Unfortunately, I now know that it was not my computer (Macbook Pro 2013) – but rather Daz 4.12.1+ incompatibility with Mac's Catalina OS that has caused serious problems working in the application for the past few months. As a result, one of my favorite applications will get shelved going forward. And that's after 15 dedicated years (May 2005) of working in Daz and buying tons and tons and tons of content on daz3d.com.

How do I know it's not my computer? Just bought a new Macbook Pro to support all my 3D work in ZBrush, Maya, Blender, etc., - 64 Gigs of RAM, 2.4 Ghz 8-core Intel Core i9, and a pretty hefty graphics card. I did not transfer over Daz from my old computer. Just content. I did a 100% fresh install; but to my complete shock, after working in Daz for a little more than 3 hours tonight, I'm having identical problems I had on my 2013 machine (on Catalina), even after a completely fresh install. Both the Beta 4.12.2.6 and 4.12.1.117 exhibit the same behavior:

• 1-2 crashes per hour.

• Extremely long lag times for loading content (e.g., one character).

• Freqeunt lags in the process of merely manipulating a character.

• When I save a file, two "Save" dialog boxes pop up overlapping each other (exactly what happened on my old computer) that both read "Filtered Save". I select one and save, and then about after 6 additional saves, Daz crashes.

• When rendering, a dialog box pops up that says I am already rendering, which is false.

• When I've been lucky enough to get past 30 minutes of working in Daz and I save an existing file, it treats it if it were a new file... "Untitled". So it's essentially "Save As" forever after that point. At times the old file I had been working on was never saved anyway. 

• From time to time, after rendering, Daz crashes. It also randomly crashes from time to time after merely saving (or trying to save) the scene I'm working on.

NONE of this happened before 4.12.1.117, or before Catalina. It's really sad because I have deadlines and Daz used be fantastic for certain parts of my workflow. I was really, really hoping this new computer would solve the problems, but it looks like I can't use Daz anymore, at least until these serious problems are solved. And that's after working with Daz for over 15 years. Really, really, really disappointed.

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

Download for a Kristen Stewart morph, a recently finished commission.

I'm probably not the first to take her on, but I hope someone finds some use for my version anyway. :)

Unfortunately, I now know that it was not my computer (Macbook Pro 2013) – but rather Daz 4.12.1+ incompatibility with Mac's Catalina OS that has caused serious problems working in the application for the past few months. As a result, one of my favorite applications will sadly get shelved going forward. And that's after 15 years (since May 2005) of working with Daz and buying tons and tons and tons of content on Daz3d.com.

How do I know it's not my computer? Just bought a new Macbook Pro to support all my 3D work in ZBrush, Maya, Blender, etc., - 64 Gigs of RAM, 2.4 Ghz 8-core Intel Core i9, and a pretty hefty graphics card. I did not transfer over Daz from my old computer. Just content. I did a 100% fresh install; but to my complete shock, after working in Daz for a little more than 3 hours tonight, I'm having identical problems I had on my 2013 machine (on Catalina), even after a completely fresh install. Both the Beta 4.12.2.6 and 4.12.1.117 exhibit the same behavior:

• 1-2 crashes per hour.

• Extremely long lag times for loading content (e.g., one character).

• Freqeunt lags in the process of merely manipualting a character.

• When I save a file, two "Save" dialog boxes pop up overlapping each other (exactly what happened on my old computer) that both read "Filtered Save". I select one and save, and then about after 6 additional saves, Daz crashes.

• When rendering, a dialog box pops up that says I am already rendering, which is false.

• When I've been lucky enough to get past 30 minutes of working in Daz and I save an existing file, it treats it if it were a new file... "Untitled". So it's essentially "Save As" forever after that point. At times the old file I had been working on was never saved anyway. 

• From time to time, after rendering, Daz crashes. It also crashes after merely saving (or trying to save) the scene I'm working on.

