Where the bleep did my tweaked textures go?
andya_b341b7c5f5
Posts: 694
DS 4.8 has taken the huff and thrown it's toys out of the pram for some reason. I offer the following as a warning to others.
I spent a considerable amount of time making changes to image textures used on a character skin, including using the layered image editor, then saved the character as a scene subset. I have just reloaded the character from the scene subset and these textures are now all broken. DS is referring to JPG files in a temp location, and these files don't exist anymore! Thank you so much, you .....
Now, had I known DS might take it into it's head to behave like a spoilt brat then I would have made the same alterations in a more permanent way. But since I thought - silly me! - that saving a scene subset actually, you know, saved it, image textures and all, so I didn't do that. And now I look, there is no save option within the layered image editor, which might suggest you won't need to save the updated image externally.
Unfortunately, I have done quite a lot of this recently, and have a number of scene subsets which I suspect will now need to be rebuilt in that respect.
So, be warned - if you are making changes to image textures using DS built-in tools, don't rely on DS to save them for you, even if you ask nicely. If anyone can tell me how to get DS to save these types of changes along with the scene subset, I'll be grateful. Otherwise, it may be a case of finding the temp file(s) and save them somewhere safe as soon as you are happy with the changes you have made.
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Please open a suport ticket, attaching one or two of the bad files and noting the content used.
One thing that may be worth checking - were the modified textures in a content directory or in a folder outside your content directories?
I've noticed as well that layered images are saved in the users/[user]/app data/roaming/daz 3d/studio4/temp directory which doesn't make any sense to me either. I would think that textures (especially altered textures) should be saved in the documents folder with the users scenes and such.
Luckily when I updated to win10, I had copied my entire user folder so when I went to load old scenes and it complained it couldn't find the textures, I was able to browse the copied folder and find them again. If I hadn't, all my old scenes would have been done.
I'm now going to make it a point to save all the temp textures to my documents folder just in case.
There seems to be a couple of misunderstandings here,,,
First, LIE does not 'save' the images. It keep them in temporary locations, but no, it doesn't 'save' them. That's a feature that's been wanted for a long time (the option to 'flatten' or save them as composite images). There are ways of making LIE presets that will load the overlays from a defined content location.
Second is that saving things as a scene subset is the way to 'preserve' everything exactly. Saving as the proper asset (LIE preset, material preset, etc) is the only surefire way to make sure that everything is 'preserved'...then, once the correct assets are saved, saving as a scene subset should not have any problems replicating it, but without making it an asset first, all bets are off.
After you are done with making LIE layers, click on the image box in the surface tab and select "Browse.." DS should open its temp folder where it stores the images and you can copy/paste combined ones (they will be renamed into something like "d22.png") from there.
This x2. Saving LIE presets [in 4.6 at least] does NOT save the images. The references are to the temp folder which of course the OS overwrites when/as required it feels like it.
And as Ben98120000 pointed out the format that LIE writes is .png not .jpg so if your images really where written as .jpg something is very wrong with your set-up.
The point of LIE is to save a list of layers, so that you don't need to clutter up your HD with the (big) modified imaeg files but only the (much smaller) LIE data.
I think the point of this is, when you set up a scene and save it, you would expect everything for that scene to be perminently saved somewhere. IMO all one should need to reload a saved scene is the products used to be installed, any external images used to be in the same locationas when the scene was created. Nothing should be stored "temporarily" when you save a scene, that's the point of a save, to make a perminent copy of whatever it is you're working on.
The LIE thing isn't that big a deal if you know it's only saving to a temp folder, but with computers being around for like 20 years now and every software ever made for the computer perminently saving your work when you click save, people expect things to work that way.
*edit*
actually, I think external images should be saved to a folder in your documents/daz folder where your scenes and subsets and such are saved. I don't see why DS can't save pointers to the images used in LIE and reload them from the original rather than the temp folder.
That should be happening - LIE should store the location of the image layers and recreate the composite in the temp folder.
If it is saved as LIE preset...if it is just saved as a scene subset, then the ONLY references are the temp folder links. To properly work it MUST be saved as an actual LIE preset. That should reference the ORIGINAL load location for the component layers.
Thanks for all the comments and advice.
Ex-actly, could not agree more. I thought "Don't save things in temp files if you want them to be there when you go back for them" was point 2 in the software developers catechism after "Don't use goto: it's a sign of a bad design" and "Don't expect the user to cooperate with you". It's probably been replaced with something like "Put it in the cloud" or some such these days.
mjc - I will have a look at saving LIE presets to work out what they do and don't do exactly. And make a mental note to hunt down the files in the temp folder and copy them somewhere that isn't temporary before saving the scene or subset, just in case.
Richard - I am not inclined to raise a ticket as this seems, counter intuitively, to be the intended behaviour. At least I'm not inclined to spend time putting together a thorough bug report only to be told it's a 'feature' not a bug.
