So many issues, at the end of my patience...
rodriguez1222_bda0b64bf2
Posts: 52
Ok, so this all started with the fact that on the surface DS4 is just so far superior to DS3 in so many ways that I HAD to step away from 3, learn 4, despite how much I hate the GUI layout, and get on with it...
Got 4.5 installed it. My configuration is odd mainly because I have a system with several hard drives. My content goes in G, the program is installed to F. With DS3 this worked fine, I could find everything, all was well... I couldnt simply install DS$ into C because its my SSD drive and its only 256g, while the other drives on my PC are all 1T or higher...
I started by working with GenX. As a looong time D|S user I have so many models, morphs, items, etc, that I couldnt just scrap it all and start over... I do run an online book series and do a great deal of commissioned pieces. It's how I pay my bills, insurance, buy food... all that..... so I NEED my figures to be consistent or I think my subscribers would likely lynch me....
So... Read a tutorial on what I needed to transfer morphs... hit up the links to the GenX upgrade, bought that, jumped over to Rendo, and OOPS the GenX version I bought the upgrade for no longer exists... now its a new piece of software in the Daz store... no biggie, and the folks at Daz were even kind enough to give me store credit for my screw up. No problem... I got the right version of Genx and started trying to figure out how it works...
Well, guess what... all the tuts you can find with web searches are for the older version and none of those work quite right with the last release... SO I spend a few days bashing my head against a brick wall trying to get it to work... When I say a few days I really do mean it. I work in front of my PC so when Im trying to get something done, I go at it like a bull and pretty much dont sleep until I get it down. So 48 hours of struggle, I still hadnt gotten a successful transfer...
So... I looked at the few figures I would need for my latest book, and no big deal, I could dial the characters up and with some tweaking they would look nearly identical... Ok... so I throw all the V4 morphs I have ++, elite, ethnic, think I own them all... into the genx, create individual morphs for all of them and get the trees set up so it looks close to what I have in DS3... long list of morphs but if its what I have to do then so be it...
Well... All my figures have one common theme, the V4 fitness morph... Guess what one of the ONLY morphs that wont transfer? You're right, the V4 fitness morph. No matter what I do it wont tranfer...
So I got Muscularity and Evolution (I think) becasue I saw it had a fitness morph listed.... Well, that morph is only for the male muscular/fitness look. For those that don't know, the V4 fitness morph makes V4 look like Alice or GND without the special injector.
At first I thought maybe some of the files were lost in translation or something because I was getting some odd 'duplicate ID' errors... So, I uninstalled DS4, took almost everything I could do without off of my C drive and I had enough space to install DS4. I installed everything to its default location, reset all my content directory preferences... only to discover that the Fitness morph just will NOT transfer...
So now... Im a week or so into this nightmare, living in front of DS4 27-30 hours at a stretch... and still I dont have a character I can use. My deadline is sneaking up on me and I figure Ill just load up my old models in DS4, still determined to use it. I got my content library set back up, which is a nightmare in and of itself, but that's another story...
I loaded in my first scene which took forever after having to find everything through DS4s web, lighted it, rendered... man it looks so much better with my rigs in 4 than it ever did in 3 and the render time was about 1/10 what it was in 3. Saved the scene, took a nap.
Now I get back to it, ready for my final stretch before my deadline, think I can knock out 30 scenes in the next day or two as fast as everything is working... Open up the scene and...
None of the textures came through... so opened the second scene I created... Nope no textures.... Closed and reopened, made sure all my libraries are listed right... Still no textures... not even a dialogue telling me it cant find them and where would I like it to look for them....
All this long text I've typed here... is just a defeated artist crawling back to DS3 because for whatever reason my PC just doesnt agree with DS4. I know Im not the only one. If you;re thinking.. "I havent had any problems with DS4" then you have no idea what ive gone through and for whatever reason your PC just works with it, there are tons of people that load it up and it just works... Then there are those of us that no matter how hard we struggle its one brick wall after another. Maybe its the computer, maybe it's the way we have our registry configured... Ive no idea...
Hell, I'm one of the folks that swears, absolutely swears by DS3. It never did anything wrong, I never had any problems with it, never crashed, never lost files, I could always count on booting it up and it just worked. Complete reliability.
DS4... man even the file structure seems to have pieces of files all over the place with no real rhyme or reason why they arent just in one folder. Why the heck is the GUI so cumbersome? I use Max and Maya for plenty of modeling and the GUI is simpler than with DS4. It's also funny how the Poser file directories are so nice and neat and easy to organize... but god forbid you move one daz native file somewhere other than in the folder it was installed to and the program goes into DEFCON 1 and opens the missile silos. What if I dont want my Genesis figure in c/name/docs/daz/studio/daz3d/mylibrary/too many folder/too much antiorganization/now ive lost it/oh there it is!
Well, guys, I'm just fed up... it's a shame really... awesome piece of software, and genesis is magical....
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Comments
As a side note, looked at something on a hunch... and the Textures are indeed there... but DS4 somehow saved them and scrambled them or something because they are no longer images that anything can read. Meaning they are still listed as JPG files but when I try to open them in Photoshop or even windows picture viewer it just says 'Error reading File: This is not a type of file xxx recognizes' or something similar...
Go figure, and Im not talking one texture... probably close to 30 different maps on 2 different scenes got wiped out...
