DAZ Studio at last has a real-time comic-book mode, somewhat like Poser. ‘Filatoon’ works with the Filament render-engine (I knew there had to be a use for it, eventually). It’s included as standard in DAZ Studio 4.23, and is not restricted to the new subscription DAZ Studio version. Note that the Filament engine can’t run on a Mac.
Judging by user try-outs and the official video trailer, it is definitely not as ‘artistic’ as Poser’s real-time tooning (which was made with the aid of comic-pros like Brian Haberlin). For instance, Poser makes its comic-book inking lines appear thicker as they near the camera. The DAZ real-time is definitely CAD-like, similar to what you can get with plugins at present with DAZ. Absolutely not going to satisfy any regular comic-book reader. Still, we have AI now, so it may be interesting to see what Stable Diffusion can do with the DAZ output, in terms of cohering it and fixing uglification, opacity map snaggles, and same-width outlines.
So, how to get DAZ Studio 4.23 with FilaToon?
On navigating the DAZ website to My Products / search ‘DAZ Studio’ / and then downloading the 756mb DAZStudio_4.23.0.1_Win64.exe — remember to also get the 48Mb IM00013176-42_DefaultResourcesForDAZStudio423.zip file which has the required Filament toon shaders. Copy the “Contents” in this .zip to your main folder path (if you have two paths, it seems it must be the first) and allow it to overwrite the existing Contents folder. Re-start DAZ.
Regrettably, Filament just doesn’t work for me in 4.23. All I get is a grey Viewport, despite doing everything correctly…
NVIDIA Drivers – yes
OpenGL 4.1 or better – yes
Load valid scene – yes
Set Viewport to Filament – yes
Set render to Viewport – yes
Filament Draw Options Node added to Scene – yes
Draw settings to ‘Style: Filament’ and ‘Bounding Box and Surface’ – yes
Distant and spotlight added to Scene – yes
Hardware anti-aliasing off – yes
… and absolutely nothing. Just a totally grey Viewport and a figure-control widget. I’d love to test and refine the new FilaToon, but… I can’t on my main workstation PC.
Filament does work fine for me in the older DAZ 4.21, which I did not allow to be uninstalled on installing 4.23. So it’s not like I can’t run Filament. It’s something in 4.23 that’s the problem.
I can also get the latest 4.23 Filament/ Viewport working fine on my Windows 10 Surface 3. But how then to get the FilaToon effect? Even after applying the shaders to a sample scene… I get nothing that looks like a toon. Nope… Filatoon seems to need a painfully detailed and long step-by-step tutorial on exactly how to set it up and get the effect. Quite the opposite of Poser, which makes the real-time Comic-book mode so simple that a small child can do it instantly.