Why does Daz Studio take SO LONG to delete scene objects... sometimes?
dreamfarmer
Posts: 2,128
in The Commons
Sometimes I can delete things trivially. Sometimes, I try to delete something and it takes... twenty minutes. Or an hour. Or I come back 12 hours later and it's still hung. This happens a LOT with groups but right now I'm trying to delete a single ungrouped Genesis 8 Male. How can I avoid this?
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Comments
When it's happening, check the log; see what is causing issues.
It's in C:\Users\YOUR_NAME\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4 (or similar) and called log.txt
WARNINGS and ERRORS can delay things. See if any of those. My advice is also to clear out the file often, so you can narrow down what is happening easier - it also makes the file a lot smaller. (CTRL a to select all, then delete and save, or just delete the file.) Not sure if Daz is affected if that file gets rediculously large; maybe Richard or others will know?
Ive found that if its at all possible, its easier and alot quicker to just exit the program without saving. Not alot of help though if your trying to save a scene that youve put much effort into and havent been saving often.
Save often, especially with W10.
The associated assets (morphs, UV sets, etc.) seem to be a factor - at least with the time it takes DS to close - but I've never had such a long wait for that or for deletion.
In this case, I'm trying to remove characters from an existing scene so I can add new characters to the set (for new renders). The set itself has a lot of bits and pieces in it so saving it off as a subset and reloading it in a new file would be a pain. Not as much of a pain as waiting HOURS to delete three characters (individually). Next time I guess I'll make sure to construct the sets so they can be reloaded independently from the scene file.
What gets me is that it's really inconsistent. I've deleted stuff in, say, 20 minutes that has previously taken over an hour (before I killed and restarted the process). It's the sort of nasty trick that makes me keep banging my head into the wall because maybe THIS time, if I'm careful and invoke the right cargo cult behavior, the software will just work.
I'm not near DS at the moment, and can't check a saved file, but if it really takes 12+ hours, then wouldn't manually deleting the entries from the saved file with a text editor help? (Back it up before trying, I can't run DS now to give this a try.)
Or how about saving a Scene Subset with just the stuff you want to keep?
Can that be done, ATI?
This has been going on since before I got this computer, and happens with a friend, too, on her computer. As I said, I'll work on setting up my custom sets in the future as something I can save as a Scene Subset, but in this mess, it was going to be awkward.
I did eventually get everything I needed to delete cleared out, by very carefully going in and deleting everything parented to the model I was trying to delete (clothes, hair, claws, ears....), and saving after each deletion, and if a deletion took more than 20 minutes, killing Daz, reloading and trying again. Once everything parented was deleted, the Genesis/Precious figures in question were zapped much more quickly, although still much, much more slowly than their pants or ears or whatever. Maybe 5-10 minutes each. And yes, sometimes I can delete a fully clothed figure in 15 seconds. As I said, that unpredictable success is what kept me from being meticulous in my approach to deletion. Now that I've asked, and it's clear it's yet another random bug 80% of Daz Studio users never see, I'll just be a lot more careful in my setups.
I get the same thing occasionally. Sometimes deleting items takes more time than I have patience for (>5 minutes). Same effect with the Purge Memory script. This usually seems to happen after loading and removing many large items (memory-wise) while trying out different scenarios. Once I sort of decide, it's time to start fresh, and, well, sometimes Studio takes its sweet time cleaning up. I found that creating a new scene usually avoids that problem, but you can't tell if Studio would have had a hard time or not deleting items, since you can't do both (if one works, well, it works, if not, you start over. Either way, you won't get a chance to try the other).
It sound like it's part of the bug(s) with DAZ Studio 4.10.x really. DAZ Studio 4.10.x exaberates slowness in the viewport quite a bit compared to DAZ Stdio 4.9.x. And they slowness is also exaberated if you have fibre hair or high subD in your viewport for your models.
When you want to delete something - they this & see if it helps:
1) Change your gizmo from whatever it's set to the the 'Geometry Editor'
2) Change the tab from your 'Preview Viewport' to your 'Render Library' tab.
3) Now go to your 'Scene' tab and delete what you mean to delete.
That should make you deleting models from your scene much faster.
Theoretically it can. I'll give it a try when I'm on my DS computer. Remind me in a few days, if I forget... :D
I don't know what DS is doing behind the scenes, but I often do very large scenes and I've noticed when I first start to delete stuff, it takes a very long time (I have to go and delete small items 1 at a time) but the more I delete, the faster it gets. Also, if you save and close, then reopen and continue deleting, it goes quicker faster.
I think it's a RAM thing. When you close, the undo history is cleared so that helps delete things faster.
I don't think it has anything to do with viewport lag or memory, but the way DS handles objects changing parents. Changing the parent of a prop is very fast, but moving a human (or other figure with many bones) to a new parent takes a long time, assumably because DS deals with each bone independently. This used to be fast, but starting a few versions back (4,7, 4,8?) it became slow. Maybe this was due to a bug fix to avoid scene file corruption or something, I have no idea.
