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SubD of 4 is absolutely huge for a genesis 3 figure. I'm sure that's eating up way more than the textures. I've never used above SubD 2 for a figure, and even that often feels like overkill.
Then again, I don't have Dale. Maybe he default loads as subD 4...just seems like a ton, unless doing an extreme closeup.
What is the difference between regular scaling and smooth scaling? Is one preferable?
I did buy it after all. Now to read the manual, etc. and try it for (reduced) size.
EDIT: I'm using it and wow! It certainly makes a difference. A scene which was borderline for my 8GB 1070 with just two characters is now reporting under 4GB with three characters. And I'm only using the 2x reduce button.
I'm not noticing a big difference in render times though - not sure why that is but I suspect it may be to do with normal maps, etc. I'll play with it some more.
Oh and the LIE baker extra feature is magic. Cuts my load times from minutes to seconds.
That's fun I have the same video board on my laptop :) I use it to work during holiydays. Good to know you managed to enter the sci-fi square in your smaller card. In case you see something looking low rez at some place, you can still Store the maps full size (in another scene not obligatory this one), and then in your low rez scene select the surfaces looking too low rez, and apply the Restore Surfaces script. That will restore only for your selected surfaces.
And if you want to share that would be nice from you!
Ouch indeed a Subd 4 is really high. I don't remember I already rendered anything with a S
When scaling an image with Daz Studio, the two functions exist. It is not documented, but I think it involves how the pixels are recalculated when scaling, it is problably more "averaged" or "smoothed" with the smooth option. I did not see differences on renders results using one option or another option, but I preferred keeping them both, because I told to myself that, even if I have not seen a case of figure where it makes the difference, users might have some scenes when smooth scaling would provide better results. Personally "simple" scaling was always ok for me. I think this is the option by default if I remember well.
Thanks a lot! And thanks so much more for reading the manual! I found someone reading manuals finally!!!!
Indeed, as you said, you can also use it to enter more characters in a scene which was initially borderline. For the render times evolution, it depends on what was the "limiting" factor for the duration. It's the combinations of lights geometries and textures. This is why, when you keep the same render hardware, the benefit in render time I saw was from 3 to 30% depending on the scene for images of around 1500x1500 px. Sometimes I could reach 50, but most of the time it varied from 3 to 30%. Note that most of the time I did not removed maps or translucency, so I guess there is a way to gain a bit more. And of course when I made fit in the video board the scenes which did not fit in before, it was a factor 7 minimum, and a factor 10 or more in general for the render speed.
One important thing if you just resized the maps is that you will probably gain render time by restarting Daz Studio before rendering.
Oh, and for the LIE baker, it was not really planned at the beginning, it is when I developped the Store script that I realized that I was going to have to bake the LIE.. And when I developped the Restore one, it became obvious that the combination of the two was also a cool LIE baker. And you're right, you gain a lot of time then when opening the scenes with LIE! Another way to gain time :)
Yes, I have been saving and restarting before rendering - that's when I realised the load time was so much quicker. I have the 3feetwolf G3F gens which match skins using LIE in the background. They always slow down loading a scene but after using your product it is much quicker to load.
Thank you for making your interface scroll! It lets me leave my monitor at its present resolution and still have access to the whole script, buttons, and all, which I appreciate! I'm just starting to use this, but I have a scene that I believe will now fit on my GPU. I'll definitely be using this in building new scenes also. So happy to have all these resources in one script!!
THIS!
A good example is 3DL.
I find 3DL highly unpredictable when trying to get 'realistic' stuff. The quality of lighting, bounce, weird interactions between light and shading... and whatever speed benefits I might gain from 3DL are often lost in much longer set up, and the inability to cleanly stop a render at 'good enough.'
This and other products offer a way to cut down stuff a lot.
Oh, and someone mentioned mouths... quick trick:
Apply Water shader to everything in the mouth for a figure. Then set refraction weight to 0 and thin shell On. This basically makes it 'clay' mouth with no maps. Save a Material preset, uncheck everything and then only check the mouth surfaces.
Find your preset and be sure to use Edit Metadata so it will appear in your Skin smart content for that figure.
