The Lesson I REFUSE to Learn
draine761_c7a1098aa1
Posts: 93
in The Commons
This is far from the first time this has happened to me.
After an hour or so, I manage to compose the perfect scene, which I then excitedly begin to render. Without saving the scene first. Halfway through the render, my system politely informs me that it has to close Daz Studio. Which it does. And then I say words that I haven't said since I was in the military. Loudly. Repeatedly.
Friends don't let friends render without saving first. Why can't I learn that? Whyyyyyyy?
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We had a poweroutage today after a render was 3 hours in. I did save it though, but had to wait again for 3 hours, ugh.
A few days ago I was working on a character morph that took several hours. Having almost reached the point where i was satisfied with it, DAZ Studio suddenly bailed, taking my morph with it. Had I saved my work along the way? Nope. Bummer. I recently redid the character, and forced myself to save repeatedly as I progressed. Will I ever make the same mistake again? Probably.
You have to drill it into your head to save often, and even as multiple versions in case you need to go back to an old one or one gets corrupted during saving. It also doesn't hurt to save our your scene's poses, camera, and light presets individually in case you have to recreate the scene or if you want to experiment making changes and then revert. It's bad enough when you lose an hour's work, but when you spend a week building a scene like I do, I had to learn to make sure to save everything and often. I swear enough when things go right. ;)
This really hit home for me about 6 years ago when I was working on a complex commercial model for a game community in 3DSMax. I had already saved 10 or so different versions at different points in the development of it as i went, but then I found a new way of doing something and found myself progressing further on something I was stuck on earlier and my enthusiasm took it further along than I should have without saving.
4 hours later I had made a ton of progress and hit the wrong tool action and it caused an error and Max closed on me. It tried to save a copy of what I was working on, but it was corrupted and I had to go back to several hours worth of work earlier and do it all over again. Ever since then I save often in every app I use..
I hate to admit that I do it all the time. Over and over again. And will again, unfortunately o.O
Laurie
Politely ask Daz why most computers shut down when using their program. It's a free software anyway.
How do you know? Do you have access to the data from eveyones computers?
I have only had DS crash on me a handful of times (knock on wood)
Its only taken me three years to remember to save often. Most of the time.
Can honestly say I've never had Daz shut down my machine. It's quit on me a few times and hung on me a few times, but never choked the whole computer.
Laurie
I haven't had it happen often, so I'll use that as an excuse for not saving.
To further illustrate how I sometimes fail to follow what would otherwise be my own advice, I never actually went into the log file to see what had caused the shutdown. My bad.
Oh, and no, I have never had DAZ Studio cause the PC to bail, either. Just the "an error has been encountered and DAZ Studio has to close" thing.
Same here, DS has never caused my computer to crash since I started using Win7 (IIRC earlier versions couldn't recover from video card driver crashes, so sometimes I would need to reboot after a video card driver crash). I do occasionally have DS crash, and usually when I haven't saved for a few hours
. You would think after spending 8-14 hours a day on computers using 3D and spatial tech. software for the last 30+ years I would learn. But ...... nope, I still do it (I obviously refuse to learn like the OP) I just get to involved in what I'm doing, and forget to save (and loose track of how much time has gone by).
I do drill it into my students so they hopefully won't get as much experience as I have redoing the work I just did ... because the software crashed. On the up side though, I'm usually a lot more efficient the second time around, and the result is usually better (or at least that's the story I'm sticking to it).
Yea, it's just a matter of forming a habit. I always save immediately when I start a new project, be it in DS or other software, and thereafter I save with ctrl+s every time I've made important changes.
Ctrl S.
Use it lots; it's a standard shortcut for all apps; I use it in all apps as they all do it at times.
The question seems to be why you haven'y learnt your lesson in the first place. I save at the times where I have has crashes before... loading objects/figures, changing shaders, deleting things... regularly and often. So I don't really lose anything anymore. Not saving for an hour or more is just asking for trouble.
