How to load a character faster? [solved with a workaround]
Ati
Posts: 9,088
Can someone please point me in the direction of a solution for loading characters/scenes faster? I'm sure I'm not the only one having issues with characters taking five minutes to load, but my mind is all over the place with irrelevant information while searching for a solution.
I picked a random G8F character, and log says "File loaded in 4 min 25.0 sec." with a ton of errors, referencing dozens of morphs above.
If I uninstall everything, and only install what I currently need, then uninstall everything again when I'm done would probably speed things up, but there is surely a better way.
Thanks! :)
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Comments
it might be my imaignation, but 4.12 seems slower than 4.10. I skipped 4.11... but yes, it is a very slow process. WHY?
The more stuff you have, the slower it gets. I was very happy with the performance a couple of years ago when I barely had anything. Now, with all the extra items I've bought over the years, I should be even happier, and yet I'm not because working with DS has become slower than ever.
I have a temp folder where I move morphs that I know I don't need...usually characters that I've bought for the skin textures, or anything cartoony.
I recently replaced my C:\ drive with an SSD, and that has sped things along quite nicely as well.
Curious, why would you use the dev load unless you are working on creating content
Yeah it is kinda nnoying, opening up a scene takes a few minutes. I am a dial mixer though, so I couldn't really go back to the V4 way of fast load, but needing to inject anything you want to use. It would probably seem faster since you are doing something active instead of just waiting twiddling your thumbs, but the actual time taken in the end is probably similar.
Would using Daz Connect be faster? I only use DIM at the moment. Can I uninstall stuff from there when I'm done with them? Does it automatically install stuff that I need and don't have installed for a loaded scene?
I used to be able to create 50+ scenes a day. Now I'm lucky if I can get 5, simple because most of the time I'm just waiting for something to load. I could probably fit 10 into the 16 hours of awake-time, but I just run out of patience. :(
My G8 figures load in a few seconds, very heavy scenes can take a couple of minutes but not too long. Maybe its a hardware problem?
Connect and dim are just install methods, I doubt they would effect load timess at all. For me, I am 92% certain it's not hardware. I can make fairly complex scenes, they load not too bad for the size. Once I start adding G8F's to the scenes, then load times go waaaaaaay up. I assume it's just because the amount of addons installed.
what system are you running?
Ryzen 7 2700x eight core
32GB RAM
Nvidia 1080ti
Windows 10 Pro
What I'm thinking of is still to not install anything that I'm currently not using. Finding what I need in DIM is out of the question, which is why I was asking about Connect. Whether it can identify the items in a scene, and install those on the fly for the scene to work. Then allow me to uninstall everything.
Uninstalling, and then later reinstalling everything through DIM would take multiple days, so I wouldn't really want to try it if anyone has a simple, working solution.
Errors are what are responsible, mostly, for slower speeds.
... Missing a morph or content, slows things down.
Yes, it will offer to install any required products that it knows are in your account.
You could uninstall one morph set afte deliberately using it in a character and then see what happens when you try to load or apply the character.
Crikey! I'm thrilled if I can do five in one day--usually, I'm spending a whole day for one scene!
I usually have dozens of "scenes" at the same place, so I only need to set the place itself up once, and then do the smaller adjustments, like figures talking, etc. But now even saving a scene takes a lot of time.
Anyway, I decided to uninstall a couple of items, mostly anything with "morph" in it to start with. And here I was saying that installing all the stuff would take days... How about uninstalling? Morphing socks and morphing stockings, these two items took over an hour (!!!) to uninstall. Oh my...