Since deletion will remove itself as a parent from anything above it, then this will also be slow when deleting complex figures.
No, RAM is definately related in some way. I have a scene with parts from all the urban futures loaded, the freebie scifi streets, the sci fi alley and pretty much all the scifi buildings from rendo. plus tons of instances for roads and lights.
If I try to delete urban future5 first, it takes forever. But if I delete it after deleting half the items in my scene, then it only takes a minute.
That doesn't prove that RAM is related, to do that you would need to take half the RAM out of your box, and see if it takes longer. What you have proved is that deleting the small stuff first is quicker, but that is down to the quirks within DS on what work is needed each time an item is removed.
Make sure you are saving things (props, characters, assets) as compressed (I had this issue about 3 years ago). Turns out, that little check had gotten 'unchecked' and 1.3MB characters were now saving as 246MB. :P
If it's DS, then the same item would take the same amount of time to delete, no matter if it's the first item or the last. The fact that an item is significantly faster to delete the more items are removed from the scene points to hardware. Maybe even a combination of RAM and CPU.
*edit*
I should put in that yes, bad coding can definately have an impact on RAM and CPU usuage. But if the program can't be optimized any further (especially after all the new stuff they've added) then the only option is to throw more harware at it.
More items also means more possible links fro DS to check as it removes the item, in a way that allows it to be restored if the action is undone (which is why closing down and restarting, where there's no need to be gentle, is sometimes faster).
But you see changing the parent vastly changes the way the object is loaded and represented in the viewport. They are related for sure.
Is it? Simply changing the parent should not alter the viewport at all (unless the new parent is a hidden group). However the system will interpret it as a "change" and likely trigger a refresh.
Already changing the parent changes the collision, smoothing, and other algoritms how they work. It's changes how hidden faces are culled. And the viewport is dependant on all that information before it can be rendered. You forget the viewport is the last operation(s) that needs to be actualized when changing a scene.
I've noticed that if I'm working with a scene from scratch I can delete stuff at will with nearly minimal wait time. Usually a few seconds. Only when I save a scene and go to work on it later I run into a "Hurry up and wait." waiting game for a model to delete. Genesis 8 seems to take the longest to purge from a scene, regardless if the model is clothed or not. Often I get the white overlay on DAZ Studio as the program goes into a "Not Responding" state while deleting something.
I'm really not seeing any sort of drain on system resources, nor any sign of a memory leak. Sometimes I can help free up the jam by resetting my GPU drivers in Windows 10. (CRTL, Left Win, Left Shift, and B).
That's not the case with me. It doesn't take long at all when adding models to a scene before DS starts to crawl...
Hello guys. I'm having the same problem specially if I have worked on a complex scene: DS takes too much time to clear it. I don't know what it's doing when clearing but it should be quicker. Almost all the applications I've worked with (including DAZ Hexagon) clear the working memory in a snap. Shouldn't it be as simple as reseting memory buffers and pointers to their original root values?
When I need to change an scene I save the current one, exit and restart DS and load the new scene. Besides, I have found out that objects, including large scenes, load quicker using drag and drop rather than the standard open file function.
I have the very same problem here. Deleting figures takes hours, even in small scenes. So annoying and time consuming. I tried everything, deleting all accessoires one by one, but it's still veeeery slow, if not hanging completely and so many times I lose all progress and had to close the program. That's very frustrating.
Have you tried the 4.11 beta. This allows objects to change parent very fast, in particular Genesis 3/8 figures that used ti take ages to swap parents. It could be when deleting it is the unparenting that is slow, rather than the delete itself.
I'm using 4.11 right now and am still having this problem. Instead of trying to give us a "work around", DAZ staff should be responding that they're going to look into it and work on it, because this problem is still persisting. I'm timing it now and 50 minutes ago I told Genesis 1 to delete (there is also scenery an a Gen8 figure in the scene, all hidden from view). Deleting pieces of clothing and Gen 1's hair took a bit of time (one prop took 10 minutes!) so it's just her in the viewport. We need an ACTUAL solution from DAZ. I'm so tired of this too.
Did anyone ever find a workaround besides saving a scene subset?
I haven't noticed this (currently 4.10 and 4.12 beta). Deleting objects, whatever it's a character with clothing and hair or a large environment, usually takes a couple of seconds. Clearing the scene when creating a New blank scene or loading another usually takes a while, but not more than a few minutes. That's on 10+ year old hardware with 8 GB RAM.
I use 4.12.0.86 / 4.12.0.85 & deleting anything takes a long time. I'm not sure if that has anything to do with my habit of making multiple groups to categorise what's in my scene or not. I've got two tickets open in fact right that that seemed to be completely unrelated problems but discovered late last week that there is something about how DAZ Studio handles groups, especially nested groups, that is really messing up DAZ Studio.