Differences between HD and non-HD characters in terms of resources?

RenderPretender

What is the difference between HD and non-HD human figures in terms of resource consumption? I'm using two HD characters (with the HD morphs zero'd), and encountering consistent crashes or errors during rendering. As soon as I remove the male character or replace  him with a non-HD one, all is well. These are G8 figures. Is there a way to minimize the resource impact of the HD characters? SubD 3 (2 for the male) is as low as I can go without loss of visual impact.

Richard Haseltine

If the Render SubD level is the same (for iray) then both should use the same amount of memory for the geometry in rendering, as far as I know. HD morphs move the vertices geenrated by SubD, but they don't add them in the first place. Of course having the HD morph deltas loaded will increase the amount of system RAM used, and may require additional processing in generating the data to be sent to Iray.

RenderPretender

Richard Haseltine said:

If the Render SubD level is the same (for iray) then both should use the same amount of memory for the geometry in rendering, as far as I know. HD morphs move the vertices geenrated by SubD, but they don't add them in the first place. Of course having the HD morph deltas loaded will increase the amount of system RAM used, and may require additional processing in generating the data to be sent to Iray.

Is zeroing the HD morphs in the Parameters tab the same as effectively "unloading" the HD morphs? I replaced the HD male with a non-HD one and the issue is resolved. Apparently, my computer does not like the two HD characters together.

TheKD

2 subd 3 characters(just the body mesh alone, not counting clothes hair etc) is over 2 million polygons. 2 subd 2 characters is only around 600k polygons. It's a rather large difference.

RenderPretender

TheKD said:

2 subd 3 characters(just the body mesh alone, not counting clothes hair etc) is over 2 million polygons. 2 subd 2 characters is only around 600k polygons. It's a rather large difference.

I know, and I think that's the problem. I had reduced the male character to SubD 2 and dialed back the HD morphs for both, but still got the errors/crashes until I replaced the male with a non-HD character.

Richard Haseltine

DS certainly keeps the data in memory for a while, since the change is on the undo stack and so it might be needed again. I'm not sure if the deltas for zeroed morphs are dropped from memory once the change has dropped off the undo stack.

RenderPretender

Richard Haseltine said:

DS certainly keeps the data in memory for a while, since the change is on the undo stack and so it might be needed again. I'm not sure if the deltas for zeroed morphs are dropped from memory once the change has dropped off the undo stack.

It seems that, even with one non-HD character, restarting DAZ after doing anything at all (posing, etc.) is the only way I can get an uninterrupted render.

DrunkMonkeyProductions

This sounds more like a character specific issue than a general issue.

Have you tried loading the problematic character alone and rendered in default settings?

Might also want to try loading a base G8M and manually applying the problematic morphs, without the material preset.

Could just be something messed up in the character preset, or just a material conflict.

 

To cover the original question.

Ran a couple quickie tests with the Aubrey 8 and her HD addon, and the difference in system ram utilization with the HD on or off was failry negligable at around 100-150MB.

For rendering, the increase in ram was the same, that is to say there wasn't any, effective, difference.

Pre-render increased ~100MB, render ram increased ~100MB.

To be clear here, this test was done in 4.12.1.117, with a base genesis 8 female, with only the Aubrey 8 and HD addon, no other characters or morphs, and with the default G8F texture applied.

I ran the tests with the base G8F only, both in default render sub-d 2 and 4, and with the base Aubrey 8 applied, with both sub-d variations and with the HD applied, again with 2 and 4 render sub-d.

All render settings at default, at a resolution of 500x500 pixels and default view position.

 

Prerender daz studio was using ~300MB with g8f only and render sub-d at 2. When rendered, ~1455MB.

With the sub-d 4 applied, the render ram, doubled to ~3030MB.

With the HD applied at render sub-d 4, system ram went to 419MB and 3150MB respectively.

 

 

Richard Haseltine said:

DS certainly keeps the data in memory for a while, since the change is on the undo stack and so it might be needed again. I'm not sure if the deltas for zeroed morphs are dropped from memory once the change has dropped off the undo stack.

Just ran a couple quickie tests, and it doesn't appear to make a difference once the morph dial has been enabled.

It remains "loaded"(takes up system ram) regardless if it's pushed off the undo list or not.

If you wish to test it, just perform ~20+ actions after enabling/disabling the particular morph dial.

I used a plane and pushed the + key on transform X-Axis 22 times after dialing the aubrey 8hd to 0 from 100%

 

 

 

TheKD said:

2 subd 3 characters(just the body mesh alone, not counting clothes hair etc) is over 2 million polygons. 2 subd 2 characters is only around 600k polygons. It's a rather large difference.

While it sounds like a big deal, computationally it's not as significant. Unless you are running really tight on ram.

A base g8f, all default render settings, default materials, naked, at render sub-d 2, on my system, utilizes around 1470MB.

