Sea Salt Hair Crashing DS --- RESOLVED!
melanie
Posts: 790
I've tried to render this hair several times on two different computers and it crashes DAZ Studio every time. It totally closes the program down and throws me out to the desktop. Has anyone else had this problem with it? This is the only hiar I've bought that does this. I can render all others. My sister bought it also and she said it crashes her DS as well. Any ideas why this happens only on this one hair?
Post edited by melanie on
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Comments
It's heavy in terms of memory requirement, and that increases with the "Sim more" and "Sim most" settings. What DS version and what are your system specs?
Go in the surface tab, scroll down until you find the PS number (it'll be the second PS option on the list) and lower to like 1 or 3 and that should do it, or keep it a little higher if you want, play around with it.
Hi Melanie :)
Sevrin is correct. This is hair is heavy on resources. As Benniewoodell has suggested, the best way to lower the resource use is to select a surface, scroll down to the pshairs and reduce the number. If the ps hairs are 3, reduce them to 1. Then add these hairs in to prhairs. So if your pr hairs were 3 before this up the count on those to 5. Substituting seems to help with memory consumption while still keeping the hair full. Also as a tip because these hairs are not like traditional hair models; there is a cap, and the hair is parented to it, so you will have to expand them in the scene tab to find the actual hair.
There is also more information in this thread, along with some youtube videos which shows some more helpful tips :)
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/380281/chevybabe-s-dforce-sbh-hair-thread#latest
It might help if each of these hair products included a preset that did this.
Oh wow, okay I didn't know about adding that number to the PR hair! I was just accepting the hair thinning a little bit without being noticeable really at all. I'll have to try this later today as I'm pretty much using only your hairs for my animated film, they dForce so beautifully :)
Thank you, Chevybabe25 for the information. I really appreciate it when the artists who create items come in and respond. Coming from the source helps a lot. I'm on a different computer right now, but later I'll give this a try when I'm on the righr computer.
You are so very welcome. Glad I could help :)
NylonGirl said:
It might help if each of these hair products included a preset that did this.
I would but this solution doesnt always work. Some computers are just not up to par, and these hairs are really heavy. In my opinion, knowledge is power. Understanding how this stuff works can give you amazing results but you have to be willing to take a chance and poke around under the hood a little. Presets will only get you so far ;)
In the meantime, I am working on ways to get future hairs lower in weight while still maintaining the details I normally have. So hopefully there will be less need to hack these hairs into something usable on older computers.
The problem with this is that PAs limit their pool of potential customers to those with experience who aren't afraid to mess around with stuff. New users are likely to find it more difficult, and a major selling point for Daz Studio and Daz assets, namely "ease of use" goes out the window. There are a lot of new users who have joined over the past year, so that's something to keep in mind.
I've been using DS for several years, but I'm far from an expert. I haven't figured out many things in it.
Okay, I just went into the program and opened the Surfaces tab, selected the hair, and I can't find anything that says PS. Am I looking in the wrong place? I'm just not seeing it there. I don't see anything in the list that starts with a P. Am I having another blonde moment?
Oops, hold on, I had the wrong thing selected. I'll be back in a moment.
Yay! Okay, that worked! I can now use this great looking hair! Thank you to all who have helped me figure this out. Thank you, Chevybabe, for great hair!
Yay!! Glad it is sorted :)
I've got some good news, and I've got some bad news, LOL
OK, my intention is to be contructive, but I do nevertheless need to raise a couple of points based upon my own experience - and before getting into the nitty gritty, your choice of hairstyles is great, which is precisely why we want to use them, and equally why we're disappointed when things don't go according to plan.
My PC Specs - Windows 7, GTX 970, 16 BG RAM, i7-2600K processor @ 3.40 GHz... so a good machine for a good number of years, but is now older and outclassed by the new computers these days i.e. I fit slap-bang in the middle of the "problem" category for using your hair.
