Digital Art Zone

Hi everybody!

I need a clever-clogs with a patient of a saint to help me find out what on earth I’m doing wrong. I apologize in advance for the daft questions, my only excuse is that I’ll (hopefully ) ask them only once.

The little I’ve been tinkering in 3D has until now been done on DAZ 3 Advanced. Though I downloaded DAZ 4 Pro as soon as it became free, I’ve held out on using it as long as I could (I’m still finding my feet around Advanced, so the prospect of tackling its beefier brother has been leaving me in a state of considerable apprehension). Those few times I peeked into it were as often as not riddled with crashes of all sorts, so i just left it and went back to my old reliable 3.

I had to do a system restore on my computer last night and when I fired DAZ 4 this morning to muck about with a quick render, I got the error message when hitting ‘render’  - a message about DAZ not finding the display driver/bitmap/dpy in its program folder filckers by in the window, and I’m left staring at a black screen. I’ve installed and reinstalled the program several times by now - nothing happens.
The Advanced 3, however, is working as well as ever.

Does anyone know what have messed up - and how to fix it?

Thanks in advance.

I don’t know how to solve your exact problem but I know enough to ask what operating system and other computer specs do you have?

Also when you uninstalled Daz 4 did you go into the registry files, and look under computer/programs x86 (or whatever you have) to see if breadcrumbs of the old Daz 4 install was left behind? A lot of times pieces are left behind which will have an effect on your new install of Daz. If you feel comfortable looking for old breadcrumbs I would try uninstalling it again, delete the Daz 4 breadcrumbs and such and then reinstall. If that doesn’t fix your problem, try resetting your download for Daz 4 and reinstalling it that way. Your original downloaded file of Daz 4 may have been corrupted.

Also where are you installing it on your computer? When you unistalled did you also uninstall the CMS (content managment service)?

Battered old Windows XP, on a 5-year old, unmodified, first gen AMD Phenom x4, the most basic of integrated Nvidias that came with the motherboard, lil’ over 3GB RAM in practice.

Bread…breadcrumbs?  CMS? Oh, boy…:facepalm: (You can tell my computer knowledge can be summed up in one sentence ‘...you mean - there no little people living in the metal box?...’)
No. I just uninstalled through the control panel, and when everything went belly-up, I’ve gone back to system restore. Everything seems to be working fine, except DAZ 4. No amount of fiddling with new installation seems to be helping, and this is the error I get whenever i hit render.

WARNING: interface\dialogs\dzbasicdialog.cpp(164): No parent specified for DzBasicDialog!
Rendering image
3Delight message #143 (Severity 2): P1029: cannot find display driver ‘C:/Program Files/DAZ 3D/DAZStudio4/displays/bitmap.dpy’
3Delight message #143 (Severity 2): P1029: cannot find display driver ‘tiff’
Compiled C:/Documents and Settings/Administrator/Application Data/DAZ 3D/Studio4/shaders/brickyard/{fd3a3ee9-2404-45b3-adb6-e7a922bc0889}/shader_Surface.sdl…

I used to have DAZ 4 Advanced on my PC, but it got replaced with the Pro version as soon as it became free.  (Now it’s not just the rendering issue in Pro - I’ve also noticed that some of the plugins don’t show now - my Generation X plugin has disappeared, for example, which means I’ll have to re-install that too,  once when I sort this rendering issue.)

Dang, I feel like a right Dumbo ...

EDIT:
I found itt - yay! I looked into the DAZ program files, following the folders/files indicated in the render error message.
It appears that for some unfathomable reason during system restore and subsequent re-installations my computer didn’t simply overwrite the correct files - it created the (2) folders, and left the original folders - empty.. Shaders were messed up that way, as well as light folder, and DAZ couldn’t recognize them.
I’ve now copied the contents of the (2) duplicate folders into their proper place - and now everything seems to work. The posing/shaping tab looks a bit less populated than before, but that’s a minor thing I can deal with by re-installing.

Yup, I do feel like a right Dumbo

Nah don’t feel dumb.

For future reference if you are wanting to make sure you have ‘deleted’ or uninstalled all the bread crumbs of any program click on the start button on your pc, type in the name of the program or files you hope are gone and let your pc scan for any files with that name. Once it is done and if there any files pertaining to what you uninstalled then delete those that come up in the list.

To search the registry files then go to start button, type in regedit, it should bring up all the registry files on your pc. You will go through these and find registry files under that program’s name. Delete them.

But I caution you to do this carefully since you do have two versions of one program on the same pc. I do to but I do everything slowly to make sure I don’t accidentally delete something I’m not suppose to.

Also look into a CCleaner. It’s a program that you can download for free from CNET and from the companies website. It will actually dig through your pc and fix/repair any registry errors. It will also ‘clean’ your pc and unistall programs better than what the actual pc has been built to do. It will also speed up your pc considerably. I use it all the time.

Thank you for a splendid advice - will download the CCleaner right-a-way. I’m just relieved it can render now.
(now If only my Daz wouldn’t freeze half-way through compiling all of Roman Baths 146 or so shaders - oh, well - one thing at the time, I guess.)