Digital Art Zone

I’ve been wishing to have multiple windows open for DS 4.5p for a while, when I accidentally opened a 2nd copy of the program, and it seems to work. Is there a good reason not to do this, like corrupting scene files or bugs or something?

It would be great to have a render cooking while working on a different scene.

If you have the available memory, and processing power I imagine it can be done.  When a render is ‘cooking’ it generally uses all of the cores that are available, so you wouldn;t be able to do much with loading objects, and moving them around.  You could restrict your rendering process in the Task manager to using most of the cores, but not all, and that would give you some processing power for the second instance, but it would slow down the first render.

What memory do you have qavailable, and how many cores?

As Jimmy says, there are fairly good reasons for DS not to by able to run multiple instances - and it isn’t written to do so. If you try rendering in the first instance you will find that any textures you applied before opening the second are not there, as DS clears the temp folder on launch (or File>New, or File>Open) which clears the .tdl files holding the textures (and also any previous renders)

That’s very interesting. Thanks, both of you. I have an i7-2600 quad core and 16gb of RAM. I’ll have to look into how to restrict the rendering process as an experiment.

Richard, do you think if I opened 2 windows at the very beginning of my work session to get rid of the clearing the temp folder problem, are there additional problems I’d run into?

I’m thinking this may be an easy way to corrupt my content database, so I’d have to back that up first. It seems to corrupt on its own fairly easily as it is, so I back it up regularly anyway.

I can see a problem doing what you want to do. Every time you hit render in one of the two instances it will run TDL make. That will prevent you from using textures in the other instance, I believe.

I frequently have 2 DSs open at the same time. I use one to assemble figures and the other to import/export .obj files.

Just remember that the last one you close will store all your UI settings - last content folder, tabs showing, etc.

mac

maclean - 11 December 2012 05:15 PM

I frequently have 2 DSs open at the same time. I use one to assemble figures and the other to import/export .obj files.

Just remember that the last one you close will store all your UI settings - last content folder, tabs showing, etc.

mac

Thanks! Very helpful. So, does that include any categorizing that was done, or does the UI settings just refer to which part of the content database was open when I closed it?

And I’m glad to hear someone else has tried this without blowing anything important up in the program.

I don’t use categories, but I’m almost positive that wouldn’t be affected no matter which one you close last.

When you exit DS, it remembers things like the last folder you had open, which tabs were showing, color of background, tool selected, etc. Things like adding new folders or content aren’t a part of that.

mac

Thanks for clarifying.