NONE of this happened before 4.12.1.117. It's really sad because I have deadlines and Daz used be fantastic for certain parts of my workflow. I was really, really hoping this new computer would solve the problems, but it looks like I can't use Daz anymore, at least until these serious problems are solved. And that's after working with Daz for 15 years. Really, really, really disappointed.

If you have the CC3 pipeline version ( I do not obviously) your FBX import is shape projected onto a NATIVE Iclone CC3 base avatar and I believe there are some Iclone native joint corrective morphs or something...

Unfortunately, iClone & CC3 still don't support JCMs, despite the fact that they were on the 2019 roadmap at one point (RL ran into "performance issues"). It's just vanilla skin-weighting; although, if you're a sucker for punishment, you could theoretically animate corrective morphs manually using Morph Animator. 

Is the morph meant to work for multiple poses of the coat, or is there to be a one-to-one relationship between poses and morphs?

Yes, which is why I'm trying to see if I can skip some steps because it's a lot of work going back and forth with the morphs between 2 programs. Because of the huge number of bones it's possible to reproduce the look of the morph through posing the handles alone.

Cloth sym has its own limitations like unattached geometry falling off. Let's say I have a scarf with a bunch of metal rings attached to its whole length. I can have two identically rigged scarf figures, one with ring geometry, the other without. I can then simulate the scarf with no rings in a cloth sym. I take that morph then apply it to the figure in Daz -> Adjust Rigging to Shape -> Memorize figure. I then fit the scarf with the rings on the modified figure without the rings then voila: simulated cloth with unattached geometry.

So you've added a huge number of handles to adjust the draping. And then using Marvellous Designer to refine that, after which you load the result as a morph? Is the morph meant to work for multiple poses of the coat, or is there to be a one-to-one relationship between poses and morphs?

If this is true (no reason to doubt), it'd be a great for someone to write a utility that analyzes and minimizes these morph-based meshes to *only* the vertices w deltas - kind of like a morph decimator. Would certainly help w the apparent problem.

Similarly, puppeteer presets save *all* morphs in a loaded character - whether they are used in the puppeteer session or not, which can make them quite huge, and when most of the saved data is irrelevant - as usually 95% of the relevant morph-settings are unchanged in a given session. Worse, these saved unused morph-settings actually override all existing figure morphs when applied to differently morphed figures in later sessions.

Interesting design defaults, these.

I wonder if such a utility could be written, per your description of what's going on.

--ms

I still don't see what adjusting the rigging is doing - a fitted item always takes the rigging of the item it is fitted to, that's how the system works. You may want to rerig the draped model in place of the original, rather than using a morph, though I'm not clear why the morph (without changing the rigging) isn't working for you.

I adjust the rigging only on the morphed figure. In my image the first draped figure has had a morph applied to it. Then I adjusted the rigging so the bones match up with the vertices. The second draped figure has no morph meaning using posing alone one could achieve the same cloth result. But it's 900 bones, which is why I use the figure with the adjusted rigging as a base for the pose.

Here is a short video of the process: https://imgur.com/DzSbspA

Both figures are at pose zero, however because the rig of the adjusted figure is different the fitted figure will look as if posed. Neither figure has had any XYZ coordinates modified, only the Origin and End points of the bones of the adjusted figure has been modified. I need to somehow translate this Origin and End points information into XYZ translate/rotate/scale information so I can save it as a pose. Then i'll be able to get the same look without the need of a hidden figure with the adjusted rigging.

Oh dear. I wonder why empty dials would use that much RAM. Or maybe it preloads all geografts too, just in case? That would seem strange behavior. I should test all my geografts at some point before I start my great reinstall of 2020 lol. Good info to have I guess. Another person called about a job, so it seems my great install will not start next week either lol.

The size difference comes from the morph-mesh loaded with the dial, and the way the morph has originally been made.

