Digital Art Zone

This has been bugging me forever, but I never got around to asking about it.

When I open an older scene file, work on it, then save it, almost invariably when it’s almost done its saving process, up comes a file requester. And the file requester wants me to “Save Texture Externally”, and it gives it a TIFF prefix, and wants to save it with the name of the .car file. Strange, cuz I don’t use TIFF for anything, or have TIFF as a setting anywhere in my scenes. 

Fine, no idea what it is, but if it wants to do that it’s okay with me.

The problem comes when I accept the default name, hit Save, and the requester comes up again. Same requester. And then again. And usually it takes about 126 tries of the exact same requester, exact same filename, before it gives up and finishes saving.

Okay, I’m exaggerating with 126, but it’s usually more than 20. Probably more than 30.

And what’s even stranger, is that after the saving is all done, later on I’ll poke around to see if there really is a file it saved so I can figure out what it wanted to save.

NOTHING THERE. It’s like someone at DAZ was mad at me, and just wanted to annoy me.

Okay, I’m joking about that. I don’t want to get anyone at DAZ upset at me for a silly joke like that. So I apologize in advance. I certainly didn’t mean to upset anyone, or imply that anyone would actually do that. 

So does anyone know what this is, and, more importantly, how to stop it?

I think it’s not saving the same texture over and over, it’s saving EVERY texture in your scene as a bitmap, each with the same default name.

With no preview of which texture you are saving, there’s no way to know what it should be named. The files that are saved seem mostly blank but if you’d saved them all as separate images you might find a handful with recognizable textures on them….

Tiff textures were the “high quality” default for imagemap textures a decade ago…. The “save all textures externally” feature assumes you are packaging a model or scene for another program, or to deliver to a client or archive. It’s attempting to export all procedural shaders to image maps.

holly wetcircuit - 20 July 2012 09:26 AM

The files that are saved seem mostly blank but if you’d saved them all as separate images you might find a handful with recognizable textures on them…..

Thanks.

But what’s really strange is, when I say there’s nothing there when I look for the files, I mean there’s no files there, not some apparently empty files. So even if it did have a reason to save the files for some purpose, it’s not even doing that.

And when I save files (and I think this has always been the case) I always leave the default when it asks how I want to save the textures (externally, local settings, or whatever). And I think the default is that it saves the textures internally, no? So I don’t even understand why it’s asking the question.

And what’s more, in all the years I’ve been checking in on this forum, I’ve never heard anyone mention this.

So now I’m even more convinced that DAZ is mad at me, and added this particular feature to my copy just to bug me. And it’s working. It’s really bugging me.

BTW, that was a joke, not intended to offend anyone.

Had the same thing if checking the “save all external” option, but in the end I had one (!) TIFF-file which was holding one of the many textures used in the scene. (I’m not sure in which directory; if it was the same where the scene-file was saved or somewhere else.)

So DAZ isn’t so mad at you

And of course I never asked: I simply said to me: “oh, this doesn’t work. Why bother, actually my textures are already saved somewhere externally. And if I go for render-nodes it makes more sense to save everything internally.”

Actually thinking about it: why would someone need this option? If I have some scene file, where I want to extract the texture of one shader I’ll do this in the shader room. Obj are exported from the instance-tab. Maybe it’s there to drive us mad ...

NOTE about saving internally and externally! I only save internal if I am gunna Send off the file to my other machine to render!

ALSO CARRARA for what ever raeson WILL NOT SAVE ANY (MOVIES) such as used in a shader, INTERNALLY! They always have to be sent along if your transferring the file! I have no idea why it wont it just is. it sucks!

The default should be to save locally, unless you have changed it in your preferences.

Saving locally uses the settings that are defined per shader. Setting a shader to local leaves textures where they are. If a texture in a shader is set to external then that option gets used and this applies on a per channel basis. Saving externally always generates a new version of a texture for every different shader but not necessarily in the place you expect, saving internally still generates new textuures but of course puts them all in the .car file.

The best thing to do for quicker saves and smaller file sizes is to make sure than pretty much everything is set to local (you may notice that some legacy shaders already have internal files and if you want to get at those textures you can switch them over to external).

JoeMamma2000 - 20 July 2012 01:04 AM

This has been bugging me forever, but I never got around to asking about it.

When I open an older scene file, work on it, then save it, almost invariably when it’s almost done its saving process, up comes a file requester. And the file requester wants me to “Save Texture Externally”, and it gives it a TIFF prefix, and wants to save it with the name of the .car file. Strange, cuz I don’t use TIFF for anything, or have TIFF as a setting anywhere in my scenes. 

Fine, no idea what it is, but if it wants to do that it’s okay with me.

The problem comes when I accept the default name, hit Save, and the requester comes up again. Same requester. And then again. And usually it takes about 126 tries of the exact same requester, exact same filename, before it gives up and finishes saving.

Okay, I’m exaggerating with 126, but it’s usually more than 20. Probably more than 30.

And what’s even stranger, is that after the saving is all done, later on I’ll poke around to see if there really is a file it saved so I can figure out what it wanted to save.

NOTHING THERE. It’s like someone at DAZ was mad at me, and just wanted to annoy me.

Okay, I’m joking about that. I don’t want to get anyone at DAZ upset at me for a silly joke like that. So I apologize in advance. I certainly didn’t mean to upset anyone, or imply that anyone would actually do that. 

So does anyone know what this is, and, more importantly, how to stop it?

Yeah, I’ve seen this a few times, but not every time.

It’s been easier to just press enter and forget about it since I’ve never found that it actually “saved” anything, anywhere, either.

But, I don’t recall having to get rid of 20, let alone “126” instances of this behavior.  Usually one at a time is all I encounter.

But, yeah, I’ve often wondered what it is all about too.