Okay, so I uninstalled everything with the word "morph" in it, this totalled 140 or so products, some of which were not actually morphs. Loaded the same character. (Alana for G8F) "File loaded in 2 min 55.0 sec." So that saved me a minute and a half there. I should be happy, but... the log looks terrible. Previously, I had 62 lines of warning (during the longer load time), and now I have 6927 lines. Yes, close to seven thousand lines of warning during the loading of that single character that doesn't even require any of the morph sets. It's looking for morphs, like:
2019-12-16 22:36:13.347 WARNING: ..\..\..\..\..\src\sdksource\fileinput\dzassetdaz.cpp(5759): Could not find output property for formula: Genesis8Female:/data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/DAZ%203D/Body/PBMGlutesLowerDepth.dsf#PBMGlutesLowerDepth?value in file : /data/DAZ%203D/Genesis%208/Female/Morphs/vyktohria/Paislee/VYK%20Paislee%20Body.dsf
7000 lines of warnings about various morphs.
If it's trying to load every single morph I have with characters that don't even need them, then sure it takes a long time. How do I stop this?
If I uninstall more items, it will make even more warnings in the log. Why does it even want to load stuff that's been uninstalled? :-o
The more character morphs you have the slower the character will load and the more RAM will be used for each G8 character. I place character morphs I don't use in a seperate folder with the same directory structure. If I need a morph for a character, I save the project and close DAZ3D and move the morph back into the correct data folder and open the project again. I am not sure of the path right now, but it is like data>DAZ 3D>Genesis 8>Female(Male)>Morphs.
The morphs it is loading have links going to the ones that are no longer there (presumably you removed the head and body morphs, which are likely to have a lot of corrective links) so the log is telling you that there's an unresolved link - which is harmless in itself, and the log isn't actually written to disk until there's a quiet moment to do so (which is why it sometimes is behind the times if there's a crash) so producing those warnings isn't impacting load times.
I suppose technically you don't need to move the morphs back and forth. If the directory structure is in place, then you simply need to go to Content Directory Manager and add/remove that directory before loading the figure.
THIS!
THANK YOU! :)
"File loaded in 0 min 7.7 sec."
Now I just need to figure out how the heck I can work with this.
If I uninstall something (using DIM, not just delete it), why on earth are references to it still being kept? :-o
Does this mean that to get the best performance out of DS, I should periodically delete the whole program and content, and reinstall it fresh with all the content I want again, so these non-existing references also get removed?
(Although moving the morphs out of the way seems to be the best solution so far which doesn't require any drastic changes.)
It isn't keeping a reference to an uninstalled item. An installed item has a link to an uninstalled item: for example, a character may include corrective morphs that kicks in when it and EyesCloseL are in effect, for which it needs a formula linking the corective to EyesCloseL - if that morph isn't installed it writes a warning, in case it's the result of an error
I see. So generally it's not a good idea to install everything (that includes any kind of morph) before I need to use them, is that right?
I don't think the warnings are a cause of slow loading, they are just informative - but of course having more morphs loaded will have an impact.
wow
This does bring up another question I've wondered about for some time.
For those of us on systems that have both SSDs and HDDs, would it be viable to move the morph data to a different drive to the texture files?
Textures would fill up an SSD pretty fast, but you only need to load one set for a character, so the higher capacity and lower speed of an HDD is fine. But when you need to load every morph for a given Genesis base before the figure will load, being able to load the morphs with the much higher random read speed of an SSD would be very beneficial.
(Right now, I'm keeping all my DS data on a HDD; I suppose I could at least consider moving the base figures and major morph packs onto a library on an SSD and seeing what that does for load times, even if I don't know about splitting up different parts of a figure's data.)
I keep in my morph folder just the morphs I use all the time and seperate the ones I don't. It isn't really that big of a problem if you create a folder with the same structure as the morph folder and just move the items in and out of the folder. If I don't have that morph, it will give my an error when I load the character. I just remember to add the morphs in after I am done with the basic scene setup and then restart the DAZ program. When the scene loads up the morphs are added and everything is how I left it during the last save. And instead of a character of 3 GB, you have a character at about 1.5 GB. Doing this also speeds up applying poses. As Posing takes longer when you have more morphs on the character.
I have this question as well. Is this possible without causing problems? I have 1TB SSD. I have some content on the SSD, but I had to start using a HDD as the library grew. I can easily fit the whole Daz 'data' folder on the SSD if it helps load times.