Can no longer use Daz on my Mac after 15 years
Ulysses Heart
Posts: 43
Unfortunately, I now know that it was not my computer (Macbook Pro 2013) – but rather Daz 4.12.1+ incompatibility with Mac's Catalina OS that has caused serious problems working in the application for the past few months. As a result, one of my favorite applications will get shelved going forward. And that's after 15 dedicated years (May 2005) of working in Daz and buying tons and tons and tons of content on daz3d.com.
How do I know it's not my computer? Just bought a new Macbook Pro to support all my 3D work in ZBrush, Maya, Blender, etc., - 64 Gigs of RAM, 2.4 Ghz 8-core Intel Core i9, and a pretty hefty graphics card. I did not transfer over Daz from my old computer. Just content. I did a 100% fresh install; but to my complete shock, after working in Daz for a little more than 3 hours tonight, I'm having identical problems I had on my 2013 machine (on Catalina), even after a completely fresh install. Both the Beta 4.12.2.6 and 4.12.1.117 exhibit the same behavior:
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1-2 crashes per hour.
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Extremely long lag times for loading content (e.g., one character).
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Freqeunt lags in the process of merely manipulating a character.
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When I save a file, two "Save" dialog boxes pop up overlapping each other (exactly what happened on my old computer) that both read "Filtered Save". I select one and save, and then about after 6 additional saves, Daz crashes.
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When rendering, a dialog box pops up that says I am already rendering, which is false.
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When I've been lucky enough to get past 30 minutes of working in Daz and I save an existing file, it treats it if it were a new file... "Untitled". So it's essentially "Save As" forever after that point. At times the old file I had been working on was never saved anyway.
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From time to time, after rendering, Daz crashes. It also randomly crashes from time to time after merely saving (or trying to save) the scene I'm working on.
NONE of this happened before 4.12.1.117, or before Catalina. It's really sad because I have deadlines and Daz used be fantastic for certain parts of my workflow. I was really, really hoping this new computer would solve the problems, but it looks like I can't use Daz anymore, at least until these serious problems are solved. And that's after working with Daz for over 15 years. Really, really, really disappointed.
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Comments
anyway to go back a version of daz until the issue is addressed.
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outside of that... I was the first person to desktop sf/f books using DTP starting in 1987, I still have the intro to the first book on a 400k floppy sent to me by Spider Robinson
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I've owned unnumerable macs since that Mac Plus ... but somewhere in the early 20s I got a pc for gaming because video cards.
my first daz stuff was on both systems
but about 5 years ago, it was time for a new system...
MacPro xeon 1630v2 8 gigs ddr3 and 4g worth of video.. $2000
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I built. asus dual mobo two xeon 2630v3, 64g ddr 4, 980ti 6g... $2000
and I still have room for 12 sticks of ram on the mobo, have 6 internal drives and have titanx tucked next to the 980ti
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sadly Mac is really a phone company now. I can still run my pagemaker 7 on mac 9 and still have a dual processor quick silver with dual 1.4 g4 running photo shop to run my 12x19 scanner
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but I couldn't run any of my old power mac apps on the mac after 10,6..
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and I can still run pagemaker 7 on my current machine .. I can still run CS2 on this one.
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Daz didn't break it .. Mac did ... just like back when I had friend who to set up a second boot to run their CS5 because it wouldn't run on the next mac os version.
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Oh, my dual processor mac running mac 9... it can't boot into 10 because it has a kernal panic and crashes on startup..
Boot in in mac 9 and it boots .. pops up a screen that says, there's an issue with cache on one of the processors contact a tech, hit this button to continue booting and it does.
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I imagine your frustration level must be incredible and while I'm setting up new boot drive with win10 .. I am not replacing the boot drive in this one with win7 and win 10 blows out daz I'll still have this.
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but either mac will fix it or daz will fix it assuming that it's not a bone deep issue in the daz program and the new mac system that don't get along well.
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but I still have my taskbar up at the top of the screen like I did when I first starting using pc .. and the transition was not as pain in the but from mac to pc as I expected it to be.
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there's nobody out there who has written an emulator type program to handle this on the Mac? I understand that when apple took out rosetta in 10.7 people built an emulator that lets you run power pc on some later system version.
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have filed a bug report with daz?
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I certainly hope so kind of a solution works out for you.
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I suppose Daz tossed away the installer for the early version of 4.12 when the newer one was installed? That is, BTW a truly shortsighted piece of programming on their behalf .. I control my installs and have 4.6 up to 4.11 on another drive and all of them will open and run .
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and you use a laptop? much braver than I am .. even without issues as bad as what you have I have beat the crap out of a keyboard or two.. the tower is behind the monitor and relitively safe when I really want to break something.
There is a reason the old IBM server keyboards command absurd prices they are virtually indestructable.
Well, thanks for that long series of thoughts. But not going to switch. A few of the 3D/animation shops I work with on the West Coast and NYC are gradually switching to all-Mac because of the new Mac Pro overhaul. I'm going to get one at some point, but for now I'm happy with what I've got. Every other 3D program I use – ZBrush, Maya and others – run like greased lightning on this computer. Coudn't be happier. The one problem application is Daz. I hope they can fix it. Sadly, by that time, I'll probably have replaced it with Blender.