- So i reduced PS hair entries to one in hair surfaces, giving a sort-of cave-woman look, hehehe - but it reduced the default loading time before render from over 170 minutes to around 5 minutes.
- When a single frame hair simulation was run, it took 90 minutes loading time before rendering as normal because the simulation process increases the PS levels...
...incidentally, the iRay status bar when scene was preparing said the memory load for the was around 757 MB (pretty huge for one hairdo and one normal resolution G8F)
TBC...
...Cont'd
By way of comparison, I can use dforce hair from other artists and not have nearly the same loading time e.g. 6 fully-clothed G8 figures some props and one dforce hair would have a load time of less than one hour.
I don't know if it's possible, but DAZ may have metrics to indicate what percentage of users have medium computer specs and how many have modern cutting-edge machines... if most now use the hottest machines, then by all means leave us behind - but if a lot still use medium-level computers, then there is a business case that you're losing money by selling products they cannot use.
I've got one more test render to run - reducing the PShair settings again AFTER the simulation has run and see how it turns out - I'll post my result when it's done.
Nah, not worth the effort - you start fiddling with settings after simulation and you very quickly lose the simulation results, and that defeats the entire purpose of trying to get this hairstyle into your scene.
The Sea Salt Hair, I believe is the second heaviest hair I've made. It was also the second strand based hair I made. Strand based dforce hair, at that time was pretty much brand new. So when I originally designed this one, I sent it to a friend with a potato disguised as a laptop and had her check to see if she could even render it. This is how I had to judge if it was too much. Obviously now I know a little more about ways to measure how heavy the hair is, how to reduce heaviness, hacks to maybe get it to work etc. but it has been a learning process. Thats the downfall of new tech. It's part of learning as you go.
I have also been working on ways to reduce the heft of hair out of the box and make it more old computer friendly, but it takes time. In the meantime I have been making the effort to label how heavy the hair is so that you know if 12 miilion verts is the tops you can render, then you can avoid purchasing ones that are too heavy.
FYI changing Ps hairs or points will change the hair backto the default position, but if you hit undo, your last simulation will return.
Jabba, that first render looks like that "uncombable hair" that some little children have. LOL
Having problems with this hair once again. I now can no longer find PS Hair in Surfaces when the hair is selected. I wonder if DS 4.15 has changed things in Surfaces. Chevybabe25 or anyone else who many know, is there a different way to fix this now?
I have just loaded it up and its still there. Just to make sure are you selecting the hair (2nd in drop down menu) and not the cap (top).
Daventaki is spot on. You are probably not selecting the actual hair :)
Thank you! I should have figured that out. It's been a while since I've played with this hair. I really like it and I want to use it. Thank you, Daventaki and Chevybabe25 for the reminder. I have several hair products that have the hair listed under the cap in the list. I completely forgot that. Anyway, thanks again.
You are very welcome :) Glad it is sorted!
Hi, I am having a similar issue with Madeline ponytail hair. I try to run it and it crashes DAZ, but I looked in the surfaces tab for PS tab and didn't see anything that resembled it. Thinking that this hair works differently, I loaded in sea salt hair and did the same, still not finding a PS number setting. What am i missing? Thanks.
If you mean Madeline Tails Hair, there was a problem that was resolved over a year ago, like all (or most) Hairblending products from outoftouch. It has been updated, so I suggest getting a fresh copy from your Product Library or DIM.
Sea Salt is a dForce Strand-Based Hair, Madeline Tails uses the more traditional transparency-mapped polygons and fibremesh, completely different technology.
HI, I uninstalled it, I redownloaded it and installed it. Unfortunately, it still crashed when I try to render. Any other advice?
Are you using Connect to download and install? There is a common file shared between all outoftouch hairblending products. If using Connect, another older version might be getting used. If you use DIM, there would only be one copy. Check your library(ies) for "OOT Hairblending Hair.dsf". You should only have one, from Jan 2023.