Digital Art Zone

Is the Property Editor working like it should now?  I.e., responding in real time, not crashing DS all the time, etc?  I’m still using 4.0.3.9.

I’ve been doing morphs like a bat out of Hell and it is a little laggy every once in a while but otherwise pretty stable. It has never crashed on me for that.

The only time I have ever had a crash is rendering complex scenes or when trying to do something weird with GoZ bridge that broke the logical steps of what you should do.

Only problem I have with PE is the old “Not Responding” when I try to open it when one of my converted Poser figures is selected, 12,500 + files and ERC code coming out of every orifice really does slow it down to a crawl, and it can take several minutes before DS is ready to continue.

Obviously I’d prefer no lag, but if it’s just while its loading and that’s the only issue, I’m okay with that.  It was the combination of “hey, it takes 15 minutes to load!” (not exaggerating there, really takes me like 10-15 minutes for PE to load a morph-heavy Genesis) plus “OMG, it’s crashing 5 times before I can really get any work done!” that was adding up to “oh, great, I have to reorganize Genesis’ morph dials and groups again?  Well, there go the next 2 days…”

If 4.5 is an improvement, it’s only barely.  Yes, auto-fit and smoothing modifiers make a scene much less laggy with 4.5 than they did with 4.

Most everything else is a wash.  Saving isn’t all that much faster.  Certainly not smaller - saves are actually larger now.  Just saved a 100mb save when I’m used to seeing not much more than 40 or 50, and even that’s unusual.  And the new character presets take forever to save, and they work like actual saves now, taking up lots of hd space, where the old ones were negligible in that regard.  They say the viewport’s all blazing fast but I didn’t notice much improvement.

And no, auto-fit doesn’t work with shoes in 4.5.  It’s faster and smoother, but it still mangles shoes beyond repair.

The Property Editor is the same crappy Property Editor from 4.  No improvement at all.  Calling this thing “alpha” would be flattery.  Still takes 10 minutes to load a stock Genesis, and 12 to load Genesis with a heavily-morphed V4’s morphs injected via GenX (I timed it several times; not like I had anything else to do).  It sucks that this kind of standard functionality is so poorly implemented in 4.5.  It’s not like we’re talking dynamic cloth or hair, or dynamic lighting here.  It’s the ability to sort the dials, which is - given content creators’ collective bungling - a necessity (and some artists talk about union - ha!  They can’t even agree on a directory structure).  All three attempts ended early, with crashes.  If anything, I think it’s even more prone to crash DS than the one in v4.

The Property Editor is an embarassment, guys.  Stop adding features and make sure the tires aren’t flat.  It’s just such a tragedy, because Genesis has so much potential, but it’s hobbled by the inability to sort the dials without going through hours of mind-numbingly tedious and frustrating work.  And as fiddly as some of Genesis’ parts can be, one has to face the prospect of one’s work in the PE being temporary.  Meaning, no certainty going forward.

I’m almost tempted to ditch Genesis for Gen4.

PS, can anyone explain to me why they wouldn’t give the user an option to rearrange morph dials WITHOUT modifying the actual morph files in the Genesis folder?  Either I’m missing something here, or this is the second most bone-headed thing I’ve ever seen (after DAZ nuking their own forum when their software has no documentation).  It simply does not make sense to me.  What do the morph files CARE which folder I see them in in DS?  It seems like a horribly bad design decision to me, opening up all kinds of avenues for trouble down the line for no reason.

Large save files are due to you using non DSON files in the scene, DS has to convert them at import into a format it can use, then when you save it has to write that data out in the form of thousands of DSF asset files, it also writes the location of the non DSON files into the DUF file, that way if you ever lose the DSF files it can rebuild them.
Saving with just DSON format files in the scene happens in seconds and gives you a DUF file that’s only a couple of KB in size.

Shoes will never work in autofit, just as they don’t work very well in XD & WW, it’s the simple fact that most haven’t been built around the figures default foot shape, so when a converter tries to fit it to the default shape you end up with a crumple zone rather than footwear. Manually reworking the mesh to fit Genesis is tbh the only real option for a good fit.