Well, that sounds very like a bug - if it's still like that in the 4.9 beta it needs reporting, if it hasn't been. As far as I am aware and would expect the scene should save the LIE settings in the same way as a LIE preset.
LOL I got my first one about 33 years ago (with it's awesome 5 KB RAM ha ha ha ha) My father, who would be 85 now, worked on them 30 years before that.
The sad thing is the average 12 yo can run rings around me on any kind of IT device :-(
Cheers mjc1016. Now I know how not to lose 'em. (Edit: so often)
First computer in our house worked by using a casette tape recorder, and you had to plug it into a tv to get a monitor Can't remember whether it was a ZX80 or a ZX81.
Probably the ZX81, that was released in the UK in 1981
The only reliable way I've found to make sure everything is where you expect it to be...load the images from a permanent location (original layers), save a preset and then, use the preset before saving as scene. That way instead of the data being linked to the temp files it's linked to originals...when saved as a scene. I find this behavior is common with ALL the various save types...if it has a specific type of 'save'...then use that FIRST before saving as scene or scene subset. Whether or not it should save everything properly by using a scene/subset save doesn't really matter...in practice it's better to not count on it, because sometimes to very often it doesn't (and there can be many reasons why it won't without it being a bug...).
Mine was a 2nd hand Vic 20, had it's own plug-in tape deck but still needed a TV.
Got a new i7 last year for the same price and that's not adjusting for inflation
Edit: Back then we had a "protected" economy and imported electronics where hellishly expensive in NZ.
Anyway shouldn't hi-jack a serious conversation but couldn't help myself.
I was going by when they really started going mainstream back around windows 3.1-95 time.
I myself, started with a Tandy 16 color
I use LIE all the time and it is working with saved scenes and scene sub-sets in the latest beta, no need to save a LIE preset.
Before the latest beta it has always been 'iffy'...sometimes, but not often, it would work, but, most of the time, without doing the preset save/reload it wouldn't. I don't have the latest beta, but if it's now working that way (which from Richard's statement is the intended behavior), then it is an improvement.
Like I said use LIE all the time and it is worked properly with all the versions I have ran.
Maybe it's more dependent on system setup or something, because I basically quit doing anything other than save as a preset, because most of the time once DS was closed and the scene reloaded it was looking in the temp folder and not the original locations, but the presets always worked.
So, Richard, to be clear about this, here are the bare bones steps to reproduce the behaviour I'm seeing. Is this worth a bug report, or this what it's 'meant' to do?
1. Create a new scene. Add a primitive plane. Apply the Iray Uber Shader. In Surfaces tab, select an image for the base colour. (I made a .jpg with a blue/white gradient.) The plane shows the gradient in the viewport in texture shaded view.
2. In Surfaces, click on the image thumbnail for the base colour and select the LIE.
3. Add a new layer, set to 50% opacity, make the colour noticeably different to the base colour image of the plane. I made it bright red. Click Accept in the LIE. The plane now shows with a purple/pink gradient as you would exp.ect
4. Save the plane as a scene subset.
5. Open a new scene.
6. Add the plane scene subset to the scene from library. It shows correctly - purple/pink gradient, so you assume everything's been saved - permanently.
7. Go to Surfaces. Hover the mouse pointer over the image thumbnail. The image referred to is in a folder 'temp' under ...Users/YourName/AppData/Roaming/Daz 3D/Studio 4/ with a name in the format d[number].png.
It's the saving in the temp location that is my issue, as eventually someone or something may well decide to do a disk clean up and understandably delete anything in temp folders. In my case I have a disk cleaner utility that does this to keep a small SSD tidy.
Ah, you are misunderstanding the process - that image in the Temp folder should be genrated by DS from the saved LIE settings when you load the file, it isn't meant to persist between sessions. So that would appear to be working correctly - I thought you meant you were getting missing file errors from DS.
I recommend to do digital imaging work with layers in Photoshop and do a clean safe of the textures and then load them to DS.
Way more possibilities in fine tuning since its dedicated made for this kind of work.
3D editing in Photoshop is possible also but don't really work nice also.
I agree that photo program is easier in some ways (you have more options in rotation and such and it's easier to move around) but in other ways it's easier to see where exactly your layer is going. Often times I'll place a layer over an image that I think is in one spot, but when the texture is applied to the object, it's in a completely different place.
So, if I understand correctly now, the issue I have had occasionally (but cannot reproduce reliably) is that the image in the temp folder is not re-created correctly, as opposed to the image in the temp folder no longer existing. Perhaps the image information is not present in the saved scene subset, or is misinterpreted. The workaround is probably to do what mjc suggests and saved the LIE preset separately.
The issue is obviously not occuring in my simplified test case. If/when I run into the same thing again in a more complicated scene then I may have something to submit as a bug report.