That sounds more like a fault with the installation than a fault with the software. Daz doesn't use proprietary formats for images, just the standard ones we all know and love. If it won't load them into Photoshop, then it's safe to say they're corrupted and need a re-installation. If they worked previously, then I strongly advise giving your PC a thorough checkup to ensure nothing else is damaged. System tools can check for errors on PC, and no doubt there's something similar on Mac.
Maybe Im missing something but when I save a scene, it creates a duplicate image in the identical place in a different directory...
What I mean is... Lets say my model I loaded in is at g:/daz/runtime/libraries/character/whatamess, and the textures are at g:/daz/runtime/textures/whatamess. daz creates duplicates of the images at c:/users/myname/documents/daz3d/studio/mylibrary/runtime/textures/whatamess.
Now usually these textures are fine, they can be opened just as any other jpg or png or whatever the texture was saved as.
And when I open the scene again, daz is loading from these duplicate textures NOT from teh main file where the textures are... same as it doesnt load my model from its base directory but from a data file that daz creates when a scene is saved....
What happened here, Daz saved these textures, but FUBARd them all.
As far as anything wrong with my system, I wont say it's impossible because I dont believe in impossibility, but it's highly unlikely as the only thing that changed from the point I saved the files to the point where I loaded them was about 40 minutes....
This PC is a fresh install of Windows as of two weeks ago and the only thing it is used for is 3d graphics work. The install of Daz is fresh as of day before yesterday and the textures were fine before that nap...
Again, please be aware Im not knocking Daz... if anything Im a fanboy and just really depressed that I can't use DS4. For a great deal of folks it works flawlessly, but that just isnt my case.... Hell with DS3 I used it over 6 different upgrades over the 7 or 8 years Ive been using it and NEVER had problems. Well nothing game breaking beyond just plugin problems that were easily fixed. I have friends that have had these kinds of problems with DS3 and even with my extensive knowledge with that software, for whatever reason I just couldnt get their systems to a point where it was usable.
I almost want to think that maybe it just doesnt like high end computers? I mean I dont know... never had these kinds of problems before and Ive always had a system above and beyond what was readily available.
I've all but give up, even to the point that Im ready to just break down and buy Maya. Same functions available within Maya as DS4 and then some.... I just dont know at this point.
Thanks for your response.
DS shouldn't be resaving textures - all it should do is store a link to the original file. Are the originals in folders you have set up as content directories (that is, does the parent folder show under one or more of he "... Formats" headings in the Content Library)?
You don't have to use Genesis - you could use the Gen 4 figures for your established characters, using Genesis for new characters or converting the cast over piece by piece as time permits. You won't get better bends, but you should get the render speed improvements.
Yes, I found that if the folder wasnt listed in the content manager the poser format figures wouldnt load properly, so yes, they are all there.
However, Daz is indeed saving the textures. Always has, since 2.something. Even a fresh install of DS 4 with all the default settings does it.
If it's not supposed to, then I'm even more perplexed because I have just gotten used to it doing so... has been as long as Ive been using Daz
As Ive said, I would love to continue to use it, the render time is incredible and the render engine surpasses the quality in the previous version. However, I worry that I spend hours setting up a scene only to have DS4 drop textures or, hell I dunno what else could go wrong with it, but I am on something of a deadline and having to retexture everything every time I open a saved scene... Im sure you can understand how that's a game breaker for me.
The two scenes in particular that got messed up were using gen4 figures originally saved in DS3. I opened the scenes from DS3, tweaked them, saved them in two parts, background elements and foreground elements, then opened them to render the scenes, and they opened flawlessly. But when closed, then opened the second time, the textures were ruined...
You see my dilemma? Unreliability can seriously destroy the software's usability.
Use CTRL+I to Refresh images or click the small context menu under the Surfaces tab to set it to automatically refresh them. You're right that Daz caches images it's currently using but you can force it to reload the originals with a simple click of a mouse.
Yes, but the chaced copy goes in the temp folder not the documents folder as reported here. The cahced copies should also be deleted when DS closes, or on File>New.
Just tried it again to see if it was something as simple as CTRL I...
Now at least Im getting an error....
"Duplicate formulas found in files. Make sure that the content is properly installed. See the log file for more details."
How could it not be installed properly? It was installed to the default directories.
Hmmm... I actually had to save this scene to my G drive, in the content folder that is located there... dunno why that would have anything to do with it.
Now in the Surface tab, its showing the image correctly as the correct texture, but it isn't applying it to the model....
Dunno...
oh for pitty's sake.....
*facepalm*
Somehow, when I load the scene, it changes my display from 'Texture Shaded' to 'Smooth Shaded'
Its defaulting to that when loading a new scene....
My apologies... stupid...
Still doesnt explain all the other problems I am having, but at least I know its keeping the textures correct...
It is an install issue but not the sort your thinking. Some how you have ended up with duplicates of morphs. If you look at your log file right after you get the error it will show you which morphs that are causing it. I think I didn't properly uninstall a couple of things and may have just slapped new versions on top. When I finally take time to do the uninstalls for the DIM and reinstall new files that should clear up for me and until then I just ignore it and have had no issues.
If you are only just upgrading you may have the old versions of some of the earlier morph sets - reset them through your account, or download them with the DIM, and reinstall them. Note that if you have the Genesis Evolution Expressions they need to be uninstalled before installing the update or you will still get the error