I mostly build building models and for that I want rectanglar base boxes 25 units wide x 50 units high and one unit deep divided into 50 and 100 units so I can knock windows etc.
Daz of course can't do rectangles .. so I've been doing them in 3d max
tried blender and went crazy trying to find how to make the box and subdivide it (which in max you can just keyboard entry the number and hit make box)
the googled.. blender will read in a subdivied box and let you edit it .. but it won't let you create one in that manner.
someday someone will produce a logical program with a clean interface that does everything and has a nice written manual
Just to let you know that blender has issues with macs as well. This is apple fault not daz fault.
Take it from someone who has been developing on MacOS X "since Steven Jobs handed out Rhapsody to the developers at WWC in 97", Apple has been changing back more and more to the pre "Return of the Jedi/Jobs" company policies.
Before Jobs left Apple in the 80s, he was the one who setup the "not invented here" policies, that Apple should not embrace standards, but do things their own and better way. (A friend's father was head of Apple Europe 81-83, directly under Jobs, so I got lots of inside info from him). That was still the policy when he came back to Apple in 97, and one of the things he critized Apple and the old managerment for. Jobs changed that, he decided to embrace open standards, and stay away from the path of microsofts embrace and extend policies.We all remember Apple Rage/Quickdraw3D, which was hardware 3D before anyone else did it, but then everyone else took another route on Windows leaving Apples ideas in the dust.
Since Steve Jobs' passing, Apple has more and more been turning back to the "not invented here" ideas, Metal is a good example, I guess they look at mirosofts success with their Direct/<anything> APIs way to tie developers to the Windows platform, and at the same time Apple wants to be able to provide the same APIs cross multiple platforms, iOS, watchOS, tvOS & macOS. Apple has also been tightening security on macOS (which is good), but they do change things a lot, causing problems for application developers all the time. Dropping support for older and less secure APIs is another thing, looking at this in the long perspective, Carbon / C-C++ APIs (which was the old macOS APIs) arrived as big companies like Adobe refused to rewrite things using the Cocoa Frameworks in Objective-C. Now swift is taking over as language and lots of older ways of doing things are rapidly getting deprecated (will cease to work in a future release of macOS).
All this does things to the mac Users, like programs stops working on newer versions of macOS. Add to this equation, Apples grudge with nVidia that is more that half a decade old, that won't let nVidia to develop drivers for macOS 10.14 or above, which now made nVidia stop developing CUDA for macOS as a result of that. DAZ Studio is not the only 3D program that uses nVidia's Iray, where the macOS version now is crippled compared to the windows version, thanks to Apple.
All these changes Apple makes, costs huge amount of money for developers, and every time they happen, a large amount of developers decides the cost is too large compared to the gain, so they drop or limit support fror macOS. This happened when Apple went from 68k to PPC processors, not very much, but it did. This happened on a very large scale when Apple went from PPC to Intel processors, and as Apple is aiming for another move, this might happen again. As always, the small developers are those who backs off, while the big ones who has no problem charging their customers for another 4k update or already has customers on a 1k / year subcription, they can spend the money to follow Apple changes. All this, leave the users of software developed by smaller developers in the dust, and has done several times in the past.
Sorry for the long post, but this is the story from someone who has been developing software for the macOS platform since 1987, been there done that and didn't even get a tshirt.
I was looking at the specs of the MBP i9 seeing if that model would allow you do downgrade to 10.14 but it does not appear to be an option. Catalina broke some very productive things for graphic artists who dare to extend their abilities beyond the Apple and Adobe scope of software. All things considered I repurposed my 2010 cheese grater (specs below) and installed win 7 and 10 on this thing and its pretty solid - yes it's the dark side but I can still work, except for the most recent DS beta which I had to roll back.
Since you said it's a new computer and DS install: Check that you have defined an author name in DS parameters. When DS saves a scene it will only allow direct save if the scene you're working on was saved with an author name corresponding to yours, so that you don't risk overwriting a scene from a product for example. If you don't have an author name defined it will always consider that the author is different.
Check to see if the character, or likely clothes/hair, have Smoothing Modifiers applied
Use File>Save (or File>Save As), rather than ctrl-s - there is an issue with shortcuts in the General reelase (fixed in the new Publicx Build)
Again, us Render>Render rather than ctrl-r or switch to the Public Build
As Leana says, make sure you have soemthing entered in Daz Studio>Preferences for the Author name
I just wanted to add that Catalina and Daz has been a headache. I'm able to use it 96% fine, but there are some hacky things I've had to do.
Please don't build judgements on guesses. Daz makes only the current version installer of DS available, and has doen for a long time, but it is possible to request an older version if you have a serious issue (such as a plug-in not working or a fault with a built-in feature).
Closed as you also posted to the main DS thread - please don't make duplicate posts/threads. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/5631921/#Comment_5631921