Meta-Crazy: a bunch of raving and ranting by some guy no one really knows.
Mardook
Posts: 291
Okay...
there is this tab thingy that shows you all the invisible crap that is weighing down your scene files.
They are called meta data,
There is also reality meta data and so forth... anyway these will literally choke your saved files and crash DAZ Studio when you try to open them.
I have like twenty thousand or more of these in some of these saved scenes, Its no wonder my saved scenes take literally hours to open at all.
Sometimes they crash before they even open; who thought these innocuous object thingies were a brilliant idea. I still have no idea of what they serve nor do I care at this point. Meta-data equals evil to me... boo! hiss!
So, I am going through all my saved files and manually deleting all of these invisible monstrosities, well at least the ones that I can open.
arrrgghh!
}:O
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Comments
You should never have any need to open Metadata files, so I have no idea what you are referring to
Metadata is considerably smaller than 5Mb per object, but otherwise I'm just as confused as you are.
Metadata forms part of a database and is not saved per file. Daz will refer to its metadata to show you objects which are compatible with other objects in the Smart Content pane. It doesn't affect how large your saved files will become, nor will it adversely impact load times on a per-file basis. In fact, metadata isn't all loaded into memory at the start either. It's broken down into categories and will load additional information as you browse each category. This is also why having a large number of items in a single category will take longer to populate the list.
Could you provide an example of this data you're deleting? It would help to isolate what the issue you're having is.
Color me confused as well, I don't see how metadata has anything to do with saved scene file. At most the saved scene file might have a database pointer for an object so it can be later identified (this is a surmise on my part).
Color me Confuzzeled too. I only have the Duf file and the png file in my scene folders. And the Data Folder holds all the data with a pointer that is SMALL. I'm not tracking at all with this.
When the Metadata files were a seperate download, they were all around the 5 MB size as downloade, although they were already a part of the main installer anyway.. I thought that maybe that was what the OP was referring to.
Don't forget the actual reason for this — each of these installers included the executable code to run the installation process, which in the most recent versions (for the last year or so) came to a bit over 5MB for each installer in Windows, nearly three times that for a Mac. So the actual amount of metadata is quite small — if you look in the /Runtime/Support/ folder, none of the .dsx files I've come across so far are as much as 100kB each, even for large scenery or clothes sets with lots of bits.
I have a feeling I know what the OP is referring to, when you save a scene in 4.5 that is made up of only DSON format content, then the DUF save file is tiny as there is very little in it. The problem is when you have a scene full of content that was loaded from Poser files, Collada, FBX and even OBJ, DS4.5 writes all of those out as DSF asset files, but it also writes a lot of it in the DUF file as well, on top of that it also adds data to the DUF file, so that DS can find and rebuild your scene from the original non DSON files in the event you lose/corrupt your "data" folder, these files can be huge even when compressed.
Ya know, I think that you're all right. Its something else, anyway here are two screen grabs. It has something to do with Reality 2 which is strange... I did not use it here. :o
Now, that IS strange. Reality should only be creating a single node, not repeatedly duplicating them. This is a shot from a scene I did which WAS actually rendered using Reality 2.5. As you can see, there's only one instance of the Reality_Scene_Data node. It's used to store information specific to Reality such as materials, lighting and so on. After all, no point going through all the hard work of arranging your materials to perfection only for them to be wiped out upon reloading.
Of course, why it's creating so many copies is a mystery. Which version of the Reality plugin are you using?
It may be because the OP has 'Show Hidden Nodes' checked, this is normally off by default.
You could try changing that, you too HoF, to see if it makes any difference. Thanks.
By default the node I showed IS hidden. Reality doesn't usually duplicate them as badly as the OP showed in his image. I've checked over 8 different Reality rendered files I've done, and all of them only have the one node.
Does changing to 'Show Hidden Nodes' make any difference? Does it show more nodes or just the same?
I am sure you checked, but just to be clear. I think the OP would need to ask in the Reality thread or on Paulo's website, it is certainly strange :)
Just to reiterate, the node I showed you was originally hidden. It is shown in the screenshot because I had already 'shown hidden nodes'. Here's some screenshots to illustrate the point. All of the Reality nodes are automatically hidden and aren't normally visible in the scene tab. Nor do they really need to be since it's 'under the hood' data that can't really be manipulated outside of the Reality interface.
Let me guess, you set up something so it works in Reality and then saved it as a scene, you then did the same thing to multiple other items, then merged them all into a new scene and then saved that combined scene, so you have a little rant without realizing that your the reason it's all in there.
Probably! But all taken care of now :D