Filament! Whats it all about?

deeahr2169

I am a simple soul and have no intention of messing around with animation, the ability to create still images is more than satisfying for me. I am ambitious to achieve as close to photo realism as I am able within the limitations imposed upon me by my ability and my limited budget. I have used Reality via Lux render since it was first released and am so used to it in its many iterations that I rarely if ever attempt to use anything else, indeed I have to spend time re-learning other ways such as 3Delight.

Then one day I notice this thing called Filament being released and do some reading and wonder if in time it may advance the quest for fast photo real renders over and above those that I can achieve with Reality4. I doubt if there will be any further upgrades to Reality, it being almost as old as I am, so unless I find another another means for rendering I am going to be stuck in the past.

What I need to know before I switch to DS4.14 and have a play with Filament is will my ability to use Reality be compromised. I mean I would like to give Filament a try, but not if by doing so I would then lose the use of Reality. 

Even as I type this I realise the question betrays my lack of smarts but please appreciate that there are some of us who while we like to play at this 3D, have no desire to spend our entire time learning the more complex things, we just want to dip our toes in the water...

So the question is if I switch to DS4.14 wll I stil be able to render with Reality...

Thanks for any advice

Leana

deeahr2169 said:

What I need to know before I switch to DS4.14 and have a play with Filament is will my ability to use Reality be compromised.

AFAIK the Reality plugin still works fine in 4.14.

But if you're worrried you could install the 4.14 beta to try Filament and keep your current version of the General Relase for Reality (or keep your current beta and install 4.14 general release if what you use now is the beta).

azcraigrr

I found this video intro to be very helpful for understanding Filament;

I especially like how it will help with lighting easier than now where I switch view between Texture and IRay.

I really think I'll be using it a lot. It keeps crashing on my TangoAlpha products where it would probably be most useful to me.

deeahr2169

Thanks so much for the replies both of which tweaked my limited knowledge. First is the fact that I have never involved myself in beta versions because I figured those were for really clever people and for testing the new stuff. It didnt occur to me that I could have both my current version and a beta version installed on my machine. I might have to do a bit of looking to find the beta version though...

The video is really interesting if a little above my pay scale, but it did make me think about how Filament works and also how I Ray works because I hardly ever bothered with that either. I watched the entire video which I dont often do so thats a mark of how valuable I found it...

Thanks very much...

onix

As I see that filament renderer Is something like an improved OpenGL  it does not even have any dedicated output and if you want to export a picture you have to render in a viewport.

It seems to be just as fast as OpenGL but it consumes a horrible amount of GPU memory so if you have filament viewport open and try to run iray at the same time most likely your rendering will fail.

Not sure how useful it is for photorealistic renderings as the quality is not as good as Iray or reality so you probably can't use it as a quick replacement.

 

Martirilla

So far as I am aware, DAZ 4.14 will run the latest Reality plugin fine. You may want to pick up a helper script at the Store such as 'Instances to Objects', if you plan on using big architectural scenes which have lots of 'instances' in them. These will need to be converted to obj before sending the scene to Reality.