Daz's loading times can take a long time due to all morphs being loaded. Used, or not. I know there is a workaround, but it takes time and effort, and it is possible to forget you have the morphs installed, and have to go through the effort to reactivate them. I think there could be a better way.

I think it would be a good idea to either update Daz Studio so it only loads the used morphs, or someone could create an addon that sets up Daz to only load the used morphs.

Then all the morphs that are not used have an inactive message or some symbol instead of the slider. Click on it, and it loads that one morph onto the character.

I am no expert here, but I would assume the time to load a single morph is with the tradeoff of loading all the morphs at the beginning. Well, at least when you get enough morphs, that is.

We’re excited to announce that Daz is a recipient of an Epic MegaGrant from Epic Games! This allows us to provide a better experience when you use the Daz to Unreal Bridge and other Daz products.

What Is an Epic MegaGrant?

Epic Games awards these specialized grants to support those who are innovative in their use of the Unreal Engine and/or bettering the 3D graphics community. This includes game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers. 

In our case, we have the Daz to Unreal Bridge available for free that allows creators to transfer their Daz assets into the Unreal Engine and work from there. Not only is it incredibly easy to use, but it also gives Unreal Engine users access to our versatile and customizable character platform. This fits Epic Games’ description of a project that solves tough problems and improves workflows. We’re very grateful to receive an Epic MegaGrant!

Epic MegaGrants is a $100 million program designed to service and assist game developers, enterprise professionals, media and entertainment creators, students, educators, and tool developers doing outstanding work with Unreal Engine or enhancing open-source capabilities for the 3D graphics community.

What’s Next?

We’re very grateful to receive an Epic MegaGrant as it will help us improve the Daz to Unreal Bridge and add new features. Plus, we plan to convert thousands more of our products and characters as we kick start the storytelling process for Unreal Engine users.

Want to know more about Epic MegaGrants and the application process? Visit this website, and if you have additional questions, have a look at these FAQs.

If you want to start working in the Unreal Engine, check out how you can use Daz Studio for faster game development in Unreal.

Here I did some new test, seems the problem was caused by 'Face transfer'. (the top example also made by face transfer)

Below the G8M was just made by face transfer, didn't add any skin or shader or whatever, exported to UE4 by the bridge, now it seems has some seams when editing the skeleton mesh, which was not shown in DAZ iray viewport.

Edited to note, this is more about previous comments from maybe a page ago... I had to wait to post this because of a DAZ server based Cloudflare issue and I forgot about it for a while...

Egh... every time someone says "NFTs are not like Bitcoin" or whatever other cryptocraptocurrency they may be responding to or defending, in response to the issues with the massive power consumption required by cryptocurrencies and NFTs, l'm forced to wonder if they understand the concept at all...

Almost all Cryptocurrencies require some form of Proof of Work (PoW) or (Proof of Stake) to be added to the blockchain, the PoW is what gobbles up all the power and is environmentally unfriendly.

While Proof of Stake, the system Ethereum says it will "soon" adopt is supposed to be "greener" and require less energy, all I see is claims about it being greener, but no hard numbers... 10%? 82%? I'm sure it's less wasteful, but how much less?... Only one site I visited gave a number based on a claim by Ethereum that it was going to reduce its energy use by 99%, but they were promoting Ethereum and really talked around the details in such I way that I have zero confidence in that percentage.
Every other site talked around the issue as well, with the amount being "huge", "substantial", "eco-friendly" and "game changing"... 

Either way, at the moment, all the major cryptocurrencies use PoW, so what happens two months or two decades from now is not relevant to "is now" the context/tense to which the argument is being made.

"But... see, they are different than NFTs!"

No.

NFTs need to be "minted" to be added to the blockchain (actually, more correctly, the artwork or whatever needs to be minted to become an NFT)... minting requires PoW... and Proof of Work requires all that delicious energy.

