LenioTG said:

There was a thread, or part thread, on this topic fairly recently, but I don't have a link to hand. If therea re no errors then it's essentialy down to lloading and configuring the morph set up - DS doesn't store the shape data but it does need the name to appear on the slider and how the different sldiers are connected, so that they can be set and behave correctly when set. The more morphs there are installed the more there is for DS to do, and so the slower the process will be.

That's interesting, thanks.

So I could try to uninstall useless packs of morphs.

Yes, lightening the load should speed the loading.

But what is involved in that loading?

Does a faster CPU load significantly faster?
In that case, it's more a single-threaded or a multi-threaded workload?

Thank you!

It seems to be single-threaded, I'm not sure factors govern the time - quite a bit of data has to be read from disc (the fiels contain the shape chnages, even if DS doesn't keep them in memory), the property lists have to be scanned in memory, and the CPU has to process everything as it gets it - I would imagien all play a part in the time taken, given a fixed amount of data to process.

Thanks!

So single-threaded performance and system memory also play a role.
I'll test that when I'll update my hardware!

We certainly need a new PA on the level of Linday when it comes to simulated hairs. The new product looks pretty great, hope to get it soon. Perhaps someone can say for certain if there is a side part morph?

i've been playing around with  textures from texturing.xyz and using this method (zwrap) to apply them to genesis 8, with some custom sculpts in blender. this was rendered in blender.

the textures are 5k by 8k (so maybe 6.5k average resolution)

I find that zwrap is a little fidgety and prefer normal UV editing from blender. 

They just came out with a promo sale yesterday with a bunch of textures for about half price.

texturing xyz's skins are a little expensive compared to daz stuff but i recommend them.

The micro detail looks really great! I think what you need to add in is some of the macro detail, as it were, particularly on the lip where it still looks flat (the lips probably need some proper displacement for this) I'd also add more of a roughness map, in your renders everything seems to have a pretty even roughness, the lips are as shiny as the nose are as shiny as the shoulder (side note: if you're going for un makeupped realism the lips should probably be less shiny than the nose, or at least mine definitely are)

Also, I just have to say, morph shape at the corner of the mouth is rl nice. I couldnt tell you wy but sometimes details like that just speak to me

Absolutely! All praise to MIsty! Well done and Thank You! I'm always amazed at the workarounds and plugins that extend the life of Carrara!

So, after loading Janette, I applied the Victoria 7 morph, and her parameter slider appears when I click on "Genesis 3 Female". But the slider doesn't seem to do anything to the model on stage.

Am I missing a step or something?

The other morphs that appear under Genesis 3 Female seem to work as expected. These include limb/skeletal movements, facial morphs, phonemes, etc.

 

Did you click on Actor then Parameters ?, is the step I followed to get V7 to work.

Thanks for the reply (and the compliment above - high praise from someone who is wonderfully clear and concise - I don't do concise yet),

As I pull my head out of my comfort-zone sand, I get the feeling that many of these workflow alternatives and complimentary tool threads have been looking me right in the eye for a good while, but the relevance and potential were lost on me as I perused the titles. I'll go find the mentioned thread! I should just follow WendyLuvzCatz around if I want to know what's going on...

That's actually a viable strategy... I'm going to wait for @WendyLuvzCatz to figure out UE5 and then just do what they do :)

But the workflow was extremely simple... Alembic in, Alembic out, and it Just Worked(tm). The problem, like you pointed out, is that I'm not a pro, and I just don't have the time to learn everything.

I hope I didn't imply that you weren't a pro... heh. (ah language and ASCII - a fine mix).

Nice to know that Alembic works in that transfer process too. I once read that 'god is in the details' - well, as 3D world-builder, I think god needed to know these kinds of details to pull it all off before the go-live deadline.

cheers,

--ms

No, not at all... bad comma placement.