No idea why PE is doing that for you, my Genesis (basic morphs, SY’s GenX’d version of dietryings morphs, some of Jabba’s and some of SY’s own morphs), takes a little over 6 seconds for it to populate the list in the PE, which is slightly longer than it takes for a Poser figure to populate the list. Only time I get the “not Responding” is when I’m working on one of my TriAx converted Poser figures, as they can have 12000 to 40000 files in the morphs folder, that’s a hell of a lot of files to load in and a crapload of ERC code to link up. It’s not even as if I’m on a powerful PC, it’s a 2.5 Ghz Core2 quad with 4Gb of RAM running on vista 64.

PS to your PS
It’s pretty much the same with Poser & DS with Poser figures, any changes you make to a morph in the program have to be written into the files otherwise you’ll lose the changes.

Bejaymac - 13 October 2012 05:46 PM

No idea why PE is doing that for you, my Genesis (basic morphs, SY’s GenX’d version of dietryings morphs, some of Jabba’s and some of SY’s own morphs), takes a little over 6 seconds for it to populate the list in the PE, which is slightly longer than it takes for a Poser figure to populate the list. Only time I get the “not Responding” is when I’m working on one of my TriAx converted Poser figures, as they can have 12000 to 40000 files in the morphs folder, that’s a hell of a lot of files to load in and a crapload of ERC code to link up. It’s not even as if I’m on a powerful PC, it’s a 2.5 Ghz Core2 quad with 4Gb of RAM running on vista 64.

That’s about what I’m running, but w7 and 8gb RAM.  I’m glad someone’s having better luck than I.

PS to your PS
It’s pretty much the same with Poser & DS with Poser figures, any changes you make to a morph in the program have to be written into the files otherwise you’ll lose the changes.

It may be the same with other software, but it doesn’t make any sense there, either.  There’s no “have to” there, just “is.”  There’s no reason the character file can’t tell DS what hierarchy to use.  There’s no reason to require rewriting the morphs that I can see.

Start DS, load Genesis, start Property Editor.

*Wait 12 minutes for joke to load*

Work for 10 minutes, CRASH.

Start DS, Load Genesis, start PE.

*Wait 12 minutes for joke to load*

Work for 1 minute, CRASH.

Start DS, Load Genesis, start PE.

*Wait 12 minutes for joke to load*

Work for 1 minute, CRASH.

My morning so far.

This undermines the basic, everyday operating of DS, because once you’ve gone through the painstaking, unutterably BORING and tedious process of dealing with PE long enough to correct the ABSURDLY BAD morph dial organization in Genesis, you then go on to use Genesis in mortal terror of breaking something and having to go through a clean install, and then the organization process in PE all over again (Which is precisely why tying dial organization in DS’s interface to the content of the morph folders themselves is a horrible design decision; uncoupling them means I can sort the dials once, back up the file, and forget about the matter altogether until I add more morphs - it means I get to save my bloody work).

The car has two flat tires, guys.  Put down the spoiler and the ground effects kit and put some air in the tires.

Also, I object to dragging Poser into this.  Whenever I have any sorting work to do on Gen4, I instantly shut down DS and fire up Poser.  No contest whatsoever.  I’d do the same with Genesis if I could.  And I save my work as a CR2, and I’m done.  I have a file I can back up and update if I want to, done, simple, no problems.

Yeah baby!  Two MORE crashes.  15 minutes wasted a pop.  These things are piling up quick.

OHHHH, WAIIIT, I get it.  Tying everything together means keeping everything proprietary and forcing people to use DS, right?

I’m not able to keep my thoughts about that civilized, so I’ll just stop right there before I say something that’ll get me banned.

There’s something gone wrong here.  Several times in a row, I have saved my work in PE, only to have it crash a few minutes later (that’s why I save every couple of minutes), and then when I open Genesis again in PE (AFTER the 12 minute wait, of course), none of my work was saved.

WTF is going on here?  Is there some other way of saving the work I do in PE, other than “save modified assets?”

This isn’t even a joke any more.  No way am I going to be able to use Genesis, or CARE MUCH if I can, if it’s going to be like this.

Actually, I don’t remember DS 4.x doing this, so I guess it’s time to uninstall.  Pity, I did appreciate the few improvements it made.

4.5 is a bit ambitious a title for this release, guys.  More like 4.0.4 alpha.

What’s got me is why if it’s giving you so much trouble are you still using it, if it was me I’d have bug reported it and then stopped using it, it’s not like it’s the only way to edit how a morphs presentation looks in DS4.