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I'm sorry but you've either downloaded and installed Beta, or 4.12 Pro General release. Entering a discussion in the beta thread suggests you're talking about beta, if you're not post in the correct place or be more specific so folks can be helpful
The general release has been out some months, and has indeed stopped supporting multiple instances; there is a fix available in beta versions.
If you haven't considered making backups of previous versions, then I would suggest requesting one via support.
Incidentally, they haven't moved you without asking, we have to specifically flag ourselves for beta, then we have to download it - then we chose to install it or not.
Apologies if I've posted in the wrong thread. I've been very very happy with Daz Studio until recently, so haven't used the forum much :)
According to the 'about screen', my version is is the 4.12.1.117 Pro Edition release. It's just hugely frustrating to have a new version of the program break far more than it fixes.
I requested a rollback from support two weeks ago. Not had an answer yet.
Thanks to everyone who's tried to help. I won't post in this thread again :p
Ah ok thanks.
FWIW, I did a quick test of 4.12.2.60 Beta against 4.12.0.86 Release. GTX980TI, 32GB RAM Win 7. Same Scene and settings in both. Single G8F, clothing, hair, HDRI, lights.
4.12.2.60 Beta 2895 MB load on 980TI, 1761 iterations, 3 Min 51 sec, 98% convergence criteria
4.12.0.86 Release 2940 MB load on card (1Chrome tab open at google search), 2251 iterations, 4 min 12.33 sec. 98% convergence criteria
No issues. Render windows closes immediately after save.
How do you get that version? Every link I tried here or elsewhere leads me to version 4.12.1.117, the broken one. The one that won't support cpu rendering at all. The one that I've updated in good faith from the install manager right as I just spent 300 bucks worth of stuff, all of which I still don't know how they look in IRAY. I am not amused.
Sorry, went on a tangent here. Anyways, how did you find 4.12.2.6 ? Since I can't roll back, I might as well try to roll forward.
PS: Forgot to mention, my card is not a Nvidia. Yeah, I'm shopping for one.
The latest public build (beta) should be available via DIM. You may need to change DIM filters to tell it to show public builds, by default I think they're hidden. And if you've never installed a beta before you need to purchase it (for free, of course) from the store first: http://www.daz3d.com/daz-studio-beta
And for the record, quite a few people use the current general release for CPU rendering...
The filter thing did the trick, now I have the beta. Actually I have both, each in a separate folder.
Nowhere near a solution though; still no iray. "preparing scene" looping infinitely, rendering giving me an empty window after 2 seconds, log files still says "No device specified or usable"
2020-05-17 14:40:40.795 WARNING: /src/pluginsource/DzIrayRender/dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend error: No device specified or usable
2020-05-17 14:40:40.795 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering with 0 device(s):
2020-05-17 14:40:40.795 Iray [INFO] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend info : Rendering...
2020-05-17 14:40:40.795 WARNING: /src/pluginsource/DzIrayRender/dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend error: No worker to render with: aborting render
2020-05-17 14:40:40.795 Iray Render error: Internal rendering error.
2020-05-17 14:40:40.867 Saved image: /Users/letoaster/Library/Application Support/DAZ 3D/Studio4 Public Build/temp/render/r.png
2020-05-17 14:40:40.869 Finished Rendering
2020-05-17 14:40:41.110 Total Rendering Time: 3.59 seconds
Running this on MacOS 10.11, on a 2008 MacPro; GPU is a Radeon 5770, so like I said, CPU render only
"r.png" turns out to be a 2kb empty file. *sigh* why can't I just go back to 4.12.0.86, it was working perfectly fine, why did you go and broke it, DAZ, why?
In the future I"ll make sure to remember to make a restoration point, that's for sure.
this sounds like an issue with this: (see attached image), Under render settings nVida Iray Advanced setttings.
Can also be CPU is unchecked btw
Just tested with CPU unchecked (and no nVidia HW), got:
2020-05-17 21:40:36.752 WARNING: /src/pluginsource/DzIrayRender/dzneuraymgr.cpp(353): Iray [ERROR] - IRAY:RENDER :: 1.0 IRAY rend error: Cannot render: found no usable devices.
2020-05-17 21:40:36.752 Iray Render error: Invalid parameters (NULL pointer).
Mine showed a maximum of 8 (for 8 cores I presume?) Tried to change the numbers, no difference. Tried to check and uncheck the boxes in every combination, hiiiiin. Tried a canvas rendering, nope.
Well, waiting for the next release....
Have the problems with DS not closing down for up to 30+ minutes preventing you from relaunching DS been solved in this version?