Yes, I'm having extremely consistent results with Alembic, moving between Daz, Blender, Marvelous Designer, and Houdini. It is probably literally the same library behind all four of them. Blender does a tremendous job of loading on demand; it loads a 74 gigabyte abc file just as quickly as it does a 17 megabyte one. MD did not handle large files so well, and that's why I added the SubD cage option, which is good enough for cloth sim.

So do you do terrains in something like worldbuilder?

I understood that Wendy, But its the other comments telling the Op that daz studio is not good for animation. that burns my butt.

@Ivy, a burned butt sounds painful, but is not a persuasive argument. As @mindsong pointed out, neither is the unassailable quality of your work, because it speaks more to you, than Daz Studio.

I may be mistaken, but I suspect that some of us are really debating in which tool we are most comfortable. That is the only way in which Daz Studio animation tools can be defended in a world that also has Blender, iClone, Maya, Motionbuilder, Houdini, and others that I've never used but are of good repute.

My problem is that I don't yet *know* if my favorite DS features are available in the mentioned tools that I'm migrating too. I can certainly do research, but the 'brochures' all promise the world. Trying each isn't an option - not enough time or neurons left. Trusting in local expertise and the opinions of those I respect that seem to parallel my workflow and interface tolerance (e.g. Blender isn't horrible to me) is really the best tool available to me, so here I am... So I almost have to absorb these tidbits by osmosis.

Add to that the recent spike in my DS and general DAZ Inc. frustration that has me *seeking out* alternatives from the safety of my comfort zone.

If anyone could cite one single Daz Studio animation tool, real or proposed a long time ago, that hasn't been in Blender, iClone, Maya, Motionbuilder, Houdini, or any other program for ages, and better implemented, this question would at least be worthy of debate. Just one... and then we can discuss its merits. But until that time, anyone who says that Daz Studio is not good for animation simply must be forgiven for saying so.

I wish I had an answer to that - meaning, I wish I knew all of the tools well-enough to make the comparison and render a sound opinion. Aniblocks and Puppeteer were what slurped me into DS, and both have critical flaws that I'm weary of working around, but the ideas are still 'how I think' digital animation should be.

I'd be interested in where and how you integrate Houdini into your workflow. In the same way I know when/where to use domain-specific tools Hex and Bryce in my current DAZ-based workflow, when do you pull out Houdini in your problem-solving adventures? I am ignorant about the tool, but a rough description of its strengths and best-use would probably be enlightening to a few of us. (I think this thread is an OK place to discuss - considering the original question, right?).

cheers,

--ms

(edits: typos, subtle tweaks)

There's a Daz to Houdini thread here, of which I believe you're aware. And the people in it know a lot more than me. I've only ventured beyond staring in amazement over the shoulder of a pro at the Houdini Users' Group in LA, once.

In terms of getting my head around it, Houdini is to Blender what Blender is to Daz, if you know what I mean, and so it is the tool that I go to when nothing else I have works. Since 2.83 beta is available and hair collisions are working again, it's only gotten to that point once, with a cloth sim that I couldn't get to work at all in dForce, was too costly to set up in Blender, and I couldn't pin it precisely in MD. Houdini was perfect because it was like Blender in that it is a bonafide modeling environment, and also like MD in that the cloth sim with Velum is simply magic. Someone helped me with the nodes, and I'm not sure I could have done it myself from scratch, yet.

Thanks for the reply (and the compliment above - high praise from someone who is wonderfully clear and concise - I don't do concise yet),

As I pull my head out of my comfort-zone sand, I get the feeling that many of these workflow alternatives and complimentary tool threads have been looking me right in the eye for a good while, but the relevance and potential were lost on me as I perused the titles. I'll go find the mentioned thread! I should just follow WendyLuvzCatz around if I want to know what's going on...

But the workflow was extremely simple... Alembic in, Alembic out, and it Just Worked(tm). The problem, like you pointed out, is that I'm not a pro, and I just don't have the time to learn everything.

I hope I didn't imply that you weren't a pro... heh. (ah language and ASCII - a fine mix).