Do this for each figure you typically use.
Now, any time you are working with figures with their mouths closed, you have a quick surface preset to blank out the unnecessary mouth textures.
(Ok, it's not SUPER quick, but once you've done it, it's easy from there on out)
I love this script so much. Since getting it I feel like I am always gaining on render times just because reducing the textures makes it load into rendering faster and most of the time I'm not rendering to completion anyhow. But reducing Stonemason textures can take hilariously long. I loaded up all five blocks in Urbal Sprawl 3 (as a test), then trimmed down the big textures so nothing was more than 1k. It took quite a while to execute just because there were so MANY maps to go through! Totally worth it, though, for both viewport and rendering tests.
Sorry for my late answers I was in bed with a strong fever. I'm a bit better now, so back on my computer :)
Yes I never understood why opening scene with LIE took so much time. I mean I would understand it takes more time, but often it seems longer than it should be.
Lol! Thanks for your feedback. I prefer adding scroll as soon as interfaces become to grow because this is the only way to be sure it will be ok for everybody's screens!
Well the results for render time for 3Delight are not as good as for Iray, but for scene set up it should help anyway. Good idea to add the mouth blank to the metadata!!
Yes when you have a huge amount of maps it can take long, simply because of the numbers of maps to be treated. What is interesting it this case, so that "never again you have to make the same job", is to save the whole Urban Sprawl 3 as a new scene subset, why not "Urban Sprawl 3 1K", so that you can reload it whenever you want. Thanks for the totally worth it, it is nice :)
Good to see you are feeling better. Laptop in bed the next time?
Hello!
First of all : awesome product. I totally needed something like this (I mean manual resize isn't something really feasable!).
I have a question for you :
What is the quality of the resized JPG ?
Is there any way to control it ?
Thanks!
Lol next time maybe.
Hello! Thanks for your remark. IMHO the quality of the resized jpg is good. You cannot control the quality. You can choose between a simple or smooth resize but I never observed differences. The choice between normal and smooth is made by a radio button. But you cannot choose the quality vs weight compromise as you do in photoshop. There are 4 possible resize from 1/2 to 1/16.
Reading this thread, I have 2 thoughts, .......well one....
Add some presets. I don't care how you do, just do it. lol
Before you or anyone says "it can't be done"
I'll remind you. I said iray rendering could use some presets.
After a few said it couldn't be.... -- or didn't need to be or ....or.......
Oh wait, a week later they released (maybe not really a week , but it does sound more dramatic -like a week later)
iray lights thing-a-ma-jig and it came with several PRESETS. Exactly as I described. Some quick and dirty and all they way up to- 'check in next week'
This product could use some one-click-fits-all presets.
Even the godray lights are like step 1 click this....then click this....then click this.....it's in the interface NOT in any pdf you can't find. lol
I don't want to remeber EVERY product- sub-product, little add-on in Daz.
I can't have a huge manual dumped in my head for water, air, wind effects, clones, hair mixing, pose conversion, lighting, lights, shading, tone control, bump maps, LIE, decals, materials swapping, clothing-conversion, and now memory conservation.
I spent an hour studying this manual and trying to REMEMBER a day later how it works.
Make it as easy as......
- use this SCRIPT-PRESET for help with an sluggish viewport...
- use this SCRIPT-PRESET for scenes with LOTS of characters...
- Use this SCRIPT-PRESET for lots of buildings
- use this SCRIPT-PRESET for instances and repeat/cloned objects
I don't even need to know what's cooking under the hood.
Use this SCRIPT-PRESET for a savings of 20% - heck, make up the 20% number and just reduce the textures or maps or whatever magic your script does.
Use this SCRIPT-PRESET for a savings of 60% - again who cares what the % is, just reduce some textures and maps and whatever...
Use this SCRIPT-PRESET (add a caution) 72.58% savings that will probably crap-up your renders. lol and zap the heck out of the scene.
Seriously, make a bunch in the middle and users will find their usual sweep spot within a range.
Give them a number or letter to start with so they are easy to find and recall in a list.
Let the power users (The Wills) go crazy and test stuff and benchmark and tweak.
Trust me.
