Morph dials unresponsive + massive load times
Rod Wise Driggo
Posts: 2,225
OK, I guess the main problem is my huge runtime but maybe anybody has ideas to improve things:
1) Morph dials are not responsive
I used to dial morphs in and out quickly. Now recently those dials became quite unresponsive. If I drag them, the change does only occur after a little delay which makes manual dialing more or less a mess. As I workaround I started to enter values instead but that is a hit and miss. So any ideas to improve dialing behaviour would be great.
2) Loading a character takes ages
Loading a scene or a plain vanilla G8F or a G8F-based character takes several minutes. This might be due to my huge library. I do own more than 10.000 items from the DAZ store (crazy, I know). So all of that stuff resides on an external drive in my DIM runtime. On that disc a second runtime holds all stuff I purchased elsewhere (Rendo etc.) plus Free Stuff. Probably I do have to start uninstalling stuff I don't use but it would be great whether there are other ideas. Maybe merging the runtimes might help? Or opting for an SSD instead of a hard drive. Although my runtime does probable exend usual/affordable SSD sizes by far.
If it matters: I run DAZ studio 4.12 on a MacBook Pro (Mojave).
Any heads up is greatly appreciated.
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Comments
Am only commenting about the morph dial slowness.
First, are you dialing morphs at base res? Viewport SubD3 is slow.
If yes at baseRes, then, If I was you, would check your RAM memory utilization first. Make sure it's not near max, or your CPU will be forced to swap out stuff, and that means you lose lots of time.
As soon as something is loaded it should move from hardrive storage to your RAM. So if you dial in morph, from there on it should be in RAM, and hardrive should not come into play. But caluclation still happens on CPU to change everything which is why base RES is important for quick feedback.
From there the CPU should work with what is in memory. So would check your CPU and RAM utilzation after each thing you add and do in DS to see if you can find a bottleneck.
Just a couple things to consider. Good luck.
First of all thank you for your suggestions. Did a check on RAM and CPU, but that seems quite OK.
Let me be a bit more specific on things: The morph dials of for example cloth work fine. Also the viewport is fully responsive like when I turn a figure around. Problem are the figures morph dials. Those are unresponsive and make moving them really hard. So it might be connected to me having so much figures and figure-related morphs installed as those are always loaded, right. Also had a hard time just zero'ing a pose. Took ages and nearly crushed my system. Might really have to start uninstalling stuff I do not use often and see if this helps. Or do you have any other suggestions?
Regarding SubD, are you referring to View SubD? That was set to 2. I reduced it to 0 which made the dials at least a little more responsive it seems. But it is still very slow. Cloth or so do fine. So it might still be the huge amount of figures/figure morphs?
There are various things you can do to make it faster, e.g. reduce the Mesh Resolution from High to Base (assuming it has a "high") and as you say, reducing View SubD. Then you can also hide items in the scene too, which is where groups come in handy, e.g. for set, set dressing and props. Finally if there's just too much in your scene, you can pose or animate in a different file with the absolutely minimum amount of stuff in it, then save the poses out and apply them in the main scene file later.
The biggest thing for me is usually deleting hair and clothing.
I run DS on a Macbook Pro, 2019 Retina, OSX 10.14.6, 2.4 GHz Intel Core i9, 32 GB 2400 MHz DDR4, Radeon Pro 560X 4 GB, Intel UHD Graphics 630 1536 MB, Cintiq Pro 16.
When setting up large scenes, I work with smooth shaded. I then only use texture shaded to check things and iray to check for render preview.
My subd is set to 1 until I do an iray preview.
Yes. Should be way more responsive if set to 0. Shouldn't appear slightly so that you're not sure. It's that much of a difference. Or it is for me.
That's really weird and interesting that outfit dials are good and figure is not, yet figure posing is good too.
You mention those dials became unsresponsive recently? If i was in your shoes, I would find one of the last saved scenes that I knew worked fine for dialing before. Try it. Odds are it will be slow too. Figure out what content you installed afterwards, and uninstall it all. Just to make sure it's not another product, like what happened with Tarian HD. Then test last working scene again.
It is possible that figure morph overload is happening, but just can't see it, IMO.
Also, what s your CPU load when you start diualing in figure morphs? And how does that compare with clothing morphs and CPU load?
I have some of the fastest SSD's and RAM and CPUs you can buy (As of 6 months ago)... Getting SSD's will not help. Daz seems to be choking on it's own data, internally...
I was just coming to complain about the same thing. After this last update, loading-times went from 2-min to 5-min for G8 models (Just the base model) and up to 12-min for G3.
All the "delay" in loading happens before the model actually loads anything. All my "loading times" as indicated in the logs are all 0m 00s, for morphs. It is in the part just after you hit load, and before and just after "Clearing the scene".
The odd part is that the scene is completely empty, but it takes minutes to "clear the scene" and "delete objects", which don't exist. Daz just becomes unresponsive and shows as the CPU running at only 4%. (Two logical processors are running near 80%, but the rest of my cores are all 1%-0%. I have 18 cores / 36 logical processors. Daz also seems to generate about 20,000 additional "handles", as it jumps from 55,000 to 75,000 handles when Daz becomes unresponsive and seems to choke doing "nothing". The RAM usage is in the 8GB area too, for just one model.)
It literally takes less time to "search known folders for files", and "rebuild the content database", so it can't be Daz choking on "trying to find files". (If it is, it may be time to surrender the database and just go back to searching for files with standard windows calls, which, apparently, is a lot faster.)
I have cleared the JSON cache, but there is still some stupid, unidentified files that are indicated as (File: "") causing errors, after the loading part. A bunch of "missing animations", which seems to be for every body part of the model, which is also after the hang-up, which only takes 30 seconds to complete. I have also reset the database and built it back up, which didn't help.
I have painstakingly, and regrettably, gone through and deleted and uninstalled all the identified files that had "missing morph values", or files, for "helpers". All, were also after the hang-up part.
I am at a complete loss. Loading a new, empty, base model takes 12 min, but to duplicate it, takes only a minute. Loading another model, manually, takes 12 more minutes... Why? It's already loaded, and it doesn't do the scene clear and delete objects part, but something, prior to actually loading, is causing the hang-up.
It's like I just hit a brick wall of limitation with Daz... I'm in the 10,000+ item range too, closer to 40,000+ I believe (not all are morphs). I'd give you an exact number, but Daz doesn't show actual numbers anymore. Just 1200+ when it hits a limit to a category.