Daz made me (re)learn a lesson about dealing with my overclock stability, and old fashioned 4 slots of memory on cheap mobo sometimes requiring relaxing of timings.
[The crashes wern't limited to Daz] After I sorted my machine I almost never get full system hangs. Once a month maybe.
I professionally work with a program that crashes all the time, so I'm used to saving my progress regularly.
But maybe this could be a feature in the next version of DAZ, that it asks you automatically whether you want to save first whenever you click render?
Fairly simple to script that, I think, and then replace your render button (as long as you use one on a toolbar) or cmd/ctrl-r action with the script.
I'm a Brycer, I am used to crashes But Bryce has incremental saves, and I do mostly remember to use the feature. I do however end up with a bloated bryce folder because I have (pick a number) stage saves each one getting larger as it goes.
If the DAZ Studio development team want something to add to their feature list, Incremental Saves would be worth considering.
DAZ Studio saves pretty fast anyway, so simply saving the entire scene file might not be too much of a burden. Alternatively, it could just spool the entire Undo stack to disk as it goes along, allowing the file to be rebuilt from the last known good version. That might make for some slow reloads if you'd done something time-consuming (dForce, I'm looking at you), but I suspect many users would prefer a lengthy recovery process to having to start over from scratch.
Incremental saves that you have control of... at least one of the programs I use gives you the ability to chose a time frame... I set mine to about 30 minutes, because most programs seem to get a little brain fart when they autosave... which is annoying. And at the rate I model stuff a half hour isn’t too much progress vs the annoyance.
The other option would be to have a little window pop up that asks:
Hey, Stupid... Apparently you haven’t saved your scene in a while and you have just chosen an option that you might regret doing so without saving... Would you like to save now so you don’t throw the computer out the window again if anything goes wrong?...
Options: Yes, Thank you. No, I feel INVINCIBLE!
It probably could be worded better, but that’s an option... also that could be an option to turn on or off in preferences.
That would be ideal, a lot of other programs even games have incremental saving so I am not sure why Daz Studio does not have it.. Because I also have had a quite a few of what has troubled the OP, and I had forgotten to save the scene.. That is why I always now save the scene before rendering..
All these comments raise a quetion to me...
Why doesn't the program have an auto-save built in??
I have other programs that use the fuction.
Daz.... an auto save would be a good enhancement to your program.
Actuially the thought of an autosave fills me with horror; but then I grew up on incremental saves which always gave me the chance to backstep if something didn't work out quite right.
I've never had it actually shut down my system. I've had CTD several times but its rare that even good commercial programs don't do that from time to time.
Already been discussed here https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/4281301/
+1
Even though I get caught by crashes every now and then, any program with an auto-save I typically turn it off. Two reasons for that. 1) - it can be as bad as a crash (or sometimes worse) when auto-save kicks in and saves something that you made an error on many steps back, and undo can't even come close to fixing it (incremental save can help you here, but if your working on very large files, it can also eat up disk space at the speed of heat). 2) - when working on large files, it can take quite a while, even several minutes (I have had it take over 10 min.), to save the data, thus making the program un-usable until it's done (I make huge PowerPoint presentations with imbedded videos, oh how I hate PowerPoint auto-save when I'm trying to do some quick changes before right before a presentation - I always turn it off). There is a third instance where I really dislike auto-save. I often use files I don't want to change for quick demos. For a spur of the moment demo, copying large files is less than ideal, and a program that "knows better than I do" auto-saving the demo work is really annoying (or disastrous). I can live with programs that just do auto-backups in case of a crash, if they don't keep you from working while they do the backup. For me, that is the best form of user protection (MS Office programs can do that, as do many Autodesk products).
So, just as a matter of personal preference, I'd rather blame myself for being stupid and forgetting to save than put up with auto-save messing with (or messing up) my life. Obviously, your mileage may vary.
I have a big, "Remember to save" sign taped directly above my monitor.
Then you just need a 'Remember to read the "Remember to save" ' message...