, seems like it can work really nicely with whichever style you prefer (realism vs toon).
I don't know that I'd ever use it exclusively for a project, I use it more as a supporting renderer. Basically, anything that needs to render fast, anything that just isn't getting the 'look' I want in 3DL, or in some unexpected cases certain shaders (for 3dl or iray) just look better in filament than in their own render engine. I also think it plays nice with both 3DL and Iray in the sense that if you use either of those as your "main" renderer you can really easily get away with using filament in a supporting role and make the styles match without much trouble no matter which of the larger ones you prefer.
And while I did say that I use it in more of a 'supporting role' for my work, I will add that I recently started using it for main characters as well. It was one of those "unexpected cases" I mentioned where filament just looked nicer than anything else in the end.
@MegonNoel Can you please post a picture of the toulouse hair with the FSL shaders in filament ? Possibly with the settings you used so we can see how nice they work. Personally I believe they don't work at all since uber presets can't fix a render engine issue. And filament just can't handle multiple layers of alpha maps thus the issue with transmapped hair.
edit. Just got another trick that you may like to be aware of. It seems that mipmapping generates seams on some textures, so better to leave it off.
I gave the FSL Hair Shaders a try, I think the Iray shaders are pretty good but I'm not too impressed with the Filament versions. At least not with the hairs I've tried so far.
Attachment names tells what is what. Same lighting for all (Pro Studio HDR), Environment Intensity 1.0 for Iray, 0.25 for Filament.
Did some Gloss/Specular adjustments for the FSL Iray samples as they were too glossy IMO, maybe it has to do with the lighting used.
@Taoz As I suspected the FSL shaders don't fix the transmapped bug at all. If you try different colors for the strands in toulouse it shows better but it's already visible in your pictures. Thank you for providing this test.
No, there's probably no way to fix this using shaders. Here's a few more FLS Toulouse Iray/Filament samples from a different angle.
This may be a bit of a reach but is there work being done to make Filament more resilient (i.e. transparency fixes, better reflections, soft shadows, etc..)? It won't replace Iray for obvious reasons but it makes a TON of sense to be used for scene prototyping and animations.
Filament supports a lot of things but most of it is not plumbed in DAZ.
...3DL could henadl refraction (the girl in the foreground). Took a a little research on refraction of various materials and some experimentation, but it worked.
3Delight does a lot of things even iray cannot do
but also sadly too slowly for animation
...true. there are some reasons I still like it over Iray, for example I could do a number of special effects and styles "in render" instead of post.
Funny that you say that (all of it)!
When I first started messing with it again - when I made this thread - I noticed that it was really easy to get a really nice stylized render look from it.
There are still a few little things that keep me from actually using it for stylized animation renders, the big one being that the inner mouth always looks like there's a light on inside.
For hair and other seemingly problematic surfaces, I noticed a Huge improvement to everything when I open the Drawing pane under "Drawing" and turn off Avatar drawing. Now I'm not seeing the transparency issues in the hair (possibly the hair I'm using? Claasic Long Curly, by Linday).
I tested the idea that I could make Filament renders look a lot nicer if I tweaked the materials, and I was correct. So if I ever get to the point where I want to try for a beauty pass render using Filament, I'll work all of the materials until I'm happy with the look and save a new set of presets to rely on for such things. Amazing (to me, being a DS newb) how easy Daz Studio makes it to save any little piece that we want to be able to apply to existing saves!
As for animation, I love how I can preview my animation work as I go using Filament.
I'll leave Avatar Drawing On for Texture shaded, and tuen it off and on as needed in Filament.
At first it felt like it was just my imagination, but now I'm convinced that, somehow my Classic Long and Curly Hair seems to simulate a touch faster when being viewed through Filament compared to Texture Shaded. I haven't actually timed an entire sim to truly test it, but it really does seem to be faster.
Yes. I believe I mentioned that earlier.
For my particular skin materials, I need to turn of MipMap, which then makes the bump too strong, so for Filament rendering, I'd simply need to maker a separate preset for many of my materials with a lot less bump and in some cases a few more tweaks.