A Plea to PAs
LaPartita
Posts: 406
Dear all PAs (Daz Originals included),
Thank you so much for all of the wonderful products you are producing. Your hard work and creativity really shine, and I am amazed at all that you do. I especially appreciate when you include User Guides, video tutorials, and other such helpful information. The same is true of Photoshop templates, extra high quality materials, and other such goodies.
As much as I love these goodies, though, the files can be very large, and my hard drive only has so much space. Could you please consider providing these non-essential files in a separate installation zip? That way, my owner could keep using your wonderful products without worrying that uninstalling non-essential components would break Daz. As it is, she has been returning products she loved because of how much space they take up. This makes me very sad, because I love rendering art with new and exciting products.
Sincerely,
LaPartita's Computer
P.S. PAs who know how to code (@Code66 and @Riversoft, I'm looking at you!) - consider creating a product that helps slim down the size of older products? For instance, I'm sure any product that could uninstall 3Delight materials would be an instabuy...
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Comments
Second the OP.
A product of a little office env. - 2.5GB... a couple of shaders: 3.5GB... so on and so forth...
I don't think my customers will look at my deliverables with a magnifying glass to check if they have enough details generated from 8-16K maps. I myself never render 8K work...I don't make posters... And I don't think that most of pepole make impressive renders just by using lots of "high-level" detailed 8K+ maps...their graphics cards don't agree either.... Though I'm not really short of disk space and/or VRAM but no more no less will be good enough. Pls just put those "nice to have" things into separate package(s). User may decide to install or not...
You do need to bear in mind that any product that would remove the 3DL shader files would save very little disc space, maybe just a few 10s of Kilobytes. The megabytes, or even gigabytes are normally taken up by the texture files and to a lesser extent, the dsf files stored under the data section.
A script that strips out, for example, the unwanted Genesis 3 files from G3/G8 products, in particular a hair product, would be able to save on the dsf files (these are often massive for high poly hairs with a lot of morphs), but the texture files would not be removed, as they are shared by the G3/G8 versions.
To reduce the size of the texture files you would need a script to either save these at a higher level of compression, and/or reduce the size of the files. Both of these could impact the quality of the textures in any renders, in particular if shown close up.
Of course, as a 3Delight user, my opinion is that the Iray memory limitations are already showing as products with very low resolution textures (and with only the most essential controlmaps) that I have no urge to buy. Infact I think this has been going on for quite some time and is getting worse real fast. I also find the whole philosophy behind making ultra-realism with sub-par products that furthermore have to be decimated to work with regular users' hardware to be, to say the least, counter-productive.
Yes, I happily use 16k HDRIs, 8k diffuse/basetextures, 16k 16Bit displacement maps, metal maps, specularmaps, opacitymaps, roughness maps, normal maps, SSS maps, you get the drift...
Fair enough - removing 3Delight shaders on older products was just one idea of a way to get more space on my poor hard drive! I'm sure there are plenty of more effective ways that people who actually understand how computers work can figure out. My main point is that I'm frustrated by having to install all this extra stuff that I don't need, or will only use occasionally. And even small files add up - check the size of your ReadMe folders (and why are there multiple folders for ReadMes??) if you don't believe me.
DIM zip installers max out at around 500MB so if the product is less then that, the product zip will not be split up
LaPartita's Computer ,have you thought about getting your owner to get you a external harddrive to put your DAZ content ,and other larger artsie stuff on? Might want to think about it ....
In DIM, right-click on the installed item and select "show installed files", you'll get a list of just that. It's not too hard to manually remove files you know you'll never use. Texture files usually take up the most space.
@LaPartita: Have you ever thought about manual install? It has many advantages: You only install what you really need, you always know where to find what, you don't burden your hard drive with installers and uninstallers, you don't have to deal with incorrectly installed files (unless you make mistakes yourself ;-)), and much more. I really don't know what DIM etc. should really do for me.
Yep, I do rather agree with @caravelle.
I have a history with DS extending back to 2004 when I had to install stuff manually because it was before the release of DIM, and only on rare occasions have I wished it could be done automatically. This is countered by the number of occasions I've seen people have problems with DIM or more frequently with the now superseded DAZ Central. I also compare those problems with the number of problems I see reported by people who've manually installed (can't remember any since 2019). I realise as a percentage of the user base, that the number of problems is fairly small, but it's not zero.
And most content from other market places is manual install too, so DIM seems to me to be a nudge style effort to encourage people not to use other market places. It's a legitimate sales tactic from DAZ, but not one I want to go along with, I want access to everything I'm interested in, rather than be limited to those PA's who wish to sell through DAZ.
Regards,
Richard
It's not about how to remove / delete the installed files we don't need. We know the ways... It's about how to wisely make a good product and pack the product files. Lots of people would rather just spend money to put up with "as-is" than think about potential improvement.
