Love the new Dog Houses but....
sapat
Posts: 1,735
The file is 1.06GB. Yikes.
I used my PC coupon and got it for $2.50, and I love them, but holy cow! Time to bring out my Scene Optimizer.
https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
I thought I used to have a freebie script from the forum here that resized texture maps? Anyone remember it? I can't find it now.
Post edited by sapat on
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Yeah some of these texture files are msssive. Just had to uninstall a couple sets to free u hard drive space.
That's what I'm going to have to do. I only have just over 6GB left on the partition where my entire content library lives, so gonna have to start dumping stuff I don't use. I still have the zips, or I can re-download if I need them, but space is at a premium and these large files are killing me.
That is just crazy! Then you add the dog, throw some LAMH fur on him, add the owner and some clothes on them. Then create a semi believable environment around the dog house, hit render and your PC freezes up! Why don't PAs take these kinds of scenarios into consideration? This looks like this PAs first prop set, so hopefully they get some constructive feedback and tone it down a little for the next one.
I have scene optimizer and it is not intuitive or easy to use for me and don't really feel it should be must use for each and every scene.
For me hdri sets, crowd billboards and oddly some hairs are eating up my hard drive. I pretty much have to remove them.
I no longer buy them. I can’t have a set I use only occasionally hogging up my runtime, plus I get tired of optimizing stuff.
Thank gawd for my large external hard drives(s) :P I think it was Newegg that I got an 8 tb external not too long ago for less than 150 bucks. I try to buy up large drives too when I find them cheap.
Edit: wait...THIS dog house?
https://www.daz3d.com/jw-dog-house-pack
Why in the WORLD would that be over a gig?? o_O
Laurie
The thread in the freebie forum is here: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/137161/reduce-texture-sizes-easily-with-this-script
There are two DIFFERENT solutions in that thread. Esemwy's and mine. Esemwy's puts the resized textures in the DS Temp directory, so they aren't persistent. Mine saves the resized textures and offers multiple resolution choices and a second script to switch between them in a scene. Use whichever you find more convenient.
I prefer large textures, you can always reduce the size/quality, but you can't improve a poor quality. Also remember the hardware specs get better and better all the time, so large textures is sort of future-orientated.
I have purchased several environment products myself where the sky looks bad because of compression artifacts, which ruins any render IMO. Most HDRI sky products suffer from that problem (some look outright terrible IMO), I don't buy them in that case even though the rest of the environment may look great.
not me. Knowing textures are big or not optimized means I don’t buy.
Large textures are excellent for objects that are large and close to the camera. But for more distant objects that take up only a small portion of the entire image, using large textures is simply wasteful. Which is why I keep lobbying the PAs to include at least one, if not two, additional sets of textures that are pre-resized, and materials presets that use them. It would NOT take much extra time, and if naming conventions were used, could be automated fairly easily. Then their products could be loaded and then adjusted depending on the distance to the camera and size of the object in the image by simply using a 'medium' or 'low' res materials preset on it.
Unfortunately, most have balked at the idea. It would increase the download size, but not by a huge amount.
If I can figure out a way to write a script that would take a set of material presets, determine all the image maps in them, resize them, and create copies of the material presets (with the "medium" and "low" suffixes attached to the names) that use them......hmmm. Now that I think about it, that shouldn't be too hard to do. I'll look into it tonight.....
Some products actually do include different texture sizes, might be good as a general thing. I'd probably do it myself if I was a vendor.
Yep, that dog house pack. I only have 6GB left on my partition for my content library, and the houses are over 1GB. I have 3 external drives but they are nearly full. In fact I had to change the name of one to 'FULL- DO NOT USE'.
Right. I'd get a dog house, some lo res grass, a few dog toys and 1 figure in the scene and I'd top out my card.
Yeah, I don't have any crowd packs, and I tend to use the same few HDRI's or Ghost Lights, so I'm thinning the herd on those too. Hairs are super huge. I had to return that long dynamic real hair thing. I got it posed using a preset, but the sim made DS crash over and over.
