After having spent the past week to two-weeks completely nuking my Content Library and re-downloading 2TB worth of ZIP files from DAZ and GBs worth of ZIPs from Renderosity and Renderotica, I find myself now in a bit of a bind.
I’m fucking scared to actually install any characters or expressions for fear of getting right back where I was before, with G8F taking 30 goddamn minutes to fucking load in my scene.
So I’ve resigned myself to only install a few characters and then manually install additional one’s if I need them.
But this has almost completely ruined my use of Studio. I am so almost to the point of just exporting everything over to Blender or Unity/ Unreal and giving up on Studio completely.
I wonder if that’s not what DAZ’s game plan is actually. And why they released the bridges that they have. Because Studio has so many fundamental architectural flaws that they can try to polish that turd as much as they want but in the end it’s still a turd.
Compropmise with yourself. Instead of installing 500 characters, install fifty. Maybe allow for a two minute load. I’m pretty sure 50 won’t kill your timings and with 50, you can cover all the worthwhile characters. Avoid body shape morphs. Load in Bendcontrol and sickleyields 200 morph set and that’s all you’ll need. Maybe some specialty morphs from renderotica.
Avoid morph based expressions for the most part and morph based poses entirely.
Remove characters as you find yourself glancing past them over and over.
Just remember to never try to load a character onto an existing model. Save the pose, delete the existing model, load new character, load pose.
I think you mentioned trying the second library for “everything” and still had super slow load times on the bare necessities library. The trick here is to disconnect/drop the everything library from daz when not in use - so it doesn’t know to go there to find more morphs.
Morph based expressions pretty much kills 90% of the pose sets from Zeddicus have you noticed?
This weekend I’m going to see if I can load up some Zeddicus pose sets that also have dialable expressions and see if I can delete them out of data and how much that breaks stuff.
But yeah. I’m literally going over everything now with a fine tooth comb and when you have over 18,000 damn items in your library that’s a lot of fucking items!
At 6000 assets, I load G8F in two minutes. Somewhere between 6000 and 18000 there is a performance cliff. If you don’t have so many assets as Mike, you’re probably safe to download DA morphs. If you do have a ton of assets, you might have to pare some to add some.
Every Character preset you load (which are morphs), every Morph set you load (like fantasy shapes, ears, body types, age presets, teen, child morphs, old age morphs, etc.) and every dialable Expression all each have to be read from disk and parsed by the application so Daz can populate all the myriad of Parameter Dials for you when you load up a figure.
And that takes time. If you only have a couple, then it goes by so fast that you hardly notice it.
But I had literally 2,000 different G8F characters not to mention a fuck-ton of expressions and other miscellaneous morphs.
It took me 30 minutes to load G8F into my scene. And that’s with a relatively (albeit now 4 years old) I7 gaming rig with 64GB of RAM.
Save your ZIPs. Because if you ever need to go in and “uninstall” something you’ve installed, you can at least extract a file-list out of the ZIPs and use that to go in and subsequently delete the files out of /data.
SSDs help. For sure. My DAZ Library is on a 10TB hard drive because it (was) so large enough that there wasn’t an SSD big enough I could afford to put it on. But even with your library on an SSD that application still has to process every single one of those DSF and DSX files that are in /data so it can build-out the parameter dials.
It’s just real shitty architecture to load all of that all at once for each and every single figure.
Hmmm. that is troubesome. I see that for me using 4.11 the body morphs aren’t active in my vanilla run time but the expressions are from from my unmapped runtime. That seems… Odd. I shall see if I can figure out why.
But I proved (at least for me) that all Content Library data folders were being read was because I had morph dials show up in a character loaded from an almost empty Content Library where those morphs only existed on my main Library.
And the reverse is true now.
I created a new Content Library called “third party content” for all my Rendo and Rotica pieces.
Morphs for those characters that are in that third-party library show up when I load my main G8 characters.
Interesting. I don’t doubt this is true. DAZ studio isn’t always a very consistent piece of software. I am sorry I can’t help with this. If I come up with an answer, I will let you know.