As for DIM, I know there're lots of old-timers started DS journey from a long time ago when there was no DIM as well as Smart Content...Then they've been always using Content Library. But to me, DIM / Smart Content are really well-designed software and plugin. They help me to save a lot of time as well as learn a lot to improve my workflow with DS.
Anyway, different strokes for different folks... it's up to one's preferences at the end of the day... as long as he/she is happy with it. Understandable and unblamable.
To my knowledge, the final packing/distribution/zip file decisions are made by the Daz folks, not the PAs. They've certainly never asked me for input, or given me a method for providing any input about it. And honestly, I wouldn't have much to say about it if they did. It seems to me that it would only increase the complexity of distributing files and wherever you add complexity, you often end up with more bugs.
I included a user guide with my car, and I plan to do so for my next product too. I feel that the ability to orient my customers to my products, and provide answers-in-advance to usage questions that I anticipate, is well worth the 5MB or so extra additional storage it takes for the pdf. And if you disagree, you are always welcome to delete the userguide from your install (if you should ever happen to purchase anything of mine).
Hardware is always evolving. If you're struggling with storage, then I'd suggest purchasing a SSD with more capacity and either moving your Daz library to it, or setting it up as a second library location, and having DIM install any new products to the new location. I had to do that for myself as well since my working folders contain vastly more data than you end up with.
I have similar issues. It would be solved if the download file size was shown in the product description. (This gives a good idea if it would fit after it unpacks.) Other marketplaces like Renderosity show it. It helps inform the buyer.
This has been suggested multiple times in other threads to no effect. It also suggests that byers might think twice about purchasing a product if it's file size is huge, which is probably why it hasn't been implemented. I can't think of any other reason.
I'd still buy huge landscapes with accompanying forests, etc. I rarely have to load all the pieces at once ...
Hair, though. I have several items that approach 1G, and one that's 1.3G ... I might not buy any more hair unless it's very cheap or I know it's old, because I doubt I can render these pieces for the foreseeable future.
If you look at the Ultra Scenery forum thread you will see a number of posters (all posts in that thread are post 2019, I believe) that have encountered issues with that product, and some of them are people that chose to install the product manually, and then moved some of the duf files to locations the US script could not find. There is no foolproof method of installing, or managing content, all have their advantages and potential pitfalls. Everyone should just use what works best for themselves.
Exactly. The store wants people to buy blind and/or waste time trying to get a refund instead of not buying the item in the first place. The logical solution is to shop elsewhere, which is what I've been doing. I'd suggest the OP do the same. It's clear that many PAs and other users here don't care about how much memory assets take up in storage.
Is there a consistent and reliable way to recognize 3DL material files?
In any case, I have a Windows app (work in progress) which can remove selected files from installed products. See attached screenshots.
You need to have the installer zips for the products to do it though. First you select the Library the products are installed to, then you select the installer zip from the installed product which you want to delete files from, in the right pane. It will then check all the files in the zip and if they are installed they will be marked green, as shown on the first screenshot. You then simply checkmark the files you want to delete (I've selected all the 3DL files here) and click "Remove Selected". After removal they will be marked yellow, which indicates that they're no longer found in the library. If you want to reinstall them you just do the same, but click "Extract Selected" instead. It does not remove any references to the deleted files though, though I don't think this is an issue in this context.
Currently it doesn't delete empty folders after removing files, an issue which is on the todo list. There is a quick fix "Remove Empty Folders" however which you can use when you have finished deleting files, but that scans the whole library and removes all empty folders there, which may cause issues for bugged software which expect certain folders which sometimes may be empty to be there so it can write files to them, without checking if they exist first. So far I haven't noticed any issues in that respect though, and it's probably a rare issue.
I also have another app which can resize selected images / textures in DAZ Installers, and either write an exact copy of the zip but with the modified images, or overwrite the modified files in the library, if they already are installed. But it is very slow as it requires a lot of processing to modify the images.
Very few of them come with rsl presets anymore. May or may not share same textures. One example I found (since PA's name starts with an "A" not singling him out) is Ansiko's "Road Trip Hippy Van" at 1GB.
Do users really need base color, glossy color, base bump, and normal map for a chrome bumper? Tom2099's shader pack has zero textures. Steering wheel? Steering column? The bottom of the vehicle?! Unless it's a DAZ requirement, not sure what the purpose would be.
Just my two cents. And yes, since I buy from other sites, I'm familar with "My Library" file structure and how to find stuff installed via DIM.
Anyway, bedtime I guess.
@LaPartita
Good luck! My hunch is they're going to circle the wagons on you. ; )
In general, the textures are taking most of the space, but textures are not shaders/materials and most of the texture-files are used for both Iray and 3DL.
The 3DL presets and their thumbnails are only a few tens of kilobytes, which makes no nevermind difference.
In addition to textures taking space, there has been a growing trend of geometry taking insane amounts of space. This can be seen when installing products manually.
Mostly the geometry related space has been used for character specific fitting morphs and it can easily be some 2-300MB's for a clothing product.