DAZ Studio long Save / Load / Clear scene solutions

GLE

Hello everybody :)

Purpose of this thread is to provide a place where all the known solutions to the slow D|S will be gathered.

1. Workaround: Save your scene as a Scene Subset. This is referenced in many other threads and is useful if you have the Reality plugin installed or if you recursively generate new scenes from old ones. Workflow: Open your slow scene -> File -> Save as -> Scene Subset... -> Only select the important stuff -> File -> New -> load your saved subset -> Save as -> Scene. This will cleanse your scene and if you don't close D|S you will preserve all settings including the render pane, unless you manually set D|S to behave in non-standard ways (check Edit -> Preferences). In 4.9.3.166 and above, simply resaving the old scene might provide some benefits due to a change in how some calls are handled.

2. Better resource leverage: Remove geografted parts if you can, they take time to load. Also try to reduce the number of active morphs in your G1,2,3 characters. As a general rule, keep your scenes as light as possible: save your own presets and use them as much as you can. Delete anything not needed/not in sight for the current scene camera. Remember D|S models are monsters compared to games. You can't load a full city and expect any PC to handle it.

3. Security: It's fairly reasonable to assume D|S has a userbase too small to be target of an attack that would exploit a vulnerability, so it's reasonable to exclude the program folder (default c:\Program Files\Daz 3d ) and the user data folder (default %userprofile%\documents\DAZ 3D ) from your antivirus/security suite active protection. With Windows Defender this has a noticeable impact on scenes with lots of objects, or if you have lots of morphs. You could just exclude your library directory for a balance between performance and security. You could also setup a temporary additional library folder for your new packages. Once you determine your new content is not a threat, you may move it to your main library folder. This can be automated to various degrees via software such as FreeFileSync, but this will not be discussed here.

4. Check your hardware health. D|S is a taxing program, it requires lots of resources and particularly lots of drive space that's constantly accessed when working with your scenes. If your library or your temporary files reside on damaged drives, the performance penalty will be huge. To know where your library is: Edit -> Preferences -> Content tab -> Content Directory Manager. To know where your temporary and cache folders are: Edit -> Preferences -> lower portion of the General tab. Tools like HDDscan and CrystalDiskMark can give you a raw initial estimate on the health of your drives.

5. D|S maintenance. Uninstall and reinstall the application along with its PostGreSQL CMS (uninstall Studio, uninstall the CMS, eventually clean the registry with a reputable application, reinstall the CMS, reinstall Studio). Open D|S, open the Content Library pane, from its menu icon (top corner) select Content DB maintenance. EXPORT YOUR USER DATA and Accept. Repeat but this time select Reset Database and accept. This will dispose of all personalizations you applied to the library. Repeat again, this time checking all the remaining options.

5a. If you install new content often or in large batches you might find that compulsively repeating the following will eventually improve performance: Open D|S, open the Content Library pane, from its menu icon (top corner) select Content DB maintenance.Select Process Metadata Queue and Reimport Metadata. Click OK and set the remaining options according to your needs, but let the process run for all your library products.

5b. Move your library content. If your slowdowns only happen when you load specific items in your scenes, you might consider closing D|S and openiong your library folder. Create a new folder completely independent of the previous one (e.g. create %userprofile%\DazLib if you use %userprofile%\Documents\DAZ 3D\My Library ), move some folder from the old folder to the new one, like the My Library\data\yourproduct folder. D|S will not be happy about this. Go ahead and add your new folder to the Library (Edit -> Preferences -> Content tab -> Content Directory Manager). Repeat the procedure from point 5a. After it's done, try to load your content and accept the errors. If you moved the data subfolder, your object won't have any morphs. Close D|S, move back the folder you moved to its original location, reopen D|S, remove the folder you just added to the Content Directory Manager, redo procedure 5a and let it run to the end, reload your problematic product and enjoy your product with its morphs back in place.

6. Enable or disable data compression on your hard drives. Based on your hardware (disk speed and CPU power), enabling or disabling NTFS compression may impact your loading times. COMPRESSING OR DECOMPRESSING YOUR WHOLE LIBRARY WILL REQUIRE A LONG TIME AND TURN YOUR PC INTO A SNAIL TILL THE OPERATION IS DONE. Windows 10 includes some new Powershell commands that allow for more advanced NTFS compression algorythms; these are multithreaded and save a loto of space, but are also incompatible with older Windows versions. Reference here: https://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/d9c5f534-ac14-471f-9bf5-0d56262f0df5/new-windows-10-ntfs-compression-algorithms?forum=win10itprogeneral ; .

7. Create native format props/figures (ie: create your own new content - .duf files) out of everything you want to import instead of keeping .obj and .pz2 file formats. Thanks to Algovincian for this suggestion.

8. Don't parent Genesis+ figures to groups. Grouping and "ungrouping" takes lots of time for unknown reasons (maybe recalculating XYZ relative to the new origin, which is the group. It's a shame this process isn't multithreaded). This time is added to the time it takes for a new character to appear in the scene.

9. Get the Creator Update for Windows 10. The update will take a while, but my general D|S performance got a mild boost after applying it. Besides, there's a good host of other reasons to "always run the latest version".

This post will be updated as new solutions are provided. Please add your suggestions below.

Hope this helps

Good day to you.

algovincian

Great idea for a thread, GLE. One additional thing that I've found can be helpful is to create native format props/figures (ie: create your own new content - .duf files) out of everything you want to import. Load these native files into your finished scenes as opposed to directly importing .obj files, for example.

- Greg

 

GLE

Edited: added points 5a and 5b.