Can unused morphs be deleted or turned off in DAZ Studio?
ColemanRugh
Posts: 511
Hi all,
I'm trying out DAZ Studio. I'd like to make scenes for graphic stories and often would have 3 to 8 fully clothed characters in a scene. I'd like to be able to either delete or turn off unused morphs ( in the Genesis figure, clothes and hair ) to avoid massive memory bloating.
Is this possible in DAZ Studio and Genesis figures?
Thanks!
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As I understand it (and I could be wrong) Daz Studio doesn't actually load a morph into memory until you set it to something other than 0.
At least I think I remember someone explaining that to me once before.
Depending on your system, 3 fully clothed Genesis figures should be possible. My machine struggles when I get above 5, but there are ways to cut down (making and loading reduced resolution copies of the skin textures, for one.)
As DaWaterRat pointed out, there are ways to reduce the demands on RAM. Moving the Sub Division Dial to one, or zero if it looks OK there for the item. Reducing the size of the mat files (there just images), form whatever to say half (4000x4000 to 2000x2000, 4096x4096 to 2048x2048, etc). Both high poly counts, and large mat image files consume RAM.
Unfortunately, if your doing close-ups of the figures face, or very large renders, these methods do compromise the overall quality. at best it is a "Stop-Gap" measure till you can get a computer with allot more RAM.
I started out last year with XP 32bit and 3GB of ram. I could load a figure, minimal cloths, and sometimes hair, sometimes the hair would end it (Blue screen). I got window 7 64bit with 16GB of ram, and "O" what a difference. I could have fun with three fully clothed figures with hair, and a background scene. I just recently got another 16GB for 32GB total RAM, and it's almost like being free to do what I want without worry. I've still hit a few boundaries when trying to do small crowds, tho smaller scenes are only limited by how well the graphics card can make the view-field flow. And to be honest, maxed out in this computer for RAM, I still want more. 128GB in a PC is just not here soon enough for CG, I wanted it last year. With the flood of HD figures, I'm now thinking 512GB minimum RAM (1TB preferred).
That's just me tho. We do what we can, with what we got.
When I have faced this issue, which is often, as I have only 8GB in my machine, then the best solution is to finish posing some charaters, particularly background characters, and then convert the characters to props. This reduces the memory requirement of a typical fully dressed Genesis character from about 1GB to 200MB or so. Best to have that character saved as a separate sub scene, so that if you do need to change the pose for any reason, you can always delete the character prop, reload the character, change the pose, and then convert back into a prop again.
You can still change any surface settings relating to the character and/or their clothing, and they render the same way, you just can not change the pose. This is the best way I find of handling scenes with multiple characters when you have memory issues.
My system can handle 3 fine but, as others have said, it gets really bogged down with more than that. Hiding things in the scene lowers the resource costs a lot, so if you're just using them for background you can pose the figures and toggle visible until you're ready to render. I did that recently with a spy render with some knocked out henchies in the background.
Even doing that, this was the limit with 32GB of Ram...
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/773535/
It's just so many different mats, figures, etc. And each one has a story behind them, so not exactly something I could simply clone.
Yikes, I only have 16 GB.
Yea, I new I had problems when I went to add Lucem with her outfit, and Studio just blinked out of existence, lol.
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/37539
Rebooted, and tried adding Lisa, and the same thing happened, lol.
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/34754
So yes, Yikes.
I've yet to try to render that in 'Normal mode', I don't dare to.
Even when a morph is unused it still takes up a lot of memory, I do not know why. Everytime you add another Genesis character (this assumes the character has its own morph, and is not just dialing in other morphs) or morph pack to your runtime (ie stuff is added to morphs inside the data folder), this will further bloat the memory size of a newly loaded character . That is why someone with 10 female G2F characters, 10 G2M ones and 20 Genesis characters (say 10 female, 10 male, mix is not important), will see a Genesis character needing more memory than a G2F/G2M despite its lower poly count.
Yea, I new I had problems when I went to add Lucem with her outfit, and Studio just blinked out of existence, lol.
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/37539
Rebooted, and tried adding Lisa, and the same thing happened, lol.
http://www.daz3d.com/gallery/#images/34754
So yes, Yikes.
I've yet to try to render that in 'Normal mode', I don't dare to.
Lol, my system crashes if I have more than 2 collision targets on dynamic clothing. I really need to get 32 GB.
To answer your question, and as DaWaterRat already stated, DAZ Studio does not load morphs unless they are dialed to anything but 0.
I have built several large multi figure scenes before and the last one I did was 18 G2F girls, ALL morphed differently and by that I mean I mixed and matched many morphs per figure and when I rendered it. The image took 3 hours and 10 min to render and used about 12GB of RAM. So DAZ Studio will handle it.
When it comes to setting up your scene, the best thing you can do for yourself is to build it in parts as seperate scenes that can be loaded up as you need it with out loading everything else.
https://www.daz3d.com/gallery/images/48862
I found that setting up a scene with the main character or focal point with a camera and lights is the best way to start. I take that so far and then seperate out the lights and cameras so they can be merged in with the other characters as I set them up. I also found it best to have a copy of the set saved out with no textures so that you can load it in and place new characters with out wasting time and ram loading in textures. Having everyone seperated out as seperate scenes also makes it esier to just set up two or three people interacting with each other.
Once you have everyone set up, you can merge all the scenes into a new one and save that as its own scene if you like. I did find myself moving a few people around to better fit everyone in. The final scene took little time to save. Loading it up later to render it took my computer about 30 min but it was better then doing all the parts manually.
To make you feel better about this, my computer is 8 years old
Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 2.4Ghz
8GB RAM - VRAM was set to an additional 8GB as well as a safty net. That value was set by me, not windows.
Radeon HD58xx series
That makes a lot of sense, actually. I don't have a problem having the scene loaded with figures, it's the jerkiness when trying to use active pose. The idea of splitting up scene into sub-scenes is a great idea.
Much depends on your hardware. The Computer I set up the below scene, was 16GB Ram, a 3.4GHZ Sandy Bridge and a GTX 770. It is over 4 million polys and broke 8 GB of RAM in the viewport. (It was a stress test, and fun scene.)
At no point did the viewport become bogged down, or difficult to use.
Note that there are a couple of settings in preferences that will improve viewport performance, (video card dependent.) Preferences, Interface Tab, display optimization.
If you are limited by hardware render in layers - I've only got a piddly little system with 8GB - this scene has about 80 figures in it.
Do you know what could cause viewport lag? I have a i7 4770 @ 4.0GHz, a 780 and 16GB of RAM and my last big scene was the sci-fi jail from RO, 3 henchmen and protagonist vs antagonist in the foreground and it was really slow. Maybe I need to close Chrome, I always have like 10+ tabs open.
Do you know what could cause viewport lag? I have a i7 4770 @ 4.0GHz, a 780 and 16GB of RAM and my last big scene was the sci-fi jail from RO, 3 henchmen and protagonist vs antagonist in the foreground and it was really slow. Maybe I need to close Chrome, I always have like 10+ tabs open.Use the Viewport optimization, and that should help. (It is off by default, as it crashes some cards.)
And Chrome definitely burns up cycles, more than you would expect.
Oh baby viewport optimization! Sounds like my night is going to be stress-test central.
LOL. I'll take that bet. I'll bet you are playing with something else. LOL
LOL. I'll take that bet. I'll bet you are playing with something else. LOL
I've got 2 hands.
Thanks all for the very helpful replies and suggestions!! I really appreciate it!