What is Filament
amblypigid
Posts: 1
I've been using DAZ for almost 20 years. I know my way around pretty well, and what I don't know I can usually figure out.
But for the life of me, I cannot fathom what use filament is.
All I can see about it is that it makes for faster screen manipulation than Iray. As far as that goes, I can see no advantage to filament over a texture shaded screen. Also, my CPU fans don't scream and my CPU does not run at 100 % like they do with Iray on. But again, the same is true for texture shaded. Along with that, Task Manager shows the CPU maxed out while the GPU is idle when my screen is in Iray and when I render in Iray.
Dell XPS 8930, Core i7-8700, 3.2 GHz, 6 core hyper threaded & NVIDIA GeForce 1060 3GB
As far as image rendering goes, it does nothing.
Is filament only for the view port, or does it also render images?
Thank you.
Ken.
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Comments
Filament is a Google developed render engine, realtime and PBR based. It has a number of issues, but for people without a sufficent NVidia GPU it is an option. And it might get better over time.
To render vith it you select Filament in viewport, and then set Render Engine to Viewport.
The WP Guru (Jay Versluis) has done many Daz Studio videos for both DAZ3D and his own YouTube channel. Three of his videos on Filament are
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=88LuOEpYuSE
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NS1MPRJjDss
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dE1pSOPfLNw
There are also a few products for Filament in the DAZ3D store
https://www.daz3d.com/filament-pro-lights-and-rendering-secrets--2-new-lights--video-tutorial
https://www.daz3d.com/rssy-3delight-and-iray-to-filamen
One of the issues is that many hair poducts don't work well
Filament is currently in active development and hopefully they will make it more usable in a future release.
I always imagined it as comparable to Eevee in Blender, just a faster and better looking preview than OpenGL. Basically like a game render engine with all the bells and whistles. Unfortunately DAZ released it kinda broken, most notably the most important thing, broken transparency. Along with no soft shadows, some lights don't work right nor do shadows, reflections, etc...
I am a major user of this renderer and use it for paid commissions as I do animations (yes, I understand DAZ is not great for it but it actually is a pretty good (and quicker) animation tool for certain situations). While somewhat useless for actual single frame renders - for animation, it is a major boon. It sure beats having to migrate over to UE or Blender to render out an animation.
Not everyone has a bleeding edge video card and not everyone wants to always make photorealistic renders, DAZ may be slowly coming around that there is a whole other market out there that they've left untapped.
I don't believe Filament is intended, even by Google, to be quite that feature-rich.
Given the features available in https://github.com/google/filament, I'm inclined to think there is a lot left untapped with DAZ's implementation of the filament render engine. Just some things have not been plumbed in to tap this potential.
I really like the new filatoon functionality; its given me a whole buch of possibilities with older characters, but I'd really appreciate it if someone could point me inthe direction of how to get a background into the scene? Photo backdrops and HDRIs dont seem to work....
You could load a plane primitive, scale it to the dimensions that you need and add an image to its diffuse channel on the Surfaces tab.