If I were to make a morph that raised the eyebrows, I have a choice of making the morph with just with the bare mesh of the head (skin) or with the complete mesh of the figure, eyes, teeth... all included. If I did the latter, the morph would use so much more ram than doing it with just the skin of the head.

Gen 4 and older figures load these meshes as you "inject" them into you figure, but Genesis figures load everything you have installed at the time you bring your figure into the scene or when you open a previously saved scene = If you see the dial, the mesh was read into your figure, increasing the memory consumption and making it a little slower to open.

Not sure I would conclude a link between the dials and the RAM consumption directly.  When I look at the properties of the data folder for kitten it's about 76MB.  So perhaps the more appropriate conclusion is that there is a link between anatomy extras and their morphs and the RAM consumption.  (Just not sure I understand the magnitude here as compared to the character morphs.  My speculation is that these products have many more vertices and so the morph files are larger. And/or they load by default at a higher SubD?  A G8F I think has 17K vertices at base resolution.  Kitten Genitalia graft: 1.3K, Kitten Lashes: 31.5K; Kitten Torso graft: 4.5K; Kitten Legs graft: 2.2K; Kitten Head graft: 2.1K; Kitten Breast graft: 2.0K; and Kitten Arms graft at 3.4K.  These are all base values and I think they load at high resolution ie 4 times these values.  But if the graft's morphs work on the base resolution that's still a pile of deltas.  And the lashes value is very interesting.  One wouldn't want to be carrying too many redundant lashes morphs??)  Good luck with earning money.  i'll let you know how I progress.

I don't think anyone is wilfully withholding an answer to the question about third-party content, ...

Here we disagree. I think they would very much *like* to give an answer that they simply can't afford, given the limited resources available to them. Probably the right call, but be honest about it. By-and-large, this is a super-reasonable community of really smart people who can both handle the reality of trade-offs.

... but I doubt it has been tested so it's waiting on someone giving it a go.

I would counter-speculate that nobody in the dev group has been explicitly tasked to work on the ability to import native renderosity/hivewire zipfiles into the DIM or DAZCentral core. really. and I get that, but the assumption that there's already something in there to 'give a go' ... hmmm. nope. not buying it. makes no sense. I''d love to be wrong here.

Don't forget that Daz Rawb said above that DIM and Daz Central are the same base core, so I doubt this is a matter of development costs (and I'd hold out hope that cool stuff added to DC will find its way into DIM too).  ...

DIM can't natively import foreign data of any kind! Was clearly never designed to. In fact, it still cannot properly handle DAZ Bryce (tm)  or DAZ Carrara (tm) content zipfiles after 5 years! (and yes, even *this* makes sense to me, however much I don't like it).

And getting useful content and smart-data for foreign data into the DAZ database took Riverdside Art months of work and study according to his/her own product backstory. I'm sure those development costs were quite substantial to them.

Per @mrinal's salient description of the complexity of this import capability, I would disagree that development costs aren't relevant here, and a counter that it has *everything* to do with development costs, and rightly so. It may still be worth doing (for existing customers), or it may never be worth doing (for new customers) - it's a complex ROI estimation, but I can't, without some common-sense-based push-back believe the idea that it's already in the core and we just need to wait for the code to mature. Not without some substantiation (anything hint/indication all would be welcomed). The existing DIM options and natural market tensions don't align with this representation of the current situation.

Re: DIM<->DAZCentral symbiosis - I also sincerely hope the improvements in the core are bi-directional - double win for DAZ too. Based on the early returns, I'll continue to watch with a cautious eye, saving my older installers as we go.

... I think the "you" who "spoke" would eb the silent(ish) group who use the content and applications but don't post on the forums.

Are you speculating that there's a large number of silent users that have tried and really like the new DAZ Central tool, and haven't experienced any of the problems described in here?

Sounds like another beer-bet to me. A good many of the folks in this thread that have tried this new tool and had problems are some of the most DS-savvy veterans in our user-community. These are the best of the best, and many are blue-blood DAZ supporters to the core. The early returns are mixed, but it is a beta.

