- This topic has 15 replies, 10 voices, and was last updated 5 years, 10 months ago by
.
-
Posts
-
This is the text of an opening post (not by me) on a thread in the technical Daz Forum requesting information about Filament, which has suddenly appeared out of nowhere.
'
This is a discussion on what the Filament draw style is and what its uses are.
I noticed in the new Daz update there is a filament draw style now.
It is better than texture shaded and not as detailed as iray..
I am just wondering what its actual use is?
It is nice that it shows things that texture shaded draw style does not, like the HDRI sky.
I would really like to understand this more and what are the uses of the Filament packages sold in the store?
It seems that adding them would just slow down the view?
And how are they added? What do they actually do? Do they make a Filament view seem more real?
I am very confused about this. Things seem washed out in the Filament view and if I adjust the ISO or exposure value in tone mapping it will throw off my Iray render.
Can someone please explain the uses and purpose of this Filament draw style?
Thanks '
Of course this coherent and reasonable request for information received the usual Daz Forum snarky & unhelpful response.
From what I can gather it is of more use to animator / games people than folk who do static single renders.
I have to admit that so far, other than for animation, I am quite underwhelmed by it.Anybody any thoughts?
:0/
From my basic level understanding, it's a physical based renderer, which means it is a lot more like real life than what iRay does as far as light interactions. It can do stuff like really shine through and bounce off surfaces, which is why you can see dimples and pores better, and the physical texture of things like fabrics. In theory, it can allow things like when a light on a table with a shade on it lights an area by both diffusing through the shade and bouncing off the table and ceilings and walls, or how a flashlight casts a beam in fog, but also lights the fog itself up, which in turn lights the objects in it. It also casts accurate diffused shadows, but as of now the Filament engine can't do it.
All of this assumes the objects and lights in the scene are made with PBR in mind, which from what I am seeing with the default stuff in DAZ is most definitely not the case. Everything iRay causes a washed out mess that's not remotely useful. It's obvious that using Filament will require some new tools and some learning.
Filament is used to give you basic idea of how your scene will look rendered in Iray without needing to preview it there. It's real time and any changes you make load instantly instead of reloading the whole scene the way Iray preview does.
It will be mostly used to preview. I wouldn't use it for my renders since I prefer the overall quality of Iray even if it takes hours longer to render.
From talking with a friend... the primary use of filament rendering is game animation. A secondary use might be something along the lines of web comics, since a lot of 3D comics fail precisely because they look too detailed and you expect a more stylized look in a comic scene.
The impression that I got from conversations on DAZ during the wait for Ampere support was that Filament will eventually replace iray as the default renderer. It's faster, open source, supports hardware acceleration from all hardware rather than just CPU and CUDA, and most importantly exports directly into other more advanced rendering systems so DAZ can easily sell assets to more than just Daz Studio users.
These discussions came from people in the internal betas, so while they have more inside info than most of us, still take that with a healthy dose of skepticism.
It looks like my initial impressions were correct then.
I am going to avoid anything 'Filament' too.
:0/To me Filament looks like a half-assed beta level implementation. Give them time.
I expect it to be pretty soild. Sometime around Daz 4.16 - 4.17
Even then it isn't aimed at the style of work I am interested in.
Single frame ultra-realism.
:0/
Given time it'll be pretty close. A lot of game engines these days are close to that even... and a HELL of a lot faster to boot.
I'm glad to see that my less experienced opinion is backed up with people who are much more experienced. I feel like if I had to load 1000 additional plug ins to make it look correct, then something is broken to start with. I was highly underwhelmed with Filament. Much like @eelgoo I think I will just avoid it. If it gets better in the future, wonderful. If not I won't lose any sleep or money on it. @littlepleasures I wish there was a way to get Dforce hair into blender. I'm not proficient enough with Blender yet to create my own strand based hair that looks similar to whatever hair I'm using in Blender.
Actually one quick way to make Filament look a lot better is to use 3dlight textures. They're actually closer to basic PBR than iray materials which, according to a friend in the industry, are basically their own creature.
In addition, PBR shaders from Filament would export much better to blender and the like.
Really, this is going to be a repeat of early Iray IMHO.
- You must be logged in to reply to this topic.