Typically unless you are going to do the work/minting yourself, you need to have your work minted for you by a service... and that has a cost... a "gas fee" (a reference to the energy requirements of minting)... typically, at the moment, it's $70 - $100 gas fee per transaction... plus you need to find the right platform, create a wallet, purchase cryptocoins to pay the fees, choose a starting price and or what your royalties will be and then figure out how you are going to promote your work, presumably through social media or driving through the streets shouting about it on a bullhorn*... then you sit back and wait for the bidding wars to rage.

So, even if you ignore that minting is costly energy-wise, you still need the damn cryptocash to pay for the minting and almost all cryptocurrencies are huge, substantial, non-ecofriendly, game changingly stupid energy wasters.

So maybe you mint the work yourself and mine your own coins and you have your own solar farm, windmill or hydroelectric dam in your backyard to keep your energy use clean, green and off the grid.
Okay... good work... you win...

Otherwise...

No.

An interesting example of how even trying to be green with NFTs is kinda useless, is well illustrated by British artist Jeremy Deller's work "The Last Day", which was auctioned off for charity (or will be... I'm not clear on that part yet)... the work was for charity, but also kind of a way for him to see what was involved in the NFT process...
He chose the Open Sea platform because it uses the "lazy minting"** principle which did not require any gas... However, once the work is sold, the transfer to its new owner will require 48.14 Kilowatt hours of processing energy on the Ethereum platform. That's roughly the equivalent of 1.63 days of power consumption for your average American household. 

*Presumably on a bike because that's more eco-friendly than your coal powered Hummer.

** Lazy minting sounds cool, because you don't pay the gas fee up front... but you do pay it (or the buyer pays it) when the work is sold because the work isn't minted until that point... how that actually plays out is kinda cloudy too, as how that system actually works seems to be a little murky and the platform seems to getting swamped because of misunderstandings as to who is paying the gas fee, how much is it and if you have to except certain offers.

Richard Haseltine said:

If I am reading it correctly it relates to transfering data to the GPU - that is not usually a major bottleneck for Iray.

Default CPU "window" into VRAM was limited to 256 MB. All applications transfering large amounts of textures should benefit from this change because now whole VRAM can be mapped and visible to the CPU, and memory transfers can happen in parallel without queuing. Even if it only improves transfer latency that should benefit Iray as well.

Deadly Buda said:

allenfesler_2df6b6e506 said:

 

(like your art re-selling and you get 10% of the sale)

How would I know someone resold a NFT I had sold? And if so would there be yet another transfer fee I'd be required to pay in part or in full?

You would know the NFT resold because money went immediately to your crypto wallet. That is the cool thing about NFTs and smart contracts in general. The percentage you get is already programmed into the NFT. So it could re-sell 100 times and you would get your 10% each time. Let's say you sell 100 cover art jpgs for equivalent of $10 each, and the NFT was programmed to give you 10% of each resale. Not including transaction fees (which are only temporarily high on ethereum-based NFTs) you made $1000. Then each one re-sells an average of 3 times over the next two years at double the original price, that's an extra $600 directly to you. You don't have to do anything, the blockchain just validates and executes those percentages when they occur and they are sent to you in minutes if not seconds.

These problems are temporary ...

Maybe I'll look into it again once these temporary problems have been resolved, but for now I think I’ll stick to selling my silly stories on Amazon and using DAZ to make the covers. Sure Amazon gets a piece of the action, but  the buyer gets an actual license/copy of the work – not just a link – and they can have it (and I can see a profit) for what they’d pay for a (really bad) cup of coffee from a big chain I won’t name. ;-)

 I would give them more than a passing glance, though. You could stand to profit more and do less. It really depends on your workflow and if you feel like learning a new way of doing things. Which, admittedly can be a pain. I'm not doing much with them myself, but I see their usefulness.

Not including transaction fees

Yeah, right now this is geared to making the bank (or whatever you want to call it) plenty of money - a lot like those stock houses that make money on every bid to buy/sell of stock.

It really depends on your workflow

No. It seems to depend more on you throwing money away and praying someone else will pay even more to bail you out.

You could stand to profit

There's that 'could' in there that's the problem. You 'could' also lose every penny you put into it if you can't find any suckers. Where as when selling my ebooks on Amazon I put it up and get 70% of what each one sells for - if they don't sell I'm out nothing more than a little of my time. With this NFT thing I'm out the cost of each NFT I offer - and if they don't sell or don't sell for enough I don't make it back.