All I have to go on is market forces and the comments in this thread, but I know how I'll be betting.

I'm pretty sure that DIM and Daz Central won't introduce some kind of DRM - they are dealing with plain zips, albeit with a particular structure - but I wouldn't bet on  there never being a return to DRM (I get sent links to the industrial-scale warez sites that are leaching on Daz content).

I don't even know where to start on this (I sure they won't but bet they will), other than appreciating that the data-theft is a real problem to which I have no good answer.

What I want with my data (import/export/control/flexibility), is exactly what makes the data so easy to steal. I think the "grey line" will always be making it hard enough to not be easy to steal, while making it easy enough for legit customers like me to still reach our intended cross-platform data-transfer workflows and goals. It's a tough one for sure, and it's tough for everyone in all of the content and media-based industries.

There's a fascinating dynamic in the broader marketplace, where the "have's" can and do pay, and the "have-nots" filch and steal, and the "in-betweens" define the dynamics of battleground each day. Open-source, I-tunes, phone-services, DAZ free app w/paid content - all trying to establish their footings in a very very fluid context. I'm sure it will all look very different in 10 years, and yet somehow it will be the same :)

What's encouraging is the ever-rising invoice number count each day in the store, which indicates to me that many other honest and good people like us are still paying fair value for quality goods and services.

cheers,

--ms

People in big cities are really at risk.  Living out here in a remote part of NY State I haven't heard of anybody I know getting it much less dying of it, yet.(Knock on wood)  But neither have I heard of anybody getting mugged or in an automobile accident which happens a lot.  So, just because I don't witness it, doesn't mean it isn't happening.  Some people are too eager to forget that.  All it takes is one misstep or unlucky encounter.  Stay prudent.

A barber in upstate NY who was defying stay at home orders to cut hair in his shop has contracted the virus...  

Yet another Darwin Award contender.

Well unless you're in the risk group the risk of dying is pretty small, and when you get well again you're probably immune (no more worries).  The first ones they opened up for here (two weeks ago I think) were young kids in kindergartens and schools, for they don't seem to be affected much if they get infected, and so far no horror stories.

Except that people *not* in any risk groups are dying. So really, you're running the gauntlet if you get it, no matter who you are. 

There are several complicating issues:

1) we don't know if people who get sick and recover are immune and for how long

2) we don't know if people who get sick and recover are still contagious and can infect others

3) kids generally live with other people, and may not be as careful about practicing good hygiene like frequent hand washing, so even if they are less likely to become seriously ill (and we don't really know how much "less" means), they're probably more likely to transfer the virus from one family to another.  Kids could be living in the same house as their grandparents or other people who have higher risk

JCade,

Here are two Octane renders I put togehter for this thread. It's only fair that I should upload some of my own recent studies with pale skin so that you can help me to further improve. Part of what I am trying to learn to do as an artist is to figure out exactly what it is about a skin that makes us as viewers decide what the "tone" of said skin may be. Even in low light we can usually discern a pale skin from a darker one.. but how? Does a skin need to appear bright in order to appear pale? I'm the last one to know I suspect.

Here are two renders of the same face. To my eye on is more 'realistic" than the other, however both miss the mark in my view. I could appraise the issuesd with these renders but I'd rather leave the floor open for viewers to share whatever issues they observe of their own accord. Naturally, I am going for pale skin that doesnt not lose its apparent details, doesnt compete with the specular...etc. There is not a lot of visible specualr reflections on the skin simply due to the way the room generally is lit. in the first example the lighting is that of the room, but in th esecond version I have added an additional light at the position of the camera, to create a sort of "flash" effect. To me there is a loss of believeability when this light is added however i could well be biased and suffering from a selective blindness.

