How to move projects between machines

Stryder87

I'm running into scenarios where renders can take over 24 hours to complete (especially if I have one or more animals with LAMH applied). This pretty much means my machine is hands-off until the render is done (especially painful when it's simply a test render), so it's making me think of pulling my old server back into production as a render machine, even though it only has an i3 processor (regular renders on my main machine can take over 8 hours without anything special which strikes me as weird for a quad-core i5). I really don't know how people do 3Delight renders in 3-4 hours... blah... :shut:

My question: If I install Daz and set all my install paths the same as they are on my main machine (the one I'll be doing the work on), plus make sure that DIM and all my 3rd party items are in the same location as my main box (basically a mirror image of my work machine), what are the actual 'project' files that I would need to copy over to do the render with, and where are they located?

Also, do the project files contain pointers to the products used AND their file path, or just the products used and Daz takes care of where they are located? I ask this to see if I can avoid the special path locations to all my downloaded stuff and just let Daz put it all in it's default location on the render machine to make things easier.

I'm not using the default file locations on my main box due to HDD size constraints (when you're talking a few hundred Gigs of downloaded content, the 160Gb SDD system drive would fill up REAL fast!!) but have designated a different HDD as the datastore for purchased content.

As a side benefit from all this would mean I could continue working on a project while a test render is being done!! :lol:

Thanks.

Leana

stryder87 said:

My question: If I install Daz and set all my install paths the same as they are on my main machine (the one I'll be doing the work on), plus make sure that DIM and all my 3rd party items are in the same location as my main box (basically a mirror image of my work machine), what are the actual 'project' files that I would need to copy over to do the render with, and where are they located?
Also, do the project files contain pointers to the products used AND their file path, or just the products used and Daz takes care of where they are located?

The files should contain relative paths for everything located in one or your content directories, but doesn't care where exactly that library was. So you could have your library on C:/DAZ Content on one machine, and on D:/3D content on the other, as long as what is in the library is organized in the same way you should be ok.
Exceptions would be items not located in a content directory. For example if you added a background located in "My images", it would store the full path to it and then complain if it's not in the same place in your 2nd computer.

If everything is at the same place inside your content directories on both machines and you're using .duf scenes then just moving the scene files should be enough.
For scenes in .daz format you'd also need the corresponding "data" files on both machines.

Stryder87

Leana said:

The files should contain relative paths for everything located in one or your content directories, but doesn't care where exactly that library was. So you could have your library on C:/DAZ Content on one machine, and on D:/3D content on the other, as long as what is in the library is organized in the same way you should be ok.
Exceptions would be items not located in a content directory. For example if you added a background located in "My images", it would store the full path to it and then complain if it's not in the same place in your 2nd computer.

If everything is at the same place inside your content directories on both machines and you're using .duf scenes then just moving the scene files should be enough.
For scenes in .daz format you'd also need the corresponding "data" files on both machines.

Alright. So what it looks like is it would be easiest for me to just copy everything over and keep the same file structure (the program is 'C:\Program Files\Daz3d' and all my content is nested in 'D:\Daz3d Content', with subfolders for the DIM content, 3rd party content as well as project files (it's nice and neat that way)). This would simply mean changing the folder paths in DIM and Daz to match on both machines. Not bad. I would just have to make sure I update BOTH machines whenever I purchase something, not a problem when it's through DIM, but could be an issue with manually installed 3rd party items. However, Windows 7 has a really good 'merge folder' ability that may mean I can just recopy the entire content folder and it would only add the new items from the source machine.

Since I'm at work and can't check, what's the path to the scenes? Also, what are .duf files as opposed to .daz files? I remember seeing what I think were the scene files... there was a .duf (I think) plus something like a .jpg with the same name.

Leana

stryder87 said:

Since I'm at work and can't check, what's the path to the scenes?You can save scenes wherever you want, but I think there's a default "Scenes" folder for that in the top-level of the default DS content folder.
(I started using DS very long ago so my library structure is very different from what is now the default ^^)
Check what directory you are in when you save your scene, and copy the scene file and matching png thumbnail somewhere inside your DS content library on your second computer.

Also, what are .duf files as opposed to .daz files? I remember seeing what I think were the scene files... there was a .duf (I think) plus something like a .jpg with the same name.

.daz is the format which was used for scenes in older versions of DS. .duf is the newer format DAZ introduced in DS 4.5

Basically, the main differences are the following:
- .daz is binnary, .duf is text so you can edit it if needed
- .duf can be used to save scenes but also presets, figures, and so on. Previously there was a format for scenes and various different ones for presets.
- .daz files were tied to the version of DS it was saved in, and couldn't be used in earlier versions. That means that for example if you had DS 4.0.0.0 and a content creator provided a .daz file saved in version 4.0.0.1 then you'd have to update your DS in order to use it (newer versions were fine). With .duf you don't have the same problem (well, unless the product uses a feature you don't have in your older version of DS, of course)
- .daz and .duf handled content in poser format differently. When you use a poser format item in a scene it gets auto-converted to DS-format and the needed files are stored in the "data" folder.
.daz scenes stored only the (relative) path to those "data" files, so if one was missing when you tried to reload the scene (say, on a different computer) then you'd just get an error. That's why I said you need the scene and the corresponding data files on the second computer.
.duf will store the path to the data files but also to the original poser file, and if the data files are not present when you try to reload the scene DS will look for the poser file and recreate the needed data files if it finds them. So you only need to move the .duf file if all the content is in your library.

BlueSirius

Have you looked at doing RIB files? The free 3Delight external render will run 8 cores and you can set to export the required assets to it - there was a tutorial:

http://www.versluis.com/2014/11/how-to-render-daz-studio-scenes-without-daz-studio/

and there is another recent post on exporting the assets on the same board, which is aligned to crunching the render on another computer.