NFT as it is is a bad bet for anyone but the bankers. Let me know when(if) the 'bank fees' get under the price of a cup of coffee.

It's a bit more than "a little fiddly", which is why I said "get your money back".

The actual morph asset files can have several hundred instances of the ID, any control dials will also need modified, as will any correctives and JCMs, then we have any character and/or shaping presets, as they will also have the assets ID in them, so it can be quite a list of files needing edited.

Deadly Buda said:

Zylox said:

Summary: crypto currency currently uses more than 12x the energy per customer that traditional banking does, and is designed to increase energy use over time.

NFTs do not use bitcoin. So framing NFTs in this energy discussion isn't a accurate representation of the energy situation with NFTs - at all.

As for the article you referred to, it clearly states that bitcoin currently uses 1/4 the power of traditional banks. To just multiply it by the number of people on earth isn't really an accurate way of computing energy use. Less bitcoins are mined over time. Also, I'm not sure that more people means more energy in the sort of 1:1 manner that you surmise.  To add to the speculation, computers can run more efficiently with each successive generation of technology, there is no reason they can't make more efficient ASICs just as they make more efficient processors.

Trying to argue that the power consumption of Bitcoin is in any way comparable to that of traditional banking is laughable. (I'm glad Zylox pulled up the numbers so I didn't need to.) So, Bitcoin (which affects at most 2% of the population, since that's how many people own any crypto) is 25% of the energy used by traditional banking (which is used by 100% of people). Or, according to google, 2% of the population consume 0.6% of global electricity to power Bitcoin. Furthermore, it's not as if that energy expenditure covered all the transactions of those 2%, because you can't actually buy most goods or pay bills with crypto, and the majority of those that own crypto actually just hold and don't transact. And even among those that do transact crypto, the number of transactions is probably far less than 10% of the person's total transactions. In summary, with proof of work, if the energy expenditure scaled linearly, then we'd easily exceed the entire world's energy capacity if every transaction used crypto, even at current power levels. And linear scaling is not an unreasonable assumption because, if Bitcoin handled all trade, its market cap would need to be proportionate to the world's GDP/wealth, which means mining would become more profitable, which means more people would mine, which means more energy spent. Linear scaling actually makes a lot of sense.

Now, let's address the (ridiculous) whataboutist claim often made by crypto proponents of "why is the energy used for crypto bad, while [insert any use of a GPU] is considered okay?" I think most people would agree that energy use that creates something or furthers humanity is not a waste, whereas energy that produces nothing is a waste. GPU use, whether for gaming, rendering, or research, all serve a practical purpose: productivity or entertainment. Entertainment is a means of relaxation, which is necessary for people to be productive, so that energy ultimately ends up fueling productivity. Running a  while(random() != magicNumber) { /*do nothing*/ }  loop in code is the definition of wasted energy, which is exactly what cryptomining is.

Now, you say that NFTs run on Etherium, so we shouldn't compare to Bitcoin. But they're both cryptocurrencies, and they roughly accomplish the same purpose. Hence, promoting one cryptocurrency means collectively promoting them all, and promoting their general acceptance/adoption. This is evidenced by their correlated price trends. If Bitcoin all of a sudden vanished one day, or waned in popularity to Etherium, you can be sure that those who are mining Bitcoin will just swap to Etherium (even if it means they need to buy new hardware), meaning the power consumption of Etherium will skyrocket to the levels that Bitcoin has now.

You say that "there is no reason they can't make more efficient ASICs" for mining in the future. Well, it sounds like you don't even understand how cryptomining works. The mining difficulty scales with computing power in the network, in order to ensure a consistent time between blocks. So if hardware becomes more efficient, then the difficulty will simply increase, and a miner will have twice the amount of computing power (to waste) at the same power expenditure. The limiting factor is always energy cost/capacity and hardware availability, the actual hardware efficiency is irrelevant (except for the miner's personal profits if they have more computing power for the same amount of energy). And as the last 20 years of computer hardware have shown, future generations of hardware prioritize increased performance instead of decreased power consumption.

