G2 performance in car files
mikael-aronsson
Posts: 566
Hi!
I have managed to get around most of the odd behavior of genesis 2 in Carrara now, but I have one big problem, if I have two genesis characters in a scene with some props it takes ages to save the car file (ages=5 minutes or so), carrara dies on me sometimes so I like to save often, but when it takes 5 minutes to save it.... well it get a little annoying, is this something I have to live with or is there any clever way around it maybe that I have not thought of ?
I would prefer to use Carrara, the shading builder and shading mixer is DS is a bit messy to use, I like Carrara's materials better.
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Comments
When you first save your scene, uncheck the compress file option. It can lead to longer save time, longer load times and sometimes file corruption.
It will still take a bit to save.
Another thing that can help is a little scene housekeeping. Sometimes in the course of building a scene, you may try different objects or shaders and decide you don't want them, and delete the object or replace the shader. They're still there, contained in the scene file. Tp purge the unused items, go to Edit--> Remove Unused Masters. Under that is the option to remove unused objects and shaders, and to consolidate duplicate shaders.
Hi!
Thanks for the tips, turning of compression made a huge difference, it's down from 4-5 minutes to 30 seconds now.
And with two monitors it is pretty nice to use now, left screen is a full modeling window without any clutter.
Happy new Year
Just be careful when turning off compression...
While it can save some time when saving files, the filesize can be HUGE without compression. I have a compressed scene file that's 780MB, but uncompressed it's 2.3GB, almost 3 times the size.
Thanks for the heads up. Really important consideration. Do you mind if I ask approximately how much stuff, and what kind, the scene had? Was it just one or two genesis figures and a bunch of primitives? Or, did it have a lot of plant replicators, cloud domes, a half-dozen figures, etc.?
Also, was it saved internally or locally?
Aside from load times, the other big issue can be file corruption of compressed files. A bug that bites both Mac users and Windows users occasionally.
What type of file corruption are you seeing?
I use the middle radio button ("use local settings" when I save the car file) so not sure what it does.
Naturally this is all anecdotal, and some of this stuff I have read in the "new" forums and some in the old forums, which are long gone.
I haven't had a corruption in ages, but I don't compress anymore. The issues I had would be that the file would apparently save normally and the next time I went to open it, I would either have Carrara chugging away forever or I would get an error message about not being able to open the file.
Some people have tracked it to the compression. Sometimes you can save the corrupted file by changing the .car file extension in the file name to .zip and opening it in an unzipping program. I don't recall what worked best on the Windows side I'm afraid.
One other trick: When you quit or exit Carrara without saving the scene first, Carrara will ask you if you want to save your work. According to Fenric and a couple other posts I've read, it is best to cancel the quit operation and Save, then Exit. I'm not sure if this is just for compressed files or any file. I myself, forget this little tid-bit from time to time and fortunately it has not come back to bite me.
I recall that Fenric said that saving during the quit process can sometimes cause an unexpected end of file error or something like that.
That happend to me a few days ago (8.5 pro, win64), I closed Carrara and answered yes to save the car file and it crashed, but my file was ok and I could open it again.
I use the middle radio button ("use local settings" when I save the car file) so not sure what it does.
The Save Locally option means that when you open Carrara, it looks for any image maps in the location from which they were originally loaded from. If you move them, then Carrara will ask you to find them.
Saving internally saves all the image maps in the scene file, but you should be extremely careful with this option if the scene uses a lot of image maps. Carrara saves the image maps internally as 32 bit uncompressed tiff files if I recall correctly. Even jpegs and .gifs are upconverted to the lossless format, thus increasing the file size. It increases load times, overhead and file size. The advantage is portability. You can save a scene internally, throw it on a thumb drive and take it to another computer. If you use the network render nodes, you do not have to save internally, locally works just as well.
Saving Externally can be a huge PITA. If you are making something like a model, and you want to put it into one file structure for later distribution, then it's great. If you're building a scene as you describe, it would take forever and a day with the initial save process. What happens is that Carrara will go through every shader in the scene and ask you to save it. Unfortunately, each time it asks, it throws in the default name, and doesn't change it for the next one. You can type in your own name of course, but if you have eighty master shaders in a scene, well you can see how long it will take.
Geometry is stored in the scene no matter the option. That's why the Remove Unused Masters command is such an important bit of scene housekeeping.
Thank goodness for that!
All those suggestions are just that. If you don't follow one of them, it doesn't mean you will have a problem, it just means these are things I have read over the years that myself and other users have done to solve or prevent issues. Your mileage may vary.
Happy Rendering!
Carrara Compression:
Carrara is using a very old and out of date copy of ZLib for compression, and tends to corrupt the last block in the file by writing out more bytes than there actually were. If you un-compress it using something that can handle zlib files (like WinZip or 7-zip), you can often rescue the file because the extra crap in the last block is just that - crap. The compression is slow and really isn't all that spectacular - you're better off using filesystem compression (available on both Mac and Windows these days) if you need the space.
Saving while exiting:
Carrara doesn't flush and close the file properly, and so you can end up loosing information off the tail end of the file. These usually can't easily be rescued, because the data is lost entirely and the file is no longer valid from Carrara's point of view.
from NativeFileFormat.mcx:
deflate 1.2.3 Copyright 1995-2005 Jean-loup Gailly
zlib 1.2.3 has a considerable number of known bugs: http://www.zlib.net/
Thanks again Fenric!
Wow, interesting about the compression....in all my years of using Carrara I don't think I've ever seen a compression problem. Unless it might cause the file contents to get corrupted. I do notice on occasion that, for example, my character's morphs might get distorted for no apparent reason. The parameter dials are correct, but the mesh itself is distorted, as if the dial was set differently, or even some distortion that seems unrelated to the dials.
Is it possible that the compression issues could affect the actual guts of the file contents?
And while we're on the subject, has anyone else seen what I'm describing? Unfortunately I can't come up with reproducible steps, it just seems to happen occasionally.
Just recently I opened a character I had created and saved to my browser ages ago. I used a canned pose for it and had the deflated shoulder problem, despite choosing not to disable limits. I always leave limits enabled to avoid such problems. Other than that, everything has worked as expected.
Okay, thanks to Evil and Fenric, my longstanding practice over many years of using Carrara is officially changed. I'm turning compression off when saving files, and instead using the Windows compression on those folders that have scene files. Not only do files open and save a lot quicker, but editing them is a little easier when I need to change Runtime path references.
Yeah, the files are 3x the size of the compressed ones, but Windows file compression should help that. Though I haven't experimented with exactly how much the Windows compression gets you.
Anyway, thanks for the tip. In all these years I just assumed compression was the way to go.
Okay, I just did a test with a 2.2GB uncompressed .car file, and Windows compression knocks that down to about 70% of the compressed size. I think Carrara's compression knocked it down to about 30%. Well, not quite as good, but okay I guess.