Nice to know that Alembic works in that transfer process too. I once read that 'god is in the details' - well, as 3D world-builder, I think god needed to know these kinds of details to pull it all off before the go-live deadline.

cheers,

--ms

LenioTG said:

There was a thread, or part thread, on this topic fairly recently, but I don't have a link to hand. If therea re no errors then it's essentialy down to lloading and configuring the morph set up - DS doesn't store the shape data but it does need the name to appear on the slider and how the different sldiers are connected, so that they can be set and behave correctly when set. The more morphs there are installed the more there is for DS to do, and so the slower the process will be.

That's interesting, thanks.

So I could try to uninstall useless packs of morphs.

Yes, lightening the load should speed the loading.

But what is involved in that loading?

Does a faster CPU load significantly faster?
In that case, it's more a single-threaded or a multi-threaded workload?

Thank you!

It seems to be single-threaded, I'm not sure factors govern the time - quite a bit of data has to be read from disc (the fiels contain the shape chnages, even if DS doesn't keep them in memory), the property lists have to be scanned in memory, and the CPU has to process everything as it gets it - I would imagien all play a part in the time taken, given a fixed amount of data to process.

I adore how well designed animation is within Carrara. I mean - through and through. So easy to open hierarchies - even on the individual parts of the hierachy and adjust just anything individually (opening all the way) or altogether  (leave the hierarchy closed) is such a small part of it in Carrara, yet it has the power to add a lot more realism to an action. I also love the visual queues we get. An example: I have the d=shoulder selected and I really need to tweak its rotation beyond the limits a bit. Go to the Motion tab and we get a whole worksheet that's ultra-simple to understand (as opposed to trying to find the right function within a drop-down list).

I also really appreciate the whole NLA system. Thank whomever it was to trick out that system as well as they did! So many things we can use to set up the NLA clip in different ways - or even just transfer it to sequencer keyframes, which I do quite a bit. Then I have full control with the sequencer tools and graph editor. If I want to use a clip, I can just make a new one with the new results. So cool!

But that's such a tiny bit of remark on such a vast software. Everywhere we turn in Carrara there's many ways that the develpoers gave us to animate whatever it is we're looking at! Just like Antoine Clapier said (paraphrasing): Keep the high end geeky stuff under the hood of an interface that's friendly to artists and very easy to use. They've pulled that off in spades!!!

LenioTG said:

There was a thread, or part thread, on this topic fairly recently, but I don't have a link to hand. If therea re no errors then it's essentialy down to lloading and configuring the morph set up - DS doesn't store the shape data but it does need the name to appear on the slider and how the different sldiers are connected, so that they can be set and behave correctly when set. The more morphs there are installed the more there is for DS to do, and so the slower the process will be.

That's interesting, thanks.

So I could try to uninstall useless packs of morphs.

Yes, lightening the load should speed the loading.

But what is involved in that loading?

Does a faster CPU load significantly faster?
In that case, it's more a single-threaded or a multi-threaded workload?

Thank you!

A young Carrie Fisher commission: https://www.deviantart.com/tritiumcg/art/Carrie-Fisher-Head-Morph-for-G8F-843713129

There's probably quite a few incarnations of her out there but this one's free so... :)

A bunch this time, I think I'll start labeling them:

Anime Style Elf Ears: https://www.deviantart.com/tritiumcg/art/Anime-Style-Elf-Ears-Morph-for-G8F-841687931

Kristen Stewart: https://www.deviantart.com/tritiumcg/art/Kristen-Stewart-Head-and-Body-Morphs-for-G8F-841957993

Megumi (A Japanese Model) : https://www.deviantart.com/tritiumcg/art/Megumi-Head-and-Body-Morphs-for-G8F-842318536

Joanna Dark Head Morphs (2 Versions): https://www.deviantart.com/tritiumcg/art/PD-Joanna-Dark-Head-Morphs-for-G8F-843209601

Monica Stevens Head Morph: https://www.deviantart.com/tritiumcg/art/REOF-3-Monica-Stevens-Head-Morph-for-G8F-843461645

Young Carrie Fisher Head Morph: https://www.deviantart.com/tritiumcg/art/Carrie-Fisher-Head-Morph-for-G8F-843713129

LenioTG said:

There was a thread, or part thread, on this topic fairly recently, but I don't have a link to hand. If therea re no errors then it's essentialy down to lloading and configuring the morph set up - DS doesn't store the shape data but it does need the name to appear on the slider and how the different sldiers are connected, so that they can be set and behave correctly when set. The more morphs there are installed the more there is for DS to do, and so the slower the process will be.

