Is Decimator useful for old hardware?
exstarsis
Posts: 2,128
Decimator! In FastGrab!
Is it useful for folks like me who have a pathetic amount of CUDA cores? At a glance $30 seems like a good stopgap measure until I can afford a new machine (or at least a new gfx card and power supply). I was desperately wishing for it when using some of Stonemason's city blocks the other day, but it was way out of reach. Now it's much more IN reach, especially compared to a GTx80 card, but that means now I want to know if it actually helps in managing scenes and rendering them faster?
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You might do better to edit your texture sizes - images will often use more RAM then the geometry. Finding a tool (I think Blender will work, and there may well be soem other free tools dedicated to the task) that will let you take a displacement map and bake it to normals, so you don't have to apply such high levels of SubD, will also help if you are making a lot of use of content with displacement. Decimator will reduce the size of the base geometry, but that's useful only where you don't then divide it to support displacement.
Decimator is usually used to make "game ready" models.
Now Genesis 3 is already ok for games but old models have too many polygons.
Richard, your advice sounds useful, but I don't actually quite understand it. I'm still not very up on the use of maps, although I understand most of the basics of what each sort does (I think) but what did you mean about dividing geometry to support displacement? I also don't really know if I use a lot of displacement. I also rarely turn on SubD--I tend to go for a more semi-real painted look than extreme photorealism.
My card, even though it only has about 350 CUDA cores, also has 4gb of RAM, so it only ever has problems with RAM when I've had DAZ open too long. Are the polygons what's calculated in the first (for me) 2-3 of minutes before the progressive render appears? And the textures are what's applied after through the iterations? If so, that would be good to know!
Decimator isn't for rendering, CUDA cores are any of that. It's when you need a low poly model or LOD, usually for a game. This probably only applies on limited hardware or for a low resolution LOD for far away figures. I've also found it useful for clothing items that have millions of polygons that have no business having that many polygons. Run decimator on it and then render that. So that's probably the closest you'll get to what you describe. I've found that tools and plugins for decimation that come with 3D modeling software is better. But that's just me.
Yeah, I picked up a knife somewhere that has more polygons than the human figure it's next to (and one surface). No idea why. And I get that it's primarily for games. What I'm trying to understand now is: I have a piece of artwork, with a shadowy distant figure watching somebody closer to the camera. Would Decimator improve the handling of that image? The rendering?
Also: I have seen that Lo Rez figures are sold as background figures, in this very store. Do they exist because of rendering time or just setup? And is the geometry only relevant during the period of time before visible rendering begins, or throughout the process?
Yes, the low res figures are made for background purposes. they are generally lower in detail and have lower resolution textures so that more can be added with less of a hit on your resources. What decimator does is lower the density of the mesh, making it lower poly. While this would work for background figures, you should also take the textures into an image editor and lower the resolution (from 4096 to 2048 or less) also since these tend to have more of a hit in Iray than mesh resolution.
There is another product called texture atlas which can combine all textures onto one texture map
Also, one very important note is that there is NO installer for older versions of Daz. I bought this and I was never able to install it in 4.8, even after contacting support. They straight up told me they cannot locate an installer for 4.8. If you buy Decimator right now, there are no installers for previous versions of Daz, even though this was made for previous versions of Daz. They somehow "lost" them. Maybe somebody who has the Decimator installer for 4.8 could kindly email it to Daz Support, LOL.
I got it when it was just $7 a while back, so I decided to keep it anyway, even though it is impossible for me to use it. Don't tell me to just upgrade, that's been covered. Maybe some day...maybe some day...
I'm not trying to be too snarky, (though I am kind of bitter,) I am simply informing a customer here in case they are running an older version of Daz.
I think you just need to go to the products library page and manually download the *.exe product. Works in 4.6.
I have done that. It does not work for me. When did you download it? Because if you try that right now, which I just did to be sure, it will install...but when open DS and check your plugins, you get see this:
There are no other installers besides the 2 they have (32 bit and 64 bit.)
So if you were able to do this before, Daz has conveniently removed this ability!
Ugh that sucks, outrider42.
A related question, on texture shrinking: do I actually have to do this manually, or is that what the setting in the IRay Advanced settings does, where you can specify 'texture compression'?
Okay, you are doing well. Now you need to go to my accounts - serial numbers - decimator. Copy that number. Open DAZ Studio. Help - About Plug Ins. Look for Decimator and paste your license. Save. Maybe restart DAZ Studio and you should be good to go.
Um...do you see that little part at the bottom of the pic that says "Plugin was made for a newer version of Daz Studio"???
I kind of know how to use serial numbers. I do not even get the option to place a serial in. There is no field to key in a serial. Trust me, I've been down this road before, thanks. I told you I worked with support over this.
There is a thread here where a PA said they are working on a product to batch resize textures for DS. I don't when or if it will be finished. I can't recall who it was.
I don't think the texture compression makes a huge difference, maybe a little. Plus if you make the compression too high your textures could bleed. So resizing is much better.