Finally, let's address the idea of how amazing NFTs are, and how much value they could provide the world as a practical means of authenticating ownership, without a middleman. The fundamental flaw here is the assumption that humans are honest and lack greed (greed, i.e. the very foundation on which NFTs are built on). Due to the anonymous/irreversible nature of crypto transactions, it's easy to scam buyers or sellers, so NFTs can only ever work as a means of selling/trading worthless items (or representations of items) in order to have the honor of holding the title of "owner."

For example, take Daz selling assets via NFT. Nothing stops me from buying the NFT, downloading the asset, and reselling the NFT to someone else, even at the same price. That person can then download the asset, and resell to someone else, and continue the cycle, essentially each person in the chain getting free content, and ripping off Daz, or whoever the seller might have been. Alternatively (or if there's one of those pesky "smart contracts" involved), I can just create an account and sell the asset as if I were the owner. Or if I really wanted, I could create an account and actually just sell nothing: a 404 error.

But how about buying something non-digital, like real property, i.e. something that can't be reproduced? Okay, let's say the title to my home is tied to an NFT. What if a guest hops onto my computer while I'm not looking, and sells the NFT to someone without my permission? Or maybe it happens due to a computer virus. Does that mean I've lost my home? Or was it the buyer that got scammed? Or what if I'm renting out my apartment, and the renter pretends to be the owner, mints a new NFT, and sells the apartment. You can argue that in all these cases, the buyer is responsible for verifying that the seller is an honest person. Well, perhaps for the safety of everyone, there can be an established/trusted account, such as a realtor, and I as the owner can transfer my NFT to them, so that the buyer recognizes the trusted realtor account and knows they're not getting scammed. Okay, so in an effort to save the buyer the time and effort to do their due diligence, and as a means to establish trust for all parties, I've just reintroduced that evil middleman. So in essence, that terrible system that we have now, of laws and middlemen, actually exists in order to solve all the problems plaguing NFTs. Wow, mind blown! Who knew that dishonest people exist!

All that said, I'll be happy to change my perspective on Etherium when it changes to proof of stake, but I'll believe it when I see it. Until then, it's cancer. And regarding NFTs, I'm not opposed to NFTs running on an energy efficient blockchain if they're used to distribute meaningless titles of no real world value outside of being collectible, perhaps with some trivial artwork/asset attached to symbolize the token. But to make the claim that they're useful in any real-world/practical way is, frankly, delusional.

Richard Haseltine said:

I would say report this to Daz and to the renderosity vendor - one or both could avoid issues by adding a prefix to the morph name. That is soemthing you could do yourself, since it's unlikely that any add-ons will depend on the morphs, but it is a little fiddly and may not match the official fix(es) (which could break your saved scenes) so best to give the makers a chance.

So if I go into the mophs of the products I'm having trouble with I can just add a prefix? The products would still call the right files without me doing anything else? But honestly I'm starting to see all kinds of duplicate issues, So I'm getting fustrated now along with all the missing product preview troubles lately.

I would say report this to Daz and to the renderosity vendor - one or both could avoid issues by adding a prefix to the morph name. That is soemthing you could do yourself, since it's unlikely that any add-ons will depend on the morphs, but it is a little fiddly and may not match the official fix(es) (which could break your saved scenes) so best to give the makers a chance.

Oh, I need that 3DU turtle. I've actually now licenses for 90% of his toon stuff but they are still gaps in games, like turtles. I hope it has a morph to a sea turtle and tortoise/terrapin as well.

I've read the NFTs are already going bust according to the latest metrics. Is that a surprise? Not in the least, but I suppose when you see someone making 69 millions from NFT junk art collection that was more crude Hustler style political cartoons than art; well why not gamble if you don't mind loosing a few hundred dollars in the process.

Deadly Buda said:

allenfesler_2df6b6e506 said:

 

(like your art re-selling and you get 10% of the sale)

How would I know someone resold a NFT I had sold? And if so would there be yet another transfer fee I'd be required to pay in part or in full?