That's interesting, thanks.

So I could try to uninstall useless packs of morphs.

Yes, lightening the load should speed the loading.

There was a thread, or part thread, on this topic fairly recently, but I don't have a link to hand. If therea re no errors then it's essentialy down to lloading and configuring the morph set up - DS doesn't store the shape data but it does need the name to appear on the slider and how the different sldiers are connected, so that they can be set and behave correctly when set. The more morphs there are installed the more there is for DS to do, and so the slower the process will be.

That's interesting, thanks.

So I could try to uninstall useless packs of morphs.

For me, personally, I do not normally make a product that strictly requires the base figure.  However, his particular look was only achieved with the base figure at a high percentage dialed in, so I did not make a second character preset without Valentino.  He just doesn't look right without it.  If you take a glance through the rest of my catalogue that has Daz O's as a base, a high percentage of them have a base morph character preset included with the main character preset that requires the Daz Original figure.

I tend to lean toward providing both, but in this case (and a few others) the end look wasn't justifiable in doing so.  For me, it's "does this work without the base?" more than a sales technique.  

Each Daz Original released will have a set of characters that are based off of the main model-it's always been that way. It's up to the PA's to decide if they want to include a base morph preset without the base model dialed in.  You may find that many people here in the forum will test out the figure and post what the end result is without the required Daz Original base model to help other people decide if they want to purchase the base with the additional character or not.  

If my sculpts look good enough that I'd use them without the base figure, I usually add in renders showing what the difference between the two looks like.  I can do a quick one of Xaviar without Valentino and post it here.

Just gave it a run through.  That worked with my G3.  Thanks.  I assume the idea will be to fix up a g3 mesh and then simply apply a morph to get any other character.  The only question I have here is the JCMs.  Do they come in with the fbx or do they need to be linked up separately?

Great! Thanks for giving it another run through.

You are correct about adding characters by applying morphs to the high poly mesh once we have done the necessary fixes. Because the character morphs also effect bone positions, not just the mesh shape, it won't by quite as easy as dialing in any character you want in Blender like you do in Daz Studio. We will need to parent the character shape to a correctly proportioned rig.

The JCMs will come in with the FBX file and will work with high poly characters. If your asking if they are linked and applied automatically when you rotate the bones, they are not.

There was a thread, or part thread, on this topic fairly recently, but I don't have a link to hand. If therea re no errors then it's essentialy down to lloading and configuring the morph set up - DS doesn't store the shape data but it does need the name to appear on the slider and how the different sldiers are connected, so that they can be set and behave correctly when set. The more morphs there are installed the more there is for DS to do, and so the slower the process will be.

EDIT: I was able to reduce loading times by 90%, and I'm posting the guide (originally on page 2) here, at the beginning of the first post.

FINAL CONSIDERATIONS ON FIGURES LOADING TIMES

Why are figures loading times important?

Your Daz3D library is installed on an SSD, so you load entire apartments in less than 10 seconds, and poses in a fraction of a second, but loading a single G8F takes an eternity? And even deleting the scene makes you want to switch to cave painting? Then you have the same problem I had, when waiting for figures to load, or for a scene to clear, used to take a huge part of my workflow.

What influences loading times?