This is already pretty straightforward. 'click this to reduce all textures by half'. 'click this to reduce all textures down to 1/4'. You literally don't have to do anything else unless you want to.
I understand that you would have preferred presets as you are used to have. Writing down a script has nothing comparable with saving something as a preset. It is much more complex. Now there are tens of reasons why I did not created presets such as the ones you mention. They are technical and practical.
Only the artist making the scene knows for instance, in which size the render will be, which elements can support the more texture or mesh reduction, which buildings will permanently remain behind the camera and, being here only for shadows, can totally be unmapped. For instance if using HD morphs is fundamental to his render, he would hate a script auto-reducing the subdivision of its figure. If on the front of the image, he has the close up of a face on a huge render, then he would hate that script reduces the face texture map. If he makes a scene with various camera settings, maybe some elements cannot be reduced because on one of the camera settings these elements would appear in close up. If he uses instances, he might want to keep one or two only of them visible because they are interacting with a figure or because they are the center of interest of the scene. This is why it was much more efficient to make such an interface were the artist is able to define precisely where he can make compromises, and where he does not want to.
Presets could not make the right choices, because presets ignore what is important or not for the artist, presets ignore the context and the intentions of the artist.
I have tested this script on two people who absolutely did not speak english, one of them being aged 10, and the second one "hating" technical stuff. Both of them, knowing Daz Studio, managed to get it work the way they wanted, so I really think this is easy to use. The only things I explained to them was :
"The more maps you have, the bigger are the maps, the more mesh you see (or the more it is subdivided), the slower everything is." And I translated for them what was written on the buttons. And this was done, they knew how to use it.
Otherwise to go fast, open the optimizer, and click on the first button of the first tab, then the first button of the second tab, and then on the first button of the third tab. If not enough click on the 3 next buttons of the first tab.
Thanks a lot dreamfarmer (I love this name BTW), I tried to make as simple and flexible as I could.
You tested your product with a ten year old? Are you... are you following the Evil Overlord List? Because that's a mark of greatness beyond compare. Also, as usual, great product and great documentation--not many authors bother and I want you to know that it is appreciated, most of all because of the inherent difficulty in writing technical texts in a foreign language.
Lol funny list! No, not really. He's my son and he's very interested in what I'm doing, so I show him and explain to him (so that one day he's also a PA?). He did not tested it, but he played with it (which is for me a test). For instance yesterday evening I explained to him what a UV checker map was for, and he learned to apply it and he played checking all the UVs of the outfit I'm still working on :)
Thanks a lot for this nice feedback about the optimizer :) For the documentation, the written English was not that good initially. It could be understood but the way some sentences were made sounded strange. My tester also made the corrections on my documentation...
"The more maps you have, the bigger are the maps, the more mesh you see (or the more it is subdivided), the slower everything is." And I translated for them what was written on the buttons. And this was done, they knew how to use it.
BUT! You reversed the usage of sub-divide. As I understood SCRIPTS and subdivide it ADDS DETAIL to the object. In this case, it seems you use the same terminology but do it to LESSEN DETAIL.
At any rate, you have the "Preset Scripts" load from inside in editing interface.
The opening page of your scripts shows the "scripting presets".
That's the area I'm talking about.
Otherwise to go fast, open the optimizer, and click on the first button of the first tab, then the first button of the second tab, and then on the first button of the third tab. If not enough click on the 3 next buttons of the first tab.
If the scripting format prevents you from making all that a single-click "preset", I understand.
The idea was to not deal with an interface to get a basic result going.
I see!
Well, I think the JPG compression is around 40/50% right ? Anyway, if you can't do anything, no problem at all, this tool is a must have in any case :D
For subdivision, I should have said : the "higher the subdvision level". Some elements of a scene can often perfectly accept lower subdivision levels than they have.
Indeed, I see you understood, I cannot make scripting presets with this product.
To be totally honnest I never wondered what the compression was. The goal was to have lighter scenes (from the memory point of view) with the same render quality at the end, so as soon as I saw the goal could be reached, I did not have a look at the compression. Anyway as you said, I had no control on this. Thanks for the "must have", in general I make products I need as a "user"... And with a simple Nvidia 780Ti, I really needed this one, not to go crazy too often :)....