You would know the NFT resold because money went immediately to your crypto wallet. That is the cool thing about NFTs and smart contracts in general. The percentage you get is already programmed into the NFT. So it could re-sell 100 times and you would get your 10% each time. Let's say you sell 100 cover art jpgs for equivalent of $10 each, and the NFT was programmed to give you 10% of each resale. Not including transaction fees (which are only temporarily high on ethereum-based NFTs) you made $1000. Then each one re-sells an average of 3 times over the next two years at double the original price, that's an extra $600 directly to you. You don't have to do anything, the blockchain just validates and executes those percentages when they occur and they are sent to you in minutes if not seconds.

These problems are temporary ...

Maybe I'll look into it again once these temporary problems have been resolved, but for now I think I’ll stick to selling my silly stories on Amazon and using DAZ to make the covers. Sure Amazon gets a piece of the action, but  the buyer gets an actual license/copy of the work – not just a link – and they can have it (and I can see a profit) for what they’d pay for a (really bad) cup of coffee from a big chain I won’t name. ;-)

 I would give them more than a passing glance, though. You could stand to profit more and do less. It really depends on your workflow and if you feel like learning a new way of doing things. Which, admittedly can be a pain. I'm not doing much with them myself, but I see their usefulness.

Thanks for the examples, it's about money, and the traders profit the most and the artists the least with zero appreciation for the artistic value or the enviroment. I get it can be tempting, but it's not the set of values I'd like to sign up to (Dang it, it's getting philosphical again).

has been a long time. 

i think the v4 ranger had support morphs.  look for like waist width, think it had the pregnancy morph in it too.  try manually dialing some of those built in morphs.

@DAZ_sam Ok thank you, we will wait for the next update then. Please note that in blender every single morph takes the whole object geometry. So it is important to optimize the used morphs. Spreading around all the morphs to all the objects, either if they apply or not, may result in a massive memory leak. Especially for HD figures that can easily make use of hundreds of morphs.

allenfesler_2df6b6e506 said:

 

(like your art re-selling and you get 10% of the sale)

How would I know someone resold a NFT I had sold? And if so would there be yet another transfer fee I'd be required to pay in part or in full?

You would know the NFT resold because money went immediately to your crypto wallet. That is the cool thing about NFTs and smart contracts in general. The percentage you get is already programmed into the NFT. So it could re-sell 100 times and you would get your 10% each time. Let's say you sell 100 cover art jpgs for equivalent of $10 each, and the NFT was programmed to give you 10% of each resale. Not including transaction fees (which are only temporarily high on ethereum-based NFTs) you made $1000. Then each one re-sells an average of 3 times over the next two years at double the original price, that's an extra $600 directly to you. You don't have to do anything, the blockchain just validates and executes those percentages when they occur and they are sent to you in minutes if not seconds.

These problems are temporary ...

Maybe I'll look into it again once these temporary problems have been resolved, but for now I think I’ll stick to selling my silly stories on Amazon and using DAZ to make the covers. Sure Amazon gets a piece of the action, but  the buyer gets an actual license/copy of the work – not just a link – and they can have it (and I can see a profit) for what they’d pay for a (really bad) cup of coffee from a big chain I won’t name. ;-)

 I would give them more than a passing glance, though. You could stand to profit more and do less. It really depends on your workflow and if you feel like learning a new way of doing things. Which, admittedly can be a pain. I'm not doing much with them myself, but I see their usefulness.

Deadly Buda said:

allenfesler_2df6b6e506 said:

Confused old fart here ...

For the moment let's not worry about how much energy it takes to make a PoS/PoW 'coin'; I'm more interested in what it will (or won't) do for me as a semi-artist/scifi-writer.

As I semi-understand things, to play this NFT game you have to generate or buy/convert enough cash to whatever coin is needed to make the NFT (well over $100 from what those in the thread were saying).

Then you have to 'sell' the NFT - and there's a transfer fee! (also over $100 I believe someone said).

And then you have to cash out the coin - hoping the value hasn't dropped to a point less than you paid to play this little game. (may be another converter fee?)

