Defeated by Dforce
HornetBoy
Posts: 49
I should start by saying that I've enjoyed 100's, perhaps 1000's, of creative hours with Daz over many years, Iray has been a great addition. I'm a PC+ member and find items to purchase most months.
For a long time, working with Daz has been mostly about being creative … and then along came Dforce, and now most of my time is spent trying (unsuccessfully) to resolve technical issues. You see I have NEVER completed a successful simulation with Dforce, fatal crashes end every attempt. Perhaps it is my modest graphics card (GTX 660 with 4GB RAM) or rig (Dell XPS 8500).
I have trawled through this and other forums and tried every tip (update drivers, roll back drivers, edit graphics card registry values, remove items from the scene etc.) and nothing has worked. My most recent failed attempt had nothing but G8F and Linday's Bang Bob Hair in the scene. Daz Studio 4.11 Beta hasn't affected this matter. I've spent decades working in IT and like to think of myself as reasonably technically competent.
I'm assuming that many Daz users are enjoying using Dforce and am so disappointed that I'm not. I wouldn't even mind if a simulation took 60 minutes to complete! Rather than continue this cycle of frustration and wasted effort I plan to abandon Dforce, probably until I get a more powerful rig.
If my graphics card is too underpowered to run even simple Dforce simulations then perhaps Daz (the company) should make a statement about the minimum PC spec required to enjoy this feature. I love my hobby and will continue to support Daz, but there'll be no more Dforce purchases for the time being.
(I didn't want to burden this post with too much technical detail, but in case anyone can suggest a possible resolution, the Error Log always contains … “Open CL notify: CL_MEM_OBJECT_ALLOCATION_FAILURE error executing CL_COMMAND_NDRANGE_KERNEL”. At the time of crashes Task Manager always shows around 15% CPU and 40% Memory.)
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Comments
Is your CPU AMD or Intel?
There are loops, I understand, getting it to work with AMD CPUs; I've never bothered trying, so have knowledge if it does work for sure, or how tight-a-fit those loops actually are. :)
Is your GTX 660 a display card as well as everything else?
RAM could be an issue. (It has 2GB I expect?) The failure you post from the log suggests that. I've also not seen anywhere (but would have likely ignored) if Dforce had a minimum spec as mine worked OK.
4GB of RAM your PC has is very little space for anything. You have to substract the software and whatever item you have in your scene. like, a G3 can easily take up to 1.5GB in your memory, i.e. when it has an item of clothing.
I have 32 GB RAM and even then I sometimes have a memory problem when I try to dForce certain items in high resolution.
Does everything crash, even a simple 20 segments plane draping over a ball?
Thank you for these responses. Apologies that I've not been clearer about memory - to be specific, my PC has 12GB of memory installed, and there is 4GB on the GTX 660 graphics card.
The CPU is Intel i7-3770. 64-bit OS. And yes, the GTX 660 also drives the display.
The only success (no crash) that I've ever had with Dforce (tried it this morning) is draping the IDG long scarf over a posed unclothed G3F - simulation only took 2 mins. So the issue certainly seems to be linked to the compllexity of the dforce'd object.
I always ensure that no other apps are running when using Daz.
I presume you're trying with Dforce items release by Daz?
It can't be your card as I have a gtx 970 with 4 gig of DDR and I use dforce all the time. If your scene is too complex then do your simulation early before adding to much to your scene
I haven't tried many times, but I've not had a successful attempt either. I just stick with the VWD script from rendo when I do need dynamics.
Dforce seems quite buggy to me, half the time I use the product I get the error that it is preparing to simulate but fails. Even content that is marketed as dforce compatible.
i don’t see a huge value in it for the men’s clothing I use. Maybe it works better for women’s stuff because it tends to be more drapery.
I have a GTX970 with 4 gigs and Dforce works fine. I have discovered that if the simulation generates an error, I have to restart DS otherwise it won't work from then on. The dforce clothing and hair always works but I have also had success with dynamic clothing intended for Poser such as items created by Fabiana over at Rendo. When I have trouble with Dforce, it is usually on conforming clothing or hair that falls apart. I have however found many conforming clothing items that work out of the box such as this free dress for G2f from Jan19 and Wilmap.
I have had the same problem. I think alot of these crash issues are due to having to many items that are set in scene for collision.
If I have a completely loaded scene and I try to run deforce i end up with a GPU driver crashing every time.