That basically tells me a log file full of error messages, the more errors you have the longer it takes to load, the more bogged down DS gets the slower it works, and all of that isn't doing your computer any favours either.
The morph handling system in DS4 is basically just an evolution of what we had in DS1, DS2 and DS3, sadly it's far from brilliant. It's main problem is that it reads and processes every single DSF asset file in a figures Morphs folder, and then trys to create the sliders and all of their ERC connections.
This wouldn't be an issue if every morph product was stand alone, and just needed the figures Starter Essentials installed to work cleanly. That sadly isn't the case with most of the morph based products sold here, they require other products to work cleanly, and if you don't have those other products you get error messages in the log.
This is something that needs to be sorted NOW, the way the worlds economy is going the last thing DAZ needs, is for people to be so P'd off at the long load times that they stop buying.
What else would it do? Not having the sliders for isntalled products, or having sliders but not the links to make them interact correctly, would hardly enhance usability
A lot of products have corrective morphs so that they will work nicely with other products, that doesn't mean they require them.
On obvious fix is not to install stuff you are not using. At least in the case of Daz content, when running DS thaT has been allowed to get your order history, you will be prompted to reinstalL anything that is required but not installed - so arguably the issue is "fixed".
While I have personally learned that I need to (and prefer to) have project-specific libs/runtimes in DS, I do not see this as obvious, or an official recommendation by DAZ (I know you are not DAZ) in any way. I even think it would be really embarrassing for them to agree with you, right?
Again, yours *is* a rational solution, but it's hardly obvious, if not diametrically opposed to the current easy-access/always available paradigm (and wish).
If so, that sort of reliance on a ever-present network connection, or local library of zips that are installed and uninstalled locally, based on some sort of caching scheme strikes me as a nightmare in the making on so many fronts.
Not a trivial problem to solve, but there are a lot of ways to do it badly!
--ms
Considering that the Daz Installation Manager exists in large part to make it so people can do exactly this (selectively load in/out assets on a need basis so as to keep the Daz Studio/Poser installation running as smoothly as possible) It is both officially sanctioned and fully supported by Daz.
I've never understood how it is so many people seem to overlook this fact. I remember well the days before DIM - It wasn't pretty.
Actually, with that lens, I can see that - although I've never really tasked the DIM that way - using the DIM's "export CSV" function of currently selected and grouped items you could easily create selection groups that can be saved and 'restored' later if revisiting a project. If you don't enable the 'delete after installation' function in tab-2, it's a viable paradigm.
I use DIM to install/manage plugins because of its coordination of core Program Directory resources that may not be obvious from a zipfile, but I manually manage my content zip-installs and have many topical content-dirs that kind of preclude the use of DIM for that ( e.g. separate and reorganized Runtime/Libs for Genesis1, and Micheal4, and Aiko3, and Iray shaders, and ... etc.)
Point taken, but I still don't think it's obvious - historically or currently - even the idea of multiple runtimes/content-libs isn't really generally known or encouraged - I think it sort of "happens" as people mature with the tools and are more ready for it, and to-be-sure, it's probably not a big problem for most users with a couple thousand content items (or less) in their libraries. The extreme cases always keep things interesting.
--ms
You have no idea how happy I am to hear you mention DIM's import/export CSV capabilities! Afaik you are the first person I've come across here who knows it exists - let alone what it is really useful for.
Are you aware that you can roll your own custom DIM installers? Official documentation for packages formatting is here. One of the very first things I do after acquiring/creating new content (which isn't already DIM formatted) is to package it as a DIM compatible zip file so as to ease in/out loading in the future. With some scripting you can transform ALL of your content into DIM loadable packages. Making it an extremely useful tool for keeping all things Daz related organized. To the point where I'm honestly surprised (but greatful) Daz decided to make it such an open content management platform.
In my experience most users with massive installed content libraries who suffer from extremely long content loading times are people who started with Poser or Daz Studio prior to DIM's introduction. And they simply haven't had the time/inclination to go through the potentially extremely lengthy process of breaking down potentially 10+ years/hundreds of gigabytes' worth of collected 3D assets jumbled together in one or two content/Runtime folders into custom/tweaked file versions essential to past projects, content with original installers no longer available, content that is still available, etc.
It also doesn't help that Daz hasn't exactly been on the ball during the last 4+5 years or so when it comes to promoting (much less keeping updated) existing product documentation. I'd honestly be very surprised if more than a bare handful of people here even knew before now that the DIM formatting guide linked to above exists - much less that it has been posted there for all to see for 6+ years.
heh, I've been happy for that feature a few times, but I never established it as part of my core data-mgt flow. The value is clear though. Maybe others will see this and consider the mechanism.
