Making comparisons is quite useless if the total number of morphfiles is not included. Someone with less that 100 "characters", small amount of other morphfiles and expressions can have the figure load in seconds, when someone having 1000+ "characters", a lot of morph files and a ton of expressions may expect loading times to be several minutes if not several tens of minutes. 

The warnings and errors recorded in the logfile can make loading take considerably longer in both cases.

algovincian said:

Unless I'm not understanding something, the whole ExP/INJ system didn't really function like what I'm suggesting at all - there would be no selective injecting or anything like that at runtime.

PowerLoader did that. You fire up V4.2 and it asks you which ExP morph sets to load, and more. http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/artzone/pub/software/powerloader/start The ExP tech was a blessing and a curse. A blessing because it overrode the morph channel number limitations (only so many used to be available in a figure by default back then). But if you save a scene with a V4-based character and later add a new ExP morph package to V4, your character in the scene saved prior to adding those won't be able to use them.

barbult said:

Greg, what morph package caused your very long load times? I'm sure other people might want to experiment with removing just that one.

It was a while back and I can't remember (my memory is garbage). I'll try to dig up an old post or something.

- Greg 

Taoz said:

5 minutes exactly, with 712 G8F characters and a lot of morph packages installed, DS 4.15.  Hardware 10+ years old - first gen Core 2 Quad 6600, DDR2 RAM and only HDDs.  An i5-4690 CPU is over 4 times faster, so you have to take CPU speed into account too.

Dont forget, it's about single-threaded performance, not overall CPU performance. So you can have a CPU that's 100 cores and it's 100 times faster, but it won't make a difference as loading a character is single-threaded. For faster load times on the hardware front, the key seems to be a CPU with strong single-thread performance. Fortunatly there are lots of good benchmarks for this.

certaintree38 said:

That didn't work either. I would at least like to know why these poses don't want to transfer. Does anyone have a guess?

The problem is that those poses are activated via dial controls, and whilst the pose converters will move the pose files (ie the duf files) they do not move the files under data that are needed to activate those poses.

Some stuff I bought recently...

Rayne by Pixeluna
She has a gorgeous, slightly darker (possibly Arab?) complexion with cool undertones. (Then again, you don´t really see her undertones in my render because of all the warm lights I used... *facepalm*)
I think the horizontal width of her eyes is too small, making her eyes look a little beady. But when I add a little in the width she becomes a really beautiful woman.
I find her body morph unremarkable but she comes with an HD morph than can be dialled in separately. My render shows the body of V8 and the HD morphs of Rayne, plus some minor tweaks.

Beloved Poses 2 by Mattymanx
Yes, the area around her left thigh/stomach is "clippy". Don´t feel like dealing with it :p

Awerie Outfit by 4blueyes & bucketload3d
Bought it mostly for those Glamazon boots. The top is nice, too. Don´t care for the skirt so I replaced it.

Tactical Pants by Smay
A little trickier than expected regarding pokethrough, smoothing modifier, and such. But you can make it work.

Tenebroso Lighting by Marshian
One of those emissive "eggs" is hovering between them, I clone-stamped it out in post. A 2nd one is somewhere off panel.

Mystical Wisps by Orestes Graphics
Only provides ambient and rim light here but those HDRIs are top notch and can bring the drama.

 

 

it may be another issue, I was saving the same outfit as a support asset for Genesis 8 M & F and looking in Data it appears one overwrites the other

the is a 1KB dsf morph file for male and female but only one clothing dsf

I am now not saving support assets just scene subsets with autoadapted data files which are waaaaay bigger but work

I may not keep them after using the Unreal Bridge (already exported FBX for iClone)

I just have to accept autofitting on the fly in future I guess and saving scenes or subsets for use in DAZ studio

So I just read the below post and saw it was posted a while ago....where are these settings in the new Daz3d? I am having issues with my figures stomaches wrinkling during poses such as sitting or squatting or kneeling, etc and have no idea how to fix it.

niccipb said:

Hi nowefg...

by default the Draw Manipulation subdivision is set to Delayed and the Skin Binding is set to Optimized... this is what causes that effect that you are seeing.