I have a Titan X and 2 1080ti and still your tool is super useful, mainly for the preview, but also for the final render where you don't really need 20 maps at 4k most of the time :D
I was an Octane user and there everything was way faster than iRay, but Octane manages memory very badly (at least in DS), so iRay is my main render engine now.
I love Iray, but building a scene is a pita because of the very slow preparing scene process, so setting up the lights is a very tedious process due the constant swapping between the iRay preview and the texture shade preview.
Resizing all the textures in the whole scene (1/4 is enough) helps speed up this process a lot!
By the way, do you think it will ever be possible to have something that "controls" the quality of the jpgs? I do not know how the tool does it in details, so I got to ask to understand if it's something feasible, difficult or just not feasible at all, thanks!
o_O I cannot even imagine the size of the fans to keep all this cold o_O... Or maybe a swimming pool water cools system!
That's good to know that even for people with huge video cards there is an interest using the optimizer. And I agree that often, 4 K maps fill a maximum of 500 px on a render, but of course as a PA I also see that it is necessary for PAs to make such big maps. Just because we never know what will be framed by an artist on a render.
Just for the 1/4 resizing. Remember that if you stored your scene before, you can whenever you want restore any surface to its stored stated. Just in case a 1/4 image becomes too small. I always wonder how many people have remarked the Store and Restore stuff, or if everybody has rushed to the Optimizer.. Lol..
Fans are pretty quiet to be honest :)
I'm a huge fan of big maps, but mainly because I love to render small details (and we put a lot of effort on details!)
Yes, I always use the Store/Restore function ... I just messed up during the making of one image, but I edited the Restore file and everything went smooth :D
The Store scripts satisfy my compulsive need to preserve everything. It's right there with Optimize on my Custom Actions menu.
Oh I know about your effort on details. I enjoy what you do, I have used several of your products in the promo images of my products, because they really have a "style" and I always know I'll have no issues with them!
Cool for the Store and Restore :)
Lol... We are many to have this compulsive need... Maybe it is contagious !!! OK great to know you are of the ones who use the Store (Restore) too.
Thanks a lot! And thanks so much more for reading the manual! I found someone reading manuals finally!!!!
As I mentioned in previous posts you have made a great product, well documented and thought out.
You have also touched on a sore spot for me with DAZ.
Daz sell great products, lately very easy to use, skin, props. clothing etc.
Some worthwhile products are also sold out ot the norm such as yours.
They relate to modifying, creating and adjusting ( for want of a better expression)
In the past few months I have obtained refunds for four products that did not have read me, pdf, or anything else.
In one case when I requested help from the merchant, he advised me that he would provide me with assistance although
he was not "tech support". His answer did nothing to help, it got so bad a separate thread was started to solve the problems.
When a product requires a little bit more than "double click" to work and costs relatively more than usual, I expect a little information.
I do not expect the vendor to come to my house, but some simple instructions would be nice.
That is what is truly unique about you and your item. From the first installation and reading of instructions felt right at home.
This is how I always hoped it would be.
I thank you.
Well, I've had it a few days now and it is already becoming an essential part of my workflow. I'm going through some of my cherished saved scenes, Optimising them and saving them to a sub-folder called "SO Versions". I rarely do really close-up work so I'm quite happy with the half-sized maps. Thankfully I have not yet had the need to try the 4 or 8 options.
A couple of questions though:
1. What exactly does the Overwrite option do? Does the script check whether a scene has already been optimised? I have not used it because I'm nervous to do so. Instead, when I add something to a scene I run the script again but only select the new items.
2. Does the mesh resolution get updated automatically along with the texture maps? Or is there a way to just use the mesh tab?
Maybe I missed that information in the manual - I have a habit of reading manuals to figure out what I'm doing at that moment and skimming over the rest.
@marble "I have a habit of reading manuals to figure out what I'm doing at that moment and skimming over the rest."
I hear that.
Still and all, a great product and a well done manual. This product (and manual) have enough options that it seems (to me) that one needs to work with it a bit to understand everything it can do, and the optionns available. Eventhough one can get a quick benefit right away.