DS4.X on OS X - is it normal for it to crash a lot?
Efindel
Posts: 8
So, some of you may remember me from when I hung out a lot on these forums, a bit more than a year and a half ago now. My life's been... well, let's just say 'busy', and I haven't really been doing any rendering.
I'm starting to get back into it, though, and I'd really like to try out Genesis, and the draping cloth, and that sort of stuff - but DS Pro 4.5 is crashing on me a lot. As in, half the time, the first time I select an item in the scene and try to do anything with it, it crashes. I'd tried 4.0 when it was in beta, and had a lot of problems with it, and had loaded up 4.0 when I got it when it was free, and it had done that too. I'd think that it ought to be more stable by now - I mean, a beta I can understand problems in, but it's not a beta any more.
So... are there any known problems that cause 4.5 to crash a lot on Macs? I'm still on Snow Leopard - 10.6.8, to be precise - and DS is Pro, 4.5.1.6. Right now, I'm still mostly just using DS 3, because it's stable on my machine.
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I'm on Lion, and the one thing I've found that greatly reduces crashing is to always wait for the "tdlmake" processes that run for every new texture added to a scene to finish running before trying to do anything else.
What are your Mac's specs? I run a SSD w/ Snow Leopard as a second HD, since my 2010 Mac Pro's HD runs Lion and DS4.x doesn't play well with it natively. I also upgraded my RAM to 32 Gbs recently and that really helped the kinks w/ DS. DS4 crashed on me quite often and I've found DS4.5 to be much stabler, but I do get the weird serial crashes followed by hours of stability. I started out running DS4 on my Mac Mini, but the 8 Gbs of RAM and the native video card just couldn't do too much at once.
My specs: 2010 Mac Pro, six-core 3.33 processor, 32 Gbs RAM. I've purchased separately two 16-Gb RAM chips from OWC (not cheap, but man they're great) but render times are really fast, especially with a SSD.
I also save often!
It's a 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo iMac, with 12 GB of RAM. Hard drive is the 1TB SATA that came with it. Graphics card is the built-in one - Radeon HD 4670. If I remember right, I got it in early 2010. Render times haven't been a problem, just stability - although, thinking about it, DS 4.5 did seem to be more stable if I waited between doing things, which makes me think that Murgatroyd may have something.
There are a few caveats when running on Mac OS X but most of them had been fixed in 4.5 I think. The one that is most annoying and that is beyond the DAZ programmers reach is the crashes involving the CMS client.
You can identify that if the crash logs crash stack callback has the word Valentina in it,
There are ways to minimize those crashes.
After installing things go to the CMS tab and db maintainanse tab and do mark all as seen, compact database.
Usually keeps DS up for at least 12 hours.
Hmm, didn't know that CMS used Valentina. It is - if I recall correctly - a third-party database engine that is supposed to be very fast, but I have seen reports of stability issues with it over the years.
For what it's worth, I've found DS 4.5 pretty solid on my Mac (MacBook Pro, OS X 10.8.2). It has crashed on me occasionally, but way less often than certain other 3D applications I could name (Vue, Poser, Carrara, I'm looking at you ...)
However, it could be that particular features of your system (how much RAM do you have?) or particular features of the program that you're using (dynamic cloth, for instance) are making it less stable for you.
TL: DR; It's stable for me, but your mileage evidently varies.
Valentina is fast (I've been using it since 2001), but it is also sometimes unstable. You can have speed or stability, that's the caveat.
And I agree, I have had Valentina crashes since DS 4 arrived, some people do have that to, others never. All my analyzing of the problem point to the fact that the more and faster cores you have the more often you crash, and the more content you have.
Other than that I agree, DS is no different from most 3D apps, Vue tends to crash pretty often, so does Poser.
Seriously, what's the deal with Vue?
I understand that Vue is used pretty intensively by some serious 3D artists. I can only assume that they use the PC version, because if they used the Mac one they'd probably have marched on e-on software's headquarters with pitchforks and flaming torches by now.
My experience with each version of Vue is that it crashes hard when I try to do relatively simple things with it. Then it pops up a little dialog asking me if I'd like to turn off about half the functionality of the program (apparently multiple levels of undo is something it can't handle reliably, which is a pain). I do that, and it mostly stabilizes. So I can do stuff with Vue on the Mac, but only at the cost of switching off some of the features.
I've been disappointed with Poser too in my recent experiments. I set up a relatively simple scene with 5 human figures the other day, and it started crashing if I tried to render it at more than 800x600, complaining that it didn't have enough memory (on a 16GB box? Try harder, Poser). When I added a 6th figure, it corrupted the file during save. I had expected better of Poser.
Sorry, thread drift. Just wanted to get that off my chest. We now return you to your discussion of DAZ Studio.
OS X Lion here and most of the crashes I get on Mac these days are Valentina related - the faster I click through the CMS, the sooner it crashes ;) And, yes, marking everything as seen and using the database maintenance functions helps stability for some time anyway.
Other than that not many crashes, but I just wish they get this Valentina DB stuff solved. Pointing fingers to the third-party doesn't really help me as end user.
Valentina 5 is "soon", has been "soon" for 4 months now, I think beta 54 was the last release, so as soon as it will hit 5 stable I think we'll see some changes. I know that Ivan (one of the Valentina developers) fixed a bug that I tripped on that is similar to the Valentina crashes in DS, but that change will appear in 5.0.
Valentina 5 is "soon", has been "soon" for 4 months now, I think beta 54 was the last release, so as soon as it will hit 5 stable I think we'll see some changes. I know that Ivan (one of the Valentina developers) fixed a bug that I tripped on that is similar to the Valentina crashes in DS, but that change will appear in 5.0.
I've been on 4.9.1 Linux for quite a while, and have had 0 crashes that I can attribute to valentinadb from any apps that I use with it.
Kendall
DS is still using 4.8.1...
One way to slow down CMS/VServer is to set the log level verbosity to three. This was the server answers "slower" and that seems to make DS happier (for some reason).
Thanks for these tips, I'm working under a deadline and lack of stability for Daz is killing me! even if I can keep it up for a little longer that will be good.