2 G8f's only uses 1633MB.

At Sub-d 3, 1792 and 2264 respectively.

Sub-d 4 is where it gets messy. 3053 and 4747 respectively.

Just to note, the Sub-d 4 is around 8million polys between the two figures.

Each increase/decrease in sub-d is a mulplier/divisor of 4.

 

As always, these numbers are based on my particular system, version of d.s. and may vary depending on your particular setup.

 

 

RenderPretender

DrunkMonkeyProductions said:

This sounds more like a character specific issue than a general issue.

Have you tried loading the problematic character alone and rendered in default settings?

Might also want to try loading a base G8M and manually applying the problematic morphs, without the material preset.

Could just be something messed up in the character preset, or just a material conflict.

 

To cover the original question.

Ran a couple quickie tests with the Aubrey 8 and her HD addon, and the difference in system ram utilization with the HD on or off was failry negligable at around 100-150MB.

For rendering, the increase in ram was the same, that is to say there wasn't any, effective, difference.

Pre-render increased ~100MB, render ram increased ~100MB.

To be clear here, this test was done in 4.12.1.117, with a base genesis 8 female, with only the Aubrey 8 and HD addon, no other characters or morphs, and with the default G8F texture applied.

I ran the tests with the base G8F only, both in default render sub-d 2 and 4, and with the base Aubrey 8 applied, with both sub-d variations and with the HD applied, again with 2 and 4 render sub-d.

All render settings at default, at a resolution of 500x500 pixels and default view position.

 

Prerender daz studio was using ~300MB with g8f only and render sub-d at 2. When rendered, ~1455MB.

With the sub-d 4 applied, the render ram, doubled to ~3030MB.

With the HD applied at render sub-d 4, system ram went to 419MB and 3150MB respectively.

 

 

Richard Haseltine said:

DS certainly keeps the data in memory for a while, since the change is on the undo stack and so it might be needed again. I'm not sure if the deltas for zeroed morphs are dropped from memory once the change has dropped off the undo stack.

Just ran a couple quickie tests, and it doesn't appear to make a difference once the morph dial has been enabled.

It remains "loaded"(takes up system ram) regardless if it's pushed off the undo list or not.

If you wish to test it, just perform ~20+ actions after enabling/disabling the particular morph dial.

I used a plane and pushed the + key on transform X-Axis 22 times after dialing the aubrey 8hd to 0 from 100%

 

 

 

TheKD said:

2 subd 3 characters(just the body mesh alone, not counting clothes hair etc) is over 2 million polygons. 2 subd 2 characters is only around 600k polygons. It's a rather large difference.

While it sounds like a big deal, computationally it's not as significant. Unless you are running really tight on ram.

A base g8f, all default render settings, default materials, naked, at render sub-d 2, on my system, utilizes around 1470MB.

2 G8f's only uses 1633MB.

At Sub-d 3, 1792 and 2264 respectively.

Sub-d 4 is where it gets messy. 3053 and 4747 respectively.

Just to note, the Sub-d 4 is around 8million polys between the two figures.

Each increase/decrease in sub-d is a mulplier/divisor of 4.

 

As always, these numbers are based on my particular system, version of d.s. and may vary depending on your particular setup.

 

 

Thank you for all this investigative effort. I'm running tight on RAM, certainly, but rarely encounter this scenario in this computer. Restarting Windows via the Task Manager for each render seems to help. So that suggests to me that system memory needs to be replenished for each render in this particular set. At least I've discovered how to restart Windows without a hard reboot every time. So far, so good.

DrunkMonkeyProductions

RenderPretender said:

Thank you for all this investigative effort. I'm running tight on RAM, certainly, but rarely encounter this scenario in this computer. Restarting Windows via the Task Manager for each render seems to help. So that suggests to me that system memory needs to be replenished for each render in this particular set. At least I've discovered how to restart Windows without a hard reboot every time. So far, so good.

How much ram do you have in your system?

Also, what process are you restarting in task manager?

RenderPretender

DrunkMonkeyProductions said:

RenderPretender said:

Thank you for all this investigative effort. I'm running tight on RAM, certainly, but rarely encounter this scenario in this computer. Restarting Windows via the Task Manager for each render seems to help. So that suggests to me that system memory needs to be replenished for each render in this particular set. At least I've discovered how to restart Windows without a hard reboot every time. So far, so good.

How much ram do you have in your system?

Also, what process are you restarting in task manager?

I only have 8 gigs of ram on this gaming laptop with a NVIDIA GPU. It's upgradable but I haven't wanted to drop the coin. It normally does very well, though periodically I'll run into an issue like this. Even with scenes having identical content, the issue seems sporadic.

As to restarting, I'm simply restarting Windows Explorer from the Task Manager, and it seems to help. The female in the scenes is Michaela HD, and virtually any other character in the scene with her, especially an HD one, seems to cause issues.