In the Tool Settings pane select the Universal Manipulator

Change the Subdivision to Persistent (On) and the Skin Binding to Full

This will now change the draw for all Manipulators and morph sliders

Now when you adjust the pose or a morph the transition will be smooth and accurate, but this does use more memory and if your OGL video card is slow, it could also cause lag in the viewport.

Hope this helps... :)

One way to do that would be to :

- Be sure that all your apps units are set to 1cm = 1unit

- Export a human custom morph as FBX from Character Creator

- From DAZ, Load a G8 male or female and File > Send to ZBrush (Base resolution)

- Now in ZBrush you have the Base DAZ G8. Load the CC3 exported FBX 

- Use ZWrap to set points on both meshes so that the DAZ mesh takes the shape of the CC3 Mesh. 

- Once the wrapping is done, use GoZ in ZBrush to send back the G8 now morphed.

And there you go. You have a G8 morphed into a CC3 character, already rigged and useable. 

I understand the frustration when most of these issues were given to us months ago but, I promise myself and @DAZ_vish are doing our best to figure out how we can support the community here. 
I did do an update today Added an Option to choose which type of Bump you want when converting to Redshift.
Morphs should now work @scobb3_60a649a03a thanks for being patient with me :)
Also added options so you can choose which morph you want at export. Currently, there is a checkbox for the morphs you most likely want. AND JCMs, the morphs are coming in but, there will be in need of more work on the morphs but, I hope this helps out some of you :)
Lastly, I haven't tested this new update yet on Mac. Some directories changed so if someone could let me know that be awesome!
The newest update can be found here. 
https://github.com/daz3d/DazToC4D/commits/develop
 

5 minutes exactly, with 712 G8F characters and a lot of morph packages installed, DS 4.15.  Hardware 10+ years old - first gen Core 2 Quad 6600, DDR2 RAM and only HDDs.  An i5-4690 CPU is over 4 times faster, so you have to take CPU speed into account too.

~3 seconds, with 60 G8F figures and a bunch of morph packs. Latest .13 beta.

I'm pretty sure it never touched the SSD - I rarely reboot and have a lot of unused RAM, so Windows keeps everything I use frequently in memory (caching might be the reason if your 2nd load is much faster than the first?),

I have a couple hundred G8F figures and morph packs. I use the latest Daz Studio.

58 seconds for default G8F.

46 seconds for Rory HD.

That didn't work either. I would at least like to know why these poses don't want to transfer. Does anyone have a guess?

This is an interesting pool of info! Thought I also just saw Zev0 mention working on something involving improving the way all morphs have always been linked or whatever, even when not needed. Man would that make a lot of people happy...

I have between 80-100 G8F Characters installed (many more than that not installed for these very reasons) and 40-50 separate Morph packs installed.

Daz 4.15

Win 10 x64, Meager and old i7-6700 @ 3.4 GHz, 16 GB RAM, all SSD Drives (System/Content separately)

32 Seconds

TesseractSpace said:

Now if only I could find a Lotus Seven S II, like the famous KAR120C from The Prisoner series... (and a Patrick McGoohan morph, the clothes... the whole darn village. Pretty sure I could make Rover with dForce and a sphere...)

...there is a Lotus Super 7 over at Rendo. 

Would love a model of the Village. 

fred9803 said:

Richard Haseltine said:

 

It isn't just loadign the data, it's also processing it - the actual reading is a minor part of the process.

Is that processing done in system RAM?

From a programming standpoint, the data is pulled from the HDD or SSD into system RAM, and the DAZ Studio software works on it from there. However, it's probably a very "serial" process, which means you can't do a lot of tasks simultaneously (in "parallel"), you have to do them one-by-one. And that takes a lot of time. 

I'm guessing each character is comprised of millions of vertices, and each morph changes each of the corresponding vertices, which means you're calculating millions and millions of vertices. And I suppose if you watch Windows 10 Task Manager as you're loading this stuff you'd see that not all CPU processing units are busy (I'm guessing), which means you can't do it in parallel.  

