Digital Art Zone

Saving the new .duf file with only Genesis figures in it result in nice small files.

But when other content is present in the scene (V4-figures and wardrobe and especially imported .obj’s) .duf saves to huge files.

A relative simple scene with two clothed figures saves to a total of almost 2GB, which take a very long time to save/load. This is almost unworkable!

When it comes to non native content DS has always had to convert and then write that data to native formats, the daz scene file with all of the DSO,DSD & DSV files in the data folder. DS4.5 is no different, it writes it all out as DSF in the data/auto_adapted folder, but for some reason it also writes it into the DUF file, which is why they are bigger than ones done for Genesis content.

Are you sure it says 2GB, as my biggest with 5 morphed and clothed Gen 4’s and some hefty scenery and props comes in at just under 30MB.

Did you manually edit the figures (not posing, actually change their rigging or add morphs that you didn’t save as morph assets)?

Yes, it’s really close to 2GB. What I did is the following:

-I loaded two Genesis-figures which I extensively adapted with the built in morphs, GenX-morphs and almost 50 to a 100 ZBrush selfmade morphs per figure.
-As I don’t like the Genesis-face, each figure has an invisible hairstyle fitted to it, and parented to the ‘head’ of the hair, is an ‘old’ V4-figure (of which only the face is visible which fits perfectly over the face of Genesis. So you see a Genesis body, with a V4-face).
-Each figure is clothed with a top and pants and a pair of V4-canvas sneakers which I fitted myself to Genesis (via an obj-export and create clothing).

See the image how it looks like…

So, I know this isn’t a ‘simple’ scene, but then again, in .daz such a scene would amount to let’s say 80MB. I had no problems to make even more complex scenes in DAZ without to much hassle. Now in .duf this (in my workflow a more or less simple scene) provides to be exact 1.8 GB and takes almost ten minutes to load (on a very fast laptop).

I found out that the shoes I used, are very big. One pair of shoes is in .duf 808MB! So these are the V$ canvas shoes by Billy I think but via obj import fitted as clothing

When I fit the original V4 shoes directly on the Genesis figure, the filesize is back to normal. However, this isn’t an option because old V4-shoes get mangled by the Genesis figure, so obj export and then import as clothing is the only option. Apparently the upgrade of DAZ has an issue with obj’s used as clothing (the filesize each of the individual obj-shoes is 12MB by the way, so apparently the total of 24MB gets 800MB by turning them into clothes)...

Without the shoes, the .duf of the scene described, amounts to 300MB (still fairly big I think)....

Eric van Straaten - 21 September 2012 09:16 PM

When I fit the original V4 shoes directly on the Genesis figure, the filesize is back to normal. However, this isn’t an option because old V4-shoes get mangled by the Genesis figure, so obj export and then import as clothing is the only option. Apparently the upgrade of DAZ has an issue with obj’s used as clothing (the filesize each of the individual obj-shoes is 12MB by the way, so apparently the total of 24MB gets 800MB by turning them into clothes)...

Are you doing each shoe separately for each foot for each figure?

Or did you make a pair of them beforehand and load a pair for each figure?

To take advantage of the new duf format and have very small scene files you must save every converted cloth/prop as a figure/prop asset once (save as->support asset->figure/prop asset). Save them in “My library/People/Genesis/clothing” for example for clothing. This way DS has a reference when saving and is lighter than saving the complete objet geometry, properties etc… everytime it saves a scene

You can do a quick test also by doing save as->support asset->scene asset. Create a test directory in “My library/props” and save them in “My library/props/test”. DS will save all your scene asset in that directory and will also save all assets datas in “My Library/data/TheAuthorNameYouProvided/test”

After that, save your scene and see what size it has.
Also check the size of “My Library/data/TheAuthorNameYouProvided/test”. There should be a directory for the sneakers there. If the size of the Sneakers dsf files are very big then you should report a bug. I converted a lot of Objects and V4/M4 cloth and never had a so big file

If you haven’t saved the ZBrushed morphs as Morph Assets then they are in the .duf file, as I understand the process; that’s going to add to file size. Of course if they are correction morphs for things unique to the scene (poses, cloth and hair shaping, poke-through) you won’t want them cluttering up the data folder, and a larger scene file is the lesser evil, but it is something you need to be aware of.

The method of saving the cloth/prop as a figure/prop asset seems to be working. Thank you very much!