Digital Art Zone

It’s becoming obvious that Daz can handle only so much in a given scene.  In one scene, the Lava Bar I am trying to fill it up. I had created separate scenes of patrons sitting at a table or sitting on a bar stool each saved as a scene then brought them into the main scene I am trying to build. And it’s become apparent that Daz can only handle so many ‘scenes’ at once. SO, HOW can I convert a figure and a created scene into a prop instead and try it that way? Trying to put to many scenes into a single scene slows my computer WAY down to almost the point of crashing.  So, again if I have a table set up with a couple of figures (M4, F4, Genesis mixed and matched) how can I convert all that into a prop instead of a scene? Can the M4, F4 and Genesis figures be converted into a prop?

I think I answered my own question….it has worked with Genesis figures so far. THe completed scene of two sitting at a table with the chairs and other pieces saved as a group then all that converted into a prop.

I am thinking the way the old cartoons used to handle those things. You could see everything in a scene was a solid background except the one thing that was to be animated, like a door, was colored lighter.

I not sure exactly what you mean…

It’s becoming obvious that Daz can handle only so much in a given scene.  In one scene, the Lava Bar I am trying to fill it up. I had created separate scenes of patrons sitting at a table or sitting on a bar stool each saved as a scene then brought them into the main scene I am trying to build. And it’s become apparent that Daz can only handle so many ‘scenes’ at once.

The limit is more your system (namely 32 bit/ 64 bit and amount of RAM) than anything inherent in DS, itself.

Also from something that happened to me after trying to load the latest beta, it seems that OpenGL plays a bigger role in the stability of DS than even I was thinking.  After the attempt, even reinstalling the old version (4.5.1.6) somehow Wine/DS got the OpenGL drivers messed up and were thinking that I had only OpenGL 2.1 capabilities…with that setup, DS was extremely unstable.  It would crash looking at it cross-eyed…I finally got it straightened out about an hour ago.  DS is reporting OpenGL 4.3 (with the latest Nvidia driver installed), DS is once again rock steady.

I’ve only got a dual core/ 4 GB system and don’t have anywhere near the problems some report with only 4 GB…I basically ran a test to see how much it would take to bring DS down by overloading…and I could get DS (32 bit)  to using around 3 GB of RAM, by itself, before I would run into memory problems, and even get a render out of it.  But then again, running WINE as opposed to Windows does offer better/more efficient memory management, so that may have something to do with it, but over all DS 4.x as been more stable than DS 3.x, for me…and that includes larger/more complex scenes.

If I’m understanding what the OP seems to want, I’d approach it like this:

Save the scene as a new scene (to avoid deleting something you don’t want to delete)

Then delete everything out of the scene that you do NOT want as part of your prop.

Export the scene to OBJ

I’mport the scene and set up your materials, and save as Prop…

For a better long term solution you might want to look at Decimator for Daz Studio. It switches to low poly versions for manipulating objects but allows you to render them in full detail for the final output. It’s not free, but its doubtless a powerful tool for complex scenes. You can pick it up from the Daz store.

I suspect the real killer may be textures, not geometry - converting to OBJ wil remove some overhead, but reducing the size of the textures (on a copy, not the original) for background figures will probably do more to help.

Another tip when exporting as a prop is to hide (click the eye button in the scene tab) any geometry that is covered by clothes.  Be sure to check the ‘Ignore Invisible Nodes’ & ‘Remove Unused Vertices’ befor exporting.  The will reduce the amount of geometry saved.

Another thing you can do is to render the various parts of your scene & load the renders onto primitive planes in your main scene.

Let me see if I can say it better. And I think I already know what to do, I was thinking about it. At first I had taken the Lava Bar and the Town Hall and mixed them together, blanking out everything of the Town Hall except the stage, because I liked it better as part of the bar. If you saw the clip I posted “Mickael On Stage”, that’s what I did. Now, for something I have planned in the future, I want to show the inside of the Lounge before the camera focuses on the main characters. Once the camera focuses in on them, the rest is blanked out of the scene, that’s already been set up, except when they leave. And when the camera pans from them to the stage. They can’t look like the only ones in the place. Originally, I had the bar set up and created background characters with M4, F4 and Genesis all created separately as regular scene files.. The more I added to the Lounge scene, the heavier it got and the harder on my computer it got. Which is a HP 64 bit, 4GB Ram. With Flash I could only go up to 250 MB in memory before it started having problems opening previous work.
  I was already thinking to create the scene, render it and it put it on the Backdrop. Or I could do as they did in the cartoons, render each layer as a png then build it in Flash, so that there is still some distance.
  The problems seem to have started once I started adding the Modern Male Lo-Res characters that I was going to use to fill up the scene, they sit at the bar with their back to the camera, while it moves through the Lounge it catches some of the other figures, which are Genesis, on the way to the main characters (M4,F4). I got to thinking maybe the Lava Bar and the Town Hall mixed together was too heavy, so I took out the Hall, and it’s still the same problem. But I want the stage there, I like it. I even added the booths from the Diner for atmosphere. and in the front right corner I added a Pool Table (that was WAY too much). And I have worked the round tables from Lava, made them a little taller and smaller, as a bar I know in L.A., that were in the center.
  If you want a pic this is how I have it set up, empty as it is…any suggestions how to handle this? How to fill it up to show the audience it’s busy Weekend night as the camera moves to the main characters which sit to the left behind the bar (naturally, at least they’re not in the far back corner). And I still plan to put big poster type pics on the walls, from the Home One LR.

So back to what I was hinting at in the first post…what are your system specs?

Animation is going to need a lot more than stills…