I had the same issue. Pretty crappy DAZ won't let you d/l an older version especially since you paid for the pliug in. The one I am using is an older version with 4.8, but unfortunately, with the new system upgrade, I lost the original installer so I am SOL if I need to reinstall it again.
Yeah, it was pretty awesome when they actually asked me why I wont just upgrade. I made a nice long list of reasons for them.
But I think textures would be better for old hardware. Though Decimator would help a little, too. Less complicated models means your cpu can keep up with Daz as you move around the scene, and it might impact renders times a little, just a little. Assuming, of course, you are using the newest shiny version of Daz.
There are some tips for helping make things easier for the weaker machine, like turning off normals. That can save memory and speed up renders a bit. Older models, like G2, tend to render faster than G3 because they usually have fewer texture maps. So if you can kill off a few unneeded texture maps, you will speed things up. If you have a long distance shot, this can work. Simplicity will usually be faster. So if you are looking to speed things up, think about how you can simplify this or that. Like making your scene less crowded, maybe some elements can be rendered in separate renders and post edited back in. (Like, delete the city block, and render -some- people/items by themselves, then bring the block back and delete the people you just rendered and make a new render.) Or maybe rendering small portions of a scene and post stitch them together, (I really can't say how much, if any, time that would save.)
I have 1,000 more CUDA's than you, but only 2gb of VRAM, so I have to get pretty creative to get anything to render on my card.
Thanks for all the tips. I've been trying hard to figure out why some things render really quickly and some things take a long time. I mean, that's from my perspective, where 'quickly' is '2 minutes' and 'a long time' is '6 hours' but the scenes don't seem especially different in complexity. I'm going to have to do some texture comparisons, I guess. And it IS interesting comparing the polygon counts now that I've figured out how to find them. Still can't for the life of me figure out why this dagger has 100k faces.
Meanwhile, I did pick up Decimator (not sure if that was a mistake, esp. hearing about getting it at $7) as an experiment. I rendered the ready-to-render 'Beach Scene' at around 7.5 minutes, chomped off a bunch of polygons on the model and her props (enough that it was visible up close [in the preset view, esp. her face] but wouldn't be from a distance) and rendered again at 6.5 minutes. So, yeah, not a huge improvement but might make it a lot easier to do the background characters thing.
Now I just have to figure out why Daz keeps crashing out on this render....
Basically what I hope Decimator can do is reduce the number of polygons on say a G1 figure to the point where the polygons really stand out like the facets of a cut gem. Then I can apply some suitable shader to the figure so it will look like some crystal statue with many sparkling facets. Will Decimator enable me to do that? Someone please enlighten me on this, thanks.
oh boy and I was upset could not get it for D|S3A back in the day ....
To get a faceted look...simply go to the surface properties pane and select all surfaces and scroll down to Smooth and switch it to 'Off'.
I know about this, but will Decimator help make the figure look even more faceted by reducing the polycount? :)
Not really, you start to lose mesh fidelity at about 2500 polys. Here is V7 at just under that with a diamond shader and smoothing off.
I often decimate figures (in Blender) to work in the background so it allows reduction in detail and fewer resource while keeping a usable quality for composition. Is it usable for older systems, yes, it's usable by anyone making a scene composition with a 24 core CPU, 128GB DDR4 and dual 4096 Cuda core GPUs as well.
Thanks. Bit of a disappointment, really... I was hoping the figure could really be made to look like it was all made of lotsa pretty facets. Thanks all the same for sharing what you know!
Instant Meshes will let you retopo models, including increasing or decreasing or otherwise modifying the polygons. I don't know if it preserves UV maps well, I haven't used it for that.
It's cool, it's free.
It is cool, but it does not preserve UVs, or rigging like Decimator does for that matter. Personally, I find decimator to be an incredibly valuable tool for those reasons.
- Greg
I find the decimator an Excellent tool for us animators needing to do crowd scenes.
45 seconds into this clip there are over forty Genesis figures Decimated to very low poly counts in Daz before sending to Maxon C4D for rendering.
The guy at the meeting in the orange HAZMAT suit is a heavily decimated figure as well.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B2TYEp536iB8aVBBdHJWRE9jODg/view?usp=sharing
If the Decimator plug in for Das Studio is anything like the Decimator in Hexagon, I'd say it's nigh upon useless since the geometry it makes will be almost impossible to animate and pose. You'd be better to get the hobby license for 3D Coat and use the retopo room to delete edge loops until you've got a more manageable polygon count and then bake the high rez model to the low rez model. This way you'll be able to preserve the crucial edge looks for animating and maintain a quad dominant topology (there will be a few N-Gons but they're easily removed in 3D Coat). The decimator in hexagon just makes the mesh a jumble of randomly placed tris and if the one in Daz Studio does that it'll make it very hard to work with the model once decimated.
Can instancing not be used in animation (for still figures like that?) or is decimation just more functional?
Instancing would probably work if it was rendered in DAZ studio directly but I don't think you can export them for external rendering (as in C4D). I think that's the issue there.