1. The most important factor, by a long mile, is the number of the morphs you have installed. A G8 figure, indeed, has those morphs loaded all the time, and it has to build the relationship between those morphs, even if they're not currently used, and so each morph slows down both the loading and the clearing times.
   1. Morph Packages: you probably found yet another morph package for $1.99, that you've never used. Uninstall it. Many morph packages have hundreds of morphs, so they're way worse than single characters.
   2. HD morphs: I think they're worse, regarding loading times, than standard morphs.
   3. Characters: don't buy figures that are similar to other ones you already have. Most of the time t's not even worth keeping them installed for hair, dresses or tattoos that come with them.
2. CPU and RAM. They work together, so I don't know what had the biggest impact. But I have seen a 25% improvement in loading times, with a 50% improvement in CPU performance.
3. Storage. It's fundamental. Whether to navigate your content faster, to apply poses, or to load either figures or environments/props. The difference between SSD and HDD is huge. There is yet another difference between NVME and SATA SSDs, but it's not as big as the previous one.

Was I able to improve loading times?

In my tests, I've gone from 136 seconds of loading time for the basic Genesis 8 Female figure, down to 29 seconds (-79%).
I hadn't tested that, but the 136s already were with an SSD, they were surely even slower with an HDD. Probably almost double than that.
So I'd say I reduced the loading times by around 90%.

What have I changed to get that improvement?

• I have uninstalled almost 2/3 of my figures, and the vast majority of my morph packages.
  I know, it hurts a lot to let products you have bought take dust, but, if you don't desperately need them, having them installed is a huge malus for how Daz works.
  (Some people install the products they need each time they need them. That's not viable for my workflow, because I make comics with Daz, and so I need a dynamic creative process that's not compatible with browsing DIM every time I need to do anything).
• I have upgraded my PC, from a Ryzen 5 1600 with 16GB of 2400MHz RAM, to an overclocked Ryzen 5 3600 with 32GB of 3800MHz RAM.
• I have upgraded my storage first from HDD to SATA III SSD, then to an NVME SSD PCIe 3.0. They got really cheap these days, and, since once installed your library you won't touch it much, for this use cheap QLC will do the trick.

This has been a month-long experience, that has taught me a lot, and that has changed my style of purchasing: now, in order for me to buy a morph package/figure, it must be really worth it.
Here is the discussion with the whole experience, step-by-step: https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/411446/why-does-it-take-so-long-to-load-figures/p1

I hope my experience will be helpful to you!
LenioTG.

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________

Hi everyone!

I've measured how much time my Daz takes to load each figure, here are the results (in seconds, for base figure, bought character and custom ones with around 40 morphs active):

G8M
33 base
55 character
70 custom

G8F
136 base
207 character
218 custom

G3F
8 base
6 character

G3M
9 base
6 character

Genesis
3 base
3 character

My whole library is on a fast SATA III SSD (560MB/s sequential read, 33-396MB/s random).
I have a Ryzen 5 1600 and 16GB of RAM.

I have checked the log, and there are no errors.

The loading times of entire scenes without characters are crazy fast, in the order of 10 total seconds.
I guess you can imagine, then, what a huge impact loading Genesis 8 figures has on my workflow.

I have bought many G8 figures, and 3 more times G8F than G8M, so this is the value that corresponds more to the loading time. But I'd prefer to not uninstall anything, I like them all.
While I never use other generations of figures, and I have almost no characters for those.

Is there any way to speed up these loading times?
What is the bottleneck?

Thanks in advance for your help!

I wonder if having the same UVs through the generations will allow us to map transfer better from g2f-g3f.... /thoughtfulemoji

Just gave it a run through.  That worked with my G3.  Thanks.  I assume the idea will be to fix up a g3 mesh and then simply apply a morph to get any other character.  The only question I have here is the JCMs.  Do they come in with the fbx or do they need to be linked up separately?

Absolutely! All praise to MIsty! Well done and Thank You! I'm always amazed at the workarounds and plugins that extend the life of Carrara!

So, after loading Janette, I applied the Victoria 7 morph, and her parameter slider appears when I click on "Genesis 3 Female". But the slider doesn't seem to do anything to the model on stage.

Am I missing a step or something?

The other morphs that appear under Genesis 3 Female seem to work as expected. These include limb/skeletal movements, facial morphs, phonemes, etc.