 

Hi Rashad, I will also offer some feedback as I use Octane as well as Iray, so I know the Octane parts too.  One on left is far more believable, you are good on the eyes.  The eyelashes are too blond or something, I think darkening would get it more real because it already looks very uniform.  The face's skin looks too perfect almost, for 2 reasons.  One, the detail is great, but the 'shape' of the mesh is very flat....maybe hit it with some more overt displacement somehow to get it contoured with bags under eyes and creases by chin and lips.  Or, in Daz just morph face shape details, if you will, because the skin looks very 'facelift'.

The second is the texture of the skin itself.  It looks good but is very surface monochrome, maybe multiply/add in a detail map of some sort to break it up with color splotches or something.  Use Path Tracing to reveal subtle SSS if you were using Direct Lighting, and maybe adjust the kernel Filter to soften it up, if you want.  Changing aperture will give a DOF effect, could obscure some of the super consistent detail.  If you're using the plugin I would try throwing it over to the standalone to mess with the settings on a universal, I find it way easier there to play with Randolm walk SSS, Metallic, coating, and sheen there...to me using the plugin interface is not as easy as the standalone, but that's just me.

Really cool, dig it.  It looks real as in photo-real, but it could be made more asset-real.  But it does look like you photograpphed a mannequin of a blond guy at some convention!  LOL

 

Hey! Thanks for looking and providing feedback! The renders are with the PMC kernel. These were made with the OR4C aka octane for Carrara. I agree 100% that the way the tools are designed in the Ds interface is very bloky and not nearly as well laid out as the tools are in the Standalone. This is one reason why I encourage all new Octane users to spend a little time with the standalone instead of only interacting with Octane through a plug in. My goal has been to get skin solved in Octane first, and then try to reproduce those results as closely as possible in Iray when the time comes.

Both renders would benefit from less aggressive settings from the height mapping...in this case normal maps. As less height would allow more specular highlights to show. The model itself is very flat as you observe, there's no HD going on here. Once I start working again in DS I'll get more into that. I dont want to derail the thread too much just wanted to show Jcade what I was hoping to demonstrate in that I personally don't have any doubts in my mind that the guy I rendered has pale skin even though the pixels themselves are not super bright and not in a way "overexposed" or burned out. Anyhow thanks for your time Notiusweb!

 

Subd is completely up to you. I don't think I've ever gone above 2.

As for hair, yeah, a few of us are struggling with getting a handle on it. I've seen what competent people can do with it, and very quickly, though. If you're using 2.83, though, you can put the character in a collection and then set that collection as the collision collection. That should vastly improve penetrations and just look more natural.

As for the irises, you could fix it in Blender, there's probably an edge loop you could slide, but I think you should really find a morph in Daz for that sort of thing... stand on the shoulders of giants, ya know?

Thank you again! Is it possible to move a model from Blender back into Daz to edit or do I have to re import a new model and restart the shading process all over again? 
Also should I make sure to import her as high res?

I actually wouldn't know... there might be a way, but I'm sure it is not easy.

But if I were you, I'd copy the blend file before the export so you can just File/Append all your materials that you worked so hard to perfect.

And there are two ways to go about choosing what resolution to export at. If you want it EXACTLY how it is in Daz, export at High Resolution, and the file will be large. If you can deal with very slight differences, convert to base resolution and apply a subdivision surface modifier once in Blender. The file will be lighter. But for one character, and one frame, I'd just export at High.

Again, thank you so so much for your mega helpful comments! I redid everything again with my first model using the second model's skin shader and spent the whole day working on hair. I'm glad to say... I'm really proud of her hair! Hah!

Woah. I like the hair, too! Congrats!