So a person has to believe that there's someone else out there willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a 'link' to their art/story - because it will have to sell for hundreds just for you to break even, more if you were hoping to make a profit.

Did I miss something big? Because it looks like the only sure winners are the ones selling the NFTs to the artists and the ones collecting those transfer fees. If the artist doesn't charge enough they lose money, if it doesn't sell they lose money, and the buyer buys proof that they bought proof of a link - which can go down or the contents change at any time.

I know there are a few others out there that remember 'War Games' - where the only winning move is a nice game of chess ... ;-)

What you are missing is that NFTs haven't been properly explained to you. NFTs are basically digital contracts that are unique. The contracts get executed and pay out in the particular cryptocurrency they are part of, and can be programmed to do so in the future based on certain events (like your art re-selling and you get 10% of the sale). So its a contract and payment system all in one. 

All the other stuff about marketing, transfer fees, etc. that you mention are only after-effects of some hyped transactions and services. These problems are temporary and just part of the developing nature of the technology. NFTs can potentially replace banks and lawyers to a large degree, giving artists a more streamlined way of getting paid directly from their fans or businesses.

(like your art re-selling and you get 10% of the sale)

How would I know someone resold a NFT I had sold? And if so would there be yet another transfer fee I'd be required to pay in part or in full?

These problems are temporary ...

Maybe I'll look into it again once these temporary problems have been resolved, but for now I think I’ll stick to selling my silly stories on Amazon and using DAZ to make the covers. Sure Amazon gets a piece of the action, but  the buyer gets an actual license/copy of the work – not just a link – and they can have it (and I can see a profit) for what they’d pay for a (really bad) cup of coffee from a big chain I won’t name. ;-)

Although I'm not a fan of the morphs Michael 8.1, Cleopatra 8.1, & August 8.1, and I've gambled that we are going to head towards the realism of Torment 8.1's morph (minus his theyness), if there were no new feature other than the Eye Look Automatic switch---which automagically does what was previously tediously difficult to do---the update would be worth it.

droidy001 said:

allenfesler_2df6b6e506 said:

Confused old fart here ...

For the moment let's not worry about how much energy it takes to make a PoS/PoW 'coin'; I'm more interested in what it will (or won't) do for me as a semi-artist/scifi-writer.

As I semi-understand things, to play this NFT game you have to generate or buy/convert enough cash to whatever coin is needed to make the NFT (well over $100 from what those in the thread were saying).

Then you have to 'sell' the NFT - and there's a transfer fee! (also over $100 I believe someone said).

And then you have to cash out the coin - hoping the value hasn't dropped to a point less than you paid to play this little game. (may be another converter fee?)

So a person has to believe that there's someone else out there willing to pay hundreds of dollars for a 'link' to their art/story - because it will have to sell for hundreds just for you to break even, more if you were hoping to make a profit.

Did I miss something big? Because it looks like the only sure winners are the ones selling the NFTs to the artists and the ones collecting those transfer fees. If the artist doesn't charge enough they lose money, if it doesn't sell they lose money, and the buyer buys proof that they bought proof of a link - which can go down or the contents change at any time.

I know there are a few others out there that remember 'War Games' - where the only winning move is a nice game of chess ... ;-)

I think you pretty much nailed it. But I'm no expert, I'm just going on the duck theory.

...+1 

Hi.  I found a working solution.  Use the "Daz Studio (1 unit = 1 cm) setting.  Click "show individual settings" .  Set the scale to 10000%  (yes, 10,000)

Load your morph.

Worked for me.

Best of luck!

@MimicMolly @DarkStarr42 Here's Ashan, Darius, & Diego (I pre-empted Edward & Landon since you've already purchased Real Faces)

For all renders: default HDR, Environment Dome Rotation 100, Subdivision Level 2, Core Figure Head Morph 100, Cornea Bulge 100

Ashan 8 (Tjark Short Hair)- Andres, Eduardo, Jules, Lucio, Marcus, Matias

Darius 8 (Stylish Hair)- Andres, Eduardo, Jules, Lucio, Marcus, Matias

Diego 8 (Carlos Hair)- Andres, Eduardo, Jules, Lucio, Marcus, Matias