My machine can’t take the latest batch of huge files in the scene with multiple figures and optimizing them myself takes time so for me either way it’s a pain....
yeah I know I can’t hold back progress, but I have plenty of items which are large environmental and do not have huge textures so I definitely think it’s possible to have quality without killing my hard drive with large files and making studio crash,
Agreed. I have a few large environments that look great and I am still able to add figures and props to them and render reasonably well. Many PAs need to think past their addon and what it would be used for. Environments are used for background only and NOT the focus of the render in most cases and this needs to be taken into consideration. There are 2 PAs I no longer purchase from because their texture sizes and amounts used (slots also) is out of control and they see nothing wrong with it when concern is voiced..
Agree with both. Last week I bought an addon texture expansion for a hair that is 756MB, and the hair itself is 524MB. That's over 1.7GB, That with a figure, and any clothes and I am just about limited to that and not much else in the scene. Recently I have gone back to using many of my old Poser sets, and the early DS sets. The textures were smaller, so they load and render quicker, and don't make DS get 'laggy' or crash. Often they need little or no adjusting of textures to work with Iray (in myexperience). Hoping to get a larger card in a couple months, but that won't cure my storage issues.
I can't upgrade my computer as frequently as modern tech demands. This computer is only 1 year, old, but lately having an hdri in a scene and a few characters, their clothing and hair has made my system crawl.
What I do now is pose some dummy characters who are subdivided at zero with no shaders. get things the way I want, then import the characters in their outfits and apply the pose. Its a pain, because only a few years ago, I rendered scenes with many characters in a scene, props and a monster. But now even an HDRI can cause a crash.
I honeslty think that DAZ is not handling the textures as well as it used to, because half the time I get a crash hours into a render. And yes, I've put tickets in, and no, there was never a response.
So, as much as it pains me, I have to restrain myself from buying stuff which will contribute to the problem.
My machine was the best I could afford at the time... And I don't want to buy another for at least another year.
Yeah, thanks to my slow download speeds, I spent an hour downloading the doghouses before I needed to shut my computer down, and had only managed 38% of that 1.06 gigs...
Just restarted DIM, and am finishing the download now. At least the downloads are resumable...
I did manage to double dip in the relevant sale, and grabbed another three freebies along with the doghouse, so that was kinda cool. I needed a new item for the extra 5% off gift cards (actually 4.25% thanks to Daz math) and the doghouse fit the bill perfectly. The doghouse was more appealing to me than the remaining new PC+ items, plus my doggies needed some outdoor shelter!
I'm struggling to keep up now too. Even though my computer is about 4 yr old, it's an i7 with 32GB Ram and the Nvidia card with 3GB dedicated memory. Up until about a year ago, I was sailing through renders, not having issues loading figures into scenes, etc. But this past year, huge textures, now dforce and all the big HDR's, it's impossible to keep up. And yours is only a year old! That doesn't give me hope. I can't afford a new computer right now because I'm saving to buy a newer used car (newer than the used one I already have, LOL). So I don't have any budget for a new computer. I thought if I bought a bigger power supply and new graphics card it would be blazing fast, but with cards being so expensive right now, ugh. So yeah, I am not buying those big heavy sets or hairs. I got plenty anyway. So if my girl is wearing last years hair or clothes, she'll just have to get over it.
I did that for my latest release actually but unfortunately haven't actually got any feedback from anyone on whether it was worth doing. You're right it doesn't take much time to do -- make a new folder, copy the textures to it, photoshop action to quickly resize, and finally word replace in a copy of the material preset. However it really did increase the final product file size quite a bit (about 200 MB if I remember right). Textures are probably THE biggest contributing factor for download size, even with lower res textures.
Ironically the sets that would benefit the most from having low rez material options are also likely to be the ones that are already really bulky downloads. It's something I'll probably keep in mind for the future, but I don't know if I'll be doing it for every set I make. I can understand if a PA doesn't want to do this because it'll add to the file size.