So while RAM is fast, it's pretty much irrelevant to the process since DAZ Studio has to do tons of calculations internally, and I suppose that's limited by the software capabilities, not RAM speed.  

Though it still seems awfully strange it can take 30 minutes for a character.  

Have my library on a 2 TB external SSD. So hardware is not the limiting factor. After I had load times around the 10 minutes mark I started a regular process of uninstalling or at least moving files back and forth from my main library.

Currently: 44 seconds

This is with quite some characters (Vicky 7, 8, Charlotte 8, Aiko 8, Freja 8, Girl 7, 8), some figures from Jessai/Silver, Vicey3D, Addy, 3D Universe, Crocodile Liu, EichhornArt, Maddelirium, Maelwenn, Mousso, Rarestone, RawArt, Rhiannon, Sangriart, SASE (quite a lot) plus Morph Packs from Zev0, Soto, Dogz, Meipe and a lot of dress related morphs installed.

After just temporarily moving all subfolders but DAZ 3D from the Genesis 8/Female/Morphs folder to a different location: 6 seconds

After even moving the DAZ figures: 5 seconds

So yeah, having an eye on the data/Genesis 8/Female/Morphs folder (and the other main figure folders if you use them and have lots of characters/morphs) pays out. For the above mentioned I just moved those morph folders from me SSD-library to a spare one on the same drive. 2 GB of files but 1 second as the finder does not move files but only change references.

I still do not bother to optimize as long as I am < 1 minute. Once over I know it is time for some library optimization. Then as file moving is quicker than uninstalling via DIM I tend to keep figures I like available but uninstall all characters I won't use often.

Still wondering why DAZ is not adressing this as a top priority. DAZ wants people to buy characters. But the more you buy the more sluggish studio becomes. Connect is some way to adress this. But I don't like Connect very much. So if I have moved some morphs away and I load up a scene with characters/morphs currently not installed I rather refer to DIM or manually move back once I get the first error message during loading. Doing so does prevent the second error message from showing and loads the scene fine.

What I hate even more is the long time studio needs for closing a scene. Tend to force quit studio to avoid this.

Greg, what morph package caused your very long load times? I'm sure other people might want to experiment with removing just that one.

inquire said:

Well, could this work? Create two aliases (Macintosh term) or two shortcuts (Windows term) to the DAZ 3D folders, the ones containing the G 8.1 male or female Base Pose Head and Expressions folders. Then, perhaps just before rendering, do the expressions. Click on the alias or shortcut, and "hide" [perhaps by adding .SAV to the end of each folder] those two folders. Use all the G8 expressions you want. Then, render. And, of course, click on the alias (or shortcut) again and "unhide" those two folders. 

Thus, these folders would not be hidden for very long and should not present problems when updates were being downloaded. And, if you did the expressions just before rendering, even if the scene should be worked on over several days, there should not be an occasion of lost expressions.

Would this not work, and without presenting problems, and with just a little bit of extra labor?

I should hurry to add that I had not read the two previous posts by jbowler and s_j_gregory above. I don't want them to think that I'm responding to their posts. This was just my idea.

Those posts and the whole load time thread is off topic; I'm going to post my numbers in the real load time thread.  The long load time is not specific to G8.1 and my CMS directory fix for the load time doesn't help with the expression dummy files because they are in the same product as the files they dummy out; the only way to remove the dummies is to modify the Starter Essentials product.

I believe that DAZStudio does not reload expressions etc after the scene has been loaded; it would have to rebuild all the morph sliders if it found a change and, anyway, a substantial part of the information is loaded from the DSON cache.  Even if it did reload on render relying on it doing so would not be good; there is no reason why a minor update to DAZStudio would not skip the reload, after all it would slow everything down unnecessarily if it happened.

IMO it is necessary to either work with the core product as shipped or to modify it and then commit to keeping it modified despite DAZ updates, and not complaining if a change in DAZStudio breaks the modification.