I'll see you and raise you one - between Riverside Art's "Content Manager" tool in the DAZ store and the Content Package Assistant (also in the store), I can totally appreciate your endorsement of the tool and paradigm. I re-work and re-wrap all of my zipfiles (which is why I never seem to render anything!), so these kinds of tools are close to my heart. I also don't run Postgres, so smart-content isn't really relevant to my context, making the packaging even easier and more forgiving for me. I hope they never make that a requirement for running/using DS.
I think you are right. It sounds like a daunting task to bring those libraries up-to-date because ... well ... it is... and a lot of that older data is creaking under its age, so working hard to assess and re-wrap cruddy meshes is hard to get excited about here... So ya, that can't be argued.
You just found another one. I'm in those docs twice a week - mostly scripting - and many times looking for non-existent hints on DS features ... but I'd never seen that page. Thanks for that and damn - I wish I'd seen that a long time ago.
Going forward, I think I understand DIM well enough to use it to pretty good effect, but probably not going to adjust my habits too much at this point, silly as they may be! :) I am going to look at that page though. Good on you for posting it!
cheers,
--ms
16 years; 2.4 TB of assets according to my Acronis '3DCG' backup (including most of the installer zips still retained as well as the runtimes and Libraries); one big DS4 My Library, one DS2 content, one DS 3 content, one Poser 4 runtime, one Poser 6 runtime, one more recent stuff Poser runtime (though I put most Poser stuff in the Poser 6 one still). It's very annoying that DS 4 won't load most of the saved scenes (often just a morphed and textured, clothed and haired SP3/D3/V4/M4 character I want to re-create with G8F/M; sometimes an actual scene when I want to know what I used for e.g. some room and contents) from the DS 2 content - had to find and reinstall the last DS3, which will load the DS2 saved scenes, then re-save scene from DS3, which DS4 WILL load. Further annoyance that usually some of the surfaces of the DS2 scene show up grey and untextured in DS3 and, after re-save, in DS4 despite having all the maps and material settings still there and applied in the surfaces pane in DS3 and 4.
Anyway, when my head is clear enough (if it ever is again for long enough) I must try to find out why the latest DS4 gets stuck 75% of the way through loading an untextured, unmorphed G8F and I have to kill it, and install this beta and see if it's the same.
Doesn't Studio come with a database? Use it to write references to all installed morphs. Then when the user loads a figure, read the whole list from the DB to populate the interface with all the sliders. Inject the morph when and only when the slider is moved. Have an option to remove the morph from the figure < configurable > minutes after the user zeroed the morph.
But wait, there's more! Have the database to crawl the library and pickup new items at all times (when Studio is open, and possibly as a user-initiated standalone background task). FreeFileSync can detect changes to terabytes of files in a few minutes, I can't understand why I need to rescan the database/process metadata queue everytime I install stuff in Studio. Also I'd like to be able to search for any speck of dust in my DB. Give me an option to index everything (file names, product names, folder names, file properties etc.). Then give me an option to filter by any number of factors (EG all files created between may 13 and june 15, in X folder of the content library, containing the word Y). Smart content is nice, but too much stuff doesn't appear there. Windows search is not adequate for this task.
DIM is not without merit, but the most user friendly way to manage content is not to trap the user in a dance of adding and removing stuff. Users want to create their monster libraries, keep adding and adding until there's no more disk space or the file system tops its limits*. You reach this goal via automation. Automation means leveraging the damn database.
An interim workaround could be a script which reads the content of a scene and creates a "working library" where only base morphs, used morphs and their subcomponents are copied. Bonus if it allowed importing new stuff from the main library (props, etc. - I know importing morphs would be useless when the figure is already in the viewport).
Having the ability to drop .zip packages directly in the content library, as many games do with addons, would:
- save time and some disk space (both by compression, which Studio already does to some extent, and by lowering the number of partially written sectors),
- make managing content a lot easier,
- I suspect might help with performance: any computer savvy one knows that reading a large file is usually less disk intensive than reading a myriad of small files.
It would be far better for DAZ if users spent their time on the DAZ Store, instead of wrestling their libraries. Also if the user knows that every addition results in a slowdown, said user will choose more wisely and might decide not to buy as many items.
Daz Studio is a nice program, but as it is, it's not scalable. If it was a mailserver, it oculd handle 30, maybe 50 users. 10000 users? forgetaboutit **
* or until your wallet is empty, but this won't impact Studio performance, if you remember about the electricity bill. If you forget to pay the bill, Studio performance will drop to 0. And good luck opening a support ticket about this strange issue.