If I run deforce with nothing in a scene but the character and hair, clothing items I am trying to run in deforce i usually get pretty good results with no crashes unless i have a wind node set to high
If you can I would start with running deforce & character first and built your scene around the character once you have your deforce clothing complete and saved Other wise. Another method is to shut off the visibility from the simulation that is not needed to be collided in the simluation.
you can do this by opening you scene tab and click the eye symbol on each item in the scene tab that is not to be used for the clothes & hair to collide with. this tricks deforce into only seeing the objects turned on. I do not know why this works .. but its a trick that has worked for me to get deforce up and running with a fully loaded scene. I loaded a capture of how i did it for this render done completely in iray
If you do not want to hide everything in the scene, then an alternative is to select all objects in the scene, then in the parameters tab, click Ctrl-A to select all objects in the parameter tab, and then in the filter enter "simulation". This will show a setting called "Visible in Simulation", set this to False (which should set it to false for all objects).
Now go back and set "Visible in Simulation" back to true for everything needed, ie the character wearing them item, the item itself, plus other things that might collide with the clothing, eg the ground, a chair, other clothing etc.
Now you can keep re-running the simulation whenever you want and still keep all the other objects visible.
Deleted, repeat
I have only recently had any success at all with dForce. Perhaps because I have bought a few items designed for dForce instead of trying to convert conforming clothing. Perhaps it is because I have become obsessive about, as Havos explains in the previous post, turning off visibility of everything else but the objects involved in the simulation. Mind you, I bought VWD and never got that to work either and, like the OP, I spent a long career in IT supporting computer hardware, software and networks so I am reasonably tech-savvy.
As to the original problem as described, my guess would be system RAM: 12Gb may not be enough depending on the scene. Another thing to try (I used to do this before I learned to switch off visibility) is to save the character and clothing to a sub-scene and drape it, then merge back to the main scene.
I always turn off visilbiity for every single thing not needed for the sim. Its cut back the amount of crashing considerably.
Great tip Ivy! Thank You.
Removing things from the scene not required also increase the speed of the drape.
I also remove all lights, cameras, nulls and anything else I can think of; I don't actually think nulls and cameras cause issues anyway, but since I started removing everything it did greatly reduce issues.
Also remove parts of the figure too; for example, if the arms travel through the body during the pre-drape part, they will cause a blow-up if they intersect any part of the cloth.
To remove the arm (as an example - just hope not needed as part of drape, otherwise might be better to do an animated drape), find the shoulder and right click it; then select all children of it; then you can select them all in parameters tab and remove from simulation.
I am not sure you need to select the children, because from from my observations, if a parent is not visible in the simulation, nor are any of its children. This is also true if the parent is a group.
If a dforce item is considered too heavy to have much of anything else in the scene, might not be my cup of tea either. I was really interested in the options it gave compared to opitex, yet I can't get the plugin to work at all. I put a figure in the scene, added the dforce clothing item, clicked dforce and Daz pops up a window saying it won't work. I have no other apps working in the background and the computer is on a fresh restart, everything that can be shut off is off. No matter what I do, the second I click dforce it's a no go. The image below are my specs. Oh and my graphics card (if that's important) is an ATI Radeon HD 3400 Series
Thank you all, there have been some useful suggestions above. However the simulations that crash for me have nothing in the scene other than posed G8F and the dforce item (e.g. Bang Bob Hair from Linday). No lights or extra cameras. No Wind Node, I'm simulating for gravity. I haven't tried removing body parts that wouldn't collide, and will give that a go.
Will also try Havos' suggestion re 'Visible in Simulation' feature.
I'm starting to suspect that this is a driver problem for the GTX 660 and may not be fixable for me.
Have you tried using CPU alone? This wil take longer to simulate, but at least it may not crash. You will need to have OpenCL drivers for your CPU.
Finally resolved my problem - I had to step back 5 releases of my Nvidia graphics card driver to 398.82 and now all my dforce simulations are working fine. Took quite a lot of work and a lot of patience, but at least it's sorted now. It seems that installing the latest updates isn't always a good thing!
Thanks to everyone for their input and suggestions.
I'm still running 382, or 388. The Beast is off right now, or I'd go check. I'm old school. It it ain't broke, don't fix it. I won't update the video card driver until I have no choice.
Anyway, I'm glad you finally got it sorted and are up and running. Have fun with it. (And don't forget to render any explosions that are spectacular…!)
It's good to know that a driver downgrade may solve the problem. I contacted support, and don't get me wrong, they were great, but in the end dForce was determined to be the problem and they had no solutions other than removing the dll and running without it. They said the majority of users have no issue with this. I couldn't even get the app to run after it installed. It just immediately crashed with a fatal error. I will have to see about the driver downgrade.
It's good to know that a driver downgrade may solve the problem. I contacted support, and don't get me wrong, they were great, but in the end dForce was determined to be the problem and they had no solutions other than removing the dll and running without it. They said the majority of users have no issue with this. I couldn't even get the app to run after it installed. It just immediately crashed with a fatal error. I will have to see about the driver downgrade.