As someone who sells content for it, I'm always on the lookout for Daz figures.  I've seen my M4 clothing of old used in Zombie photo booths at carnivals, and I've seen Vicky 4's and 5's on carnival ride wrappers.  I've seen a lot of "morph from fat to thin" animations using Genesis 3 and 8 in infomercials.  And of course I've seen this:

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt6710826/

Which I watched, because it's free with Amazon Prime.  It's a low-budget B movie about a Running Man type scenario but in a VR environment with dinosaurs.  It uses a lot of Daz3d assets, especially from Herschel Hoffmeyer, but there are some others in there as well (look out for the drone and the Black Widow with the garden spider retexture).

There are a surprising number of movies from the Asylum and others of similar ilk that use Daz3d creatures and robots.  Having something I made in one is one of my lifelong dreams, because, not kidding, I love movies like this and I watch a lot of them (just saw Five Headed Shark Attack recently, for instance).

I still don't see what adjusting the rigging is doing - a fitted item always takes the rigging of the item it is fitted to, that's how the system works. You may want to rerig the draped model in place of the original, rather than using a morph, though I'm not clear why the morph (without changing the rigging) isn't working for you.

I am buying a new system at the end of the month.
I agree completely that buying a top specced beast machine to only use Daz studio, is wasteful.
I am not even installing any of the "Kiddie pool" software on my new machine.( Daz studio, Iclone etc), I will leave them on my older PC and transfer character assets ,as needed, across the network
My new PC is going to have only pro production software and windows itself will be the only "paid" software
Blender 2.8x (free alternative to Maya, Max,C4D,Modo)
Davinci Resolve (free alternative to Premier & Final cut) Davinci Fusion (free alternative Adobe After effects)
Natron compositor (free alternative to Nuke)
Krita (free alternative to Photoshop)

Good luck. LTT did a video on switching from Adobe suite to things like DaVinci. They decided the productivity cost was higher than the suibscription so they stuck with Adobe.

I have this product, I bought it years ago and I have used it before. I have made a new character in G2 female that I want to convert to G3 female and I can't find this product, I have searched in scripts, in G2 and G3 antatomy, searched in daz studio, and nothing. The readme says it should be under: DAZ 3D:Studio4:GenX2” and it's not there. I have looked in Dim and it's must be installed for I have the option to uninstall. Please help me find this . 

It's its own pane. You'll have to make that pane visible to use the program.

Thanks for the reply!  I got a new pc a while ago so I had to write in the serialnumber again to see the pane. I found the manual pdf and it worked but there's a big bug with the converted morph lol: 

 

Any ideas on how to fix this? what could be wrong? I have used this before years ago and the models didn't look like this. 

Be sure all the morphs necessary for the original character are transferred - like, the character may need Morphs++, The Girl, and Aiko.

That feature would be the main reason to purchase it for me. Please keep the thread here updated on any extra capabilities you add. Thanks for your quick and honest reply. You always have the best product support!

That is the only reason I would buy this product too - if it told you exactly what product the morph came from.

After effects CS (with video co-pilots optical flares) was used heavily for ALL of the VFX in "Galactus Rising"
But it, like C4D and the rest of Adobe CS, is installed on my OLD Mac computer which is literally in "sudden death over time"
That old Mac rendered uncompressed targas 24/7, for nearly Six years straight from C4D to make my 92 minute animated feature.
As a Sci fi nerd ,there were two things I had been loathing to give up with my AECS.
Holographic effects and Anamorphic lens flares.
I Just Discovered that I can do BOTH in the FREE version of Davinci Resolve with a node base workflow when comping the "Roy Batty" animation.
when I get my new AMD PC ,in two weeks, I am not even installing any of the "Kiddie pool" software on my new machine.( Daz studio, Iclone etc), I will leave them on my older PC and transfer character assets ,as needed, across the network
The new PC is going to have only pro production&finishing software and windows itself will be the only "paid" software Blender 2.8x (free alternative to Maya, Max,C4D,Modo)
Davinci Resolve (free alternative to Premier & Final cut) Davinci Fusion (free alternative Adobe After effects)
Natron compositor (free alternative to Nuke)
Krita (free alternative to Photoshop)

Intriguing! Taking notes....