** I know that a mailserver is not a 3D modeling application, but you get the idea. Mailservers are designed to handle huge traffic and scale pretty well. With Studio, you run in a lot of bottlenecks pretty fast (I/O, viewport lag, GPU memory, you name it)
That's essentially what it does, although it doesn't save the information in a database, or else the figure wouldn't work without the database. The morph is only injected when the slider is moved. I don't think it would make sense to remove the morph a certain amount of time after it's zeroed, as nearly all the morphs will be zeroed when the figure is loaded. You would have to make all your changes within x minutes, after which you couldn't change the facial expression or morph the figure any more.
That would be a tremendous amount of overhead. I can't imagine how much slower it would be. I doubt it would be acceptable to anyone.
That's essentially what Connect does.
What about ERC links? Theya re not necessarily in the file for the morph you are setting but could be in the other end of the link (geenrally they will be in the property that is newer/addtional).
You need to rescan because you install manually - if you installed via DIM/Connect that wouldn't be the case. How would an auto-scan know where to place a file's entries in the database? A lot of (I'd say most) third-party content already lacks metadata.
Yes, using the DB for this implies the database becomes mandatory.
About the removal of unused morphs, they would be re-injected if the slider is moved again. I'm proposing this workaround (not a real solution IMHO) mainly because Studio can take a long time to close or start a new scene, if you have many morphs installed for a figure.
Give it low priority so that when Studio or any other application needs resources, the crawler service freezes. As an example, Windows 10 does a lot of automated maintenance this way, and pauses as soon as you move the mouse.
After the initial scan, only new and removed content must be updated in the DB, and this can be doen very quickly.
Connect automates installation, but does not address the library structure and the poor performance that comes from having many small files instead of an organized database and/or a smaller collection of larger files.
It also cannot track products that are not packaged for Connect.
If you are dialing a parent morph, the child morphs remain at zero and no further action is required.
If you are dialing a child morph, Studio slould be able to read (in the child morph properties) that a parent morph needs to be injected and dialed in on-the-fly.
Does Studio need to know the complete morph hyerarchy before loading a figure? If so, this needs to change ASAP as it works against scalability.
That's the problem - how am I supposed to to use DIM/Connect with 3rd party content? DIM and Connect are nice tools, but fall short of addressing the most common user case: a library filled with modern, old and 3rd party content.
The auto scan would need to do a best effort and catalog stuff based on properties (file formats, file content if it's a .duf, file path, etc). Most items must already reside in a specific library folder to work correctly, and this can be used to tell the scanner what said item is.
Pleas forgive me if I sound like a know-it-all. That's not the case. I work in IT and that's all, i'm not a database admin. I know that SQL is a very powerful tool that can be leveraged to organize and manage huge amounts of data quickly and efficiently.
I like Studio a lot, and use it despite its shortcomings. I understand that Studio is what it is because of its long development history. But I'd like it to stay competitive, move forward, and overcome its limitations.
Fyi as mentioned in this post, DIM is a completely open-ended content installation management system fully capable of handling all 1st party, 2nd party, and even 3rd party Daz related content. All it takes is some rudimentary knowledge of how it's all put together and either some homemade scripting or a software tool like this one (or a free alternative like this one) and literally everything in your collection will now work through DIM. It's the way I've been operating for years.
Could someone tell me how to download the latest public beta ?
TIA
If you haven't already, you'll need to put the beta in your cart and checkout. That will make it available in your account.
Then to download, you'll need to use the Install Manager (DIM). If you don't have DIM installed, you can find it in your product library here. From that page, you'll need to select your operating system to get the download link.
Once DIM is installed and you've logged in, (it uses the same email address and password you use for the Daz3d site,) you'll need to tell DIM to show Public files.
Items in your account marked "Public Build" will now show in Ready to Download tab. Select the files and click on the "Start Queue" button. DIM will do the rest.
Edit to add: You'll probably get a security message, asking for permission to make changes to the computer. Click on the appropriate button, and then DIM will be able to install everything you need.
I have exactly the same problem - luckily not a 30min wait though.
Its not always 30 minutes but usually between 5-10 this is so frustrating, it really interupts my work flow having to shut down before I do a final render. I shut down then have to wait until DS is ready to open again by which time I often loose interest and go off do something else and not come back to it.
Of course if the memory leak in DS was fixed this wouldn't be an issue as I wouldn't need to close DS to do the final render.