I got the doghouse set for $2.50 which is a heck of a good deal. I just wish it could have been the one style of doghouse with a little front deck option and the material presets. I only installed the small house. I left the big one in the zip. In fact due to limited space, I'll probably delete the zip since I can re-download the product if I need to. In reality, I can re-download all the stuff I'm hoarding in zips and eating into over 100GB of drive space (literally.) Think of the deep sigh of relief it would be to select 1000+ zips and put them in the recycle bin. Talk about a purge! I might go through starting with older packs and start my 'recycling' project.
At least you give users the option of the lower res textures for the background bots. That right there is a thoughtful thing to do. Otherwise if everything is hi res, the end user is struggling to load and then render all that weight, or optimize the textures themselves. I've optimized textures myself and just put them in a folder named oddly enough 'Optimized'. That way I get to choose based on my scene, what I need. I realize what you're saying though. To give ppl the hi res and optimized textures would add to the download. But perhaps it would be a good trade off because it would again, give your user the ready made option without them having to do the work themselves.
It takes really no time to do. You can do a batch resize in Photoshop and it's done. I have a utility I bought here that optimizes only the things in the scene that you select. Either way, it is the massive textures that are scene killers.
Also, why do emissives require such large maps, or am I misreading that and the large maps are for other things in the pack? Am curious about that.
E-Arkham, THANK YOU! Even if it's only one, it's a start. I may go buy that JUST to show support......
It doesn't even have to be included in the download. Make it a freebie add-on, or offer it as an ultra-cheap add-on for the product (like a $0.99 for the medium/small textures and mat presets.) For a heavy prop/character/environment? I'd pay the extra buck in a heartbeat. Also offloads the additional d/l size.
Having looked at the scripting involved, this actually looks potentially do-able. I just need to figure out exactly WHAT inside the material preset .DUF needs to be changed to match the new, resized naming. Loading it up as JSON should make modifying the image_library array field a lot simpler, just need to figure out which other members of it need to change in addition to the "url:" member.
Also need to see if there is a way to pull any info on materials from the node data, so one could simply click on something in the scene navigator, then run the script, and it would do the resizing/presets-creation for any it found. But I'm not hopeful on that....will probably require selecting the directory for the product that contains the material presets manually.
They don't require large maps, I was just trying something new with this by cramming as much as possible into the main textures/fewer atlases. Normally I'll split off all the emissive surfaces like lights into their own texture atlas, and make them small (512x512, maybe 1024x1024) which is plenty for crisp detail, and that's probably the better way to handle it (and the way I'll go back to doing it). But at least in this case it's easy to pop in the low rez emissive presets.
Haven't tried out this one yet, but after reading this thread I thought a had to mention it: https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/twin-dog-house/79658
Ok, I see. Again, though, you included them so users have an option. They're not forced to use the hi res and deal with it. Good choice. I'm not sure how many MB it adds to the zip, but users like me who only do manual install can just install the lo res ones initially, and have the option for hi res when we really need something to pop. I don't know anything about DIM, so not sure if they have the same option to only install what they want from a zip. But at least you realize ppl are responding and you're thinking about us. Thanks for that.
A typical 4k x 4k image is 16 million pixels, at 4 bytes per pixel. That's 64 MB. In the download, if JPG format is used, the compression helps on the D/L size, but doesn't help at all with the amount of VRAM it takes up on your GPU in Iray (images are converted from their file format to the internal format Iray uses).
By halving the dimensions to 2k x 2k, it becomes 4 million pixels, and so 16 MB. That's a quarter of the size.
By halving the dimensions again to 1k x 1k, it's 4 MB. That's 1/16th of the original size.
So if a file package was completely textures (effectively) and was 500MB, adding in BOTH the 1/4 and 1/16 size images as well would raise the size to 656 MB. (About 31% increase)
Including 1/16 and 1/64 size images (from 4k to 1k and 256) would only increase the file to 539 MB. (About a 7.8% increase)
That's why I got the Texture Optimizer. It has all that built into it and you can size them down with options like you give above. So 1/4, 1/2, etc. It seems difficult to add both hi and lo res textures to a download, so perhaps just have the main download as one zip with the hi res textures, and make the lo res textures as a 2nd zip. That way if ppl want them, they can download. If not, they don't.