I use only Iray, so I want to nix space consuming 3Delight Textures

jukingeo

Hello All,

The two biggest issues I have with Daz Studio is that it consumes my money and hard drive space.  While the former is just a matter of money management and making more careful purchases, the latter becomes an issue as I can't be adding a new hard drive to my computer every two years.   Now I have noticed that almost every clothing package, hair, enviroment and sometimes skins come with both Iray and 3Delight materials. So with that in mind, I realized that since I use Iray for EVERYTHING in Daz Studio, so there is no need for me to have 3Delight textures on my hard drive if I never use them.   So what I would like to know if there is a safe way to remove the 3Delight textures without messing up the library and directory structures within Daz Studio.

Thank you,

Geo

 

 

 

 

 

mikael-aronsson

Short answer is no, it's all part of the same package so no easy way to delete any 3DL stuff, you would have to do that manually, but most new content comes without 3DL materials so it's not much of a problem with new content.

And if you delete 3DL textures for older items without IRAY materials you cannot use them at all unless you have converted the materials

If you have installed both Poser and DS version of an item you can remove the poser version, you can also remove all PoserCF items to save up some space, if you have any of the Now-Crowd billboard packages and don't use them get rid of them, they are silly big, if you don't need HD items get rid of them also.

 

NorthOf45

Even if you were to do that, the vast majority of the disk space taken up by material presets is in the bitmaps, which are needed for every shader, so you can't delete them. You would be saving the 1 to 10 MB used for scripts, but compared to the 100 or 800 MB needed for the bitmaps, it's almost trivial. You will save a little space, but one of those several-hundred-megabyte installations will eat it up in one shot.

Leana

mikael-aronsson said:

If you have installed both Poser and DS version of an item you can remove the poser version

only for items with full poser and DS versions. If the DS file is a "studioCF" file it contains only materials, in that case you need the poser files.

WendyLuvsCatz

there are only 3Delight materials and shaders,

the first is a hierarchy of textures used on a surface in a shader which is a language for how the material is rendered.

there is no such thing as a 3Delight texture

Textures are images used in all those and usually the exact same ones with additional ones for PBR shaders such as iray

Martirilla

You might want to look at the Windows freeware "Alternate Directory", if you know there are specific filename types on your PC that you no longer need. It can search and delete files which fit a particular filename mask. 

However, a better solution for many bits of older content would be to look on the store for an automated 3Delight to Iray converter script. RSSY has one, and there may be others.  I can see how this would not work with sorting out more recent content, though, as it already has Iray.

TheKD

The texture maps are the largest space taker, on the few items I examined, the 3dl and iray used mostly the same maps, just plugged into the shader setup of each render engine. I delete all 3dl load stuff from products before I install it. It doesn't save space, but it saves clutter and unneeded click through folders. Instead of having to go into materials then iray, I cut and paste the iray folder and delete the materal folder. I like effeciency lol....

jukingeo

TheKD said:

The texture maps are the largest space taker, on the few items I examined, the 3dl and iray used mostly the same maps, just plugged into the shader setup of each render engine. I delete all 3dl load stuff from products before I install it. It doesn't save space, but it saves clutter and unneeded click through folders. Instead of having to go into materials then iray, I cut and paste the iray folder and delete the materal folder. I like effeciency lol....

EDIT:  Reading this again, so I take it by what you are saying there is only one set of texture maps for both 3dlight and Iray?

So how would you go about doing that.  I know it was mentioned above to not bother installing the poser files and that I have been doing, but to not install the 3delight materials from the get go?  No, I don't know how to do that.  Also, as it was also point out, some of the older stuff needs the 3Delight material and there I would need to be extra careful.   But yes, in addtion to space saving, this is something else I wanted to do as it is very annoying to have to check some of the older content that doesn't have the RSL and MDL labels to identify what is what.  Also when it comes to hair materials, this is often not labeled like this, and I have to end up right clicking on the two files to see which is the Iray one.  So by only have the one selection there for the Iray materials, I don't have to do that anymore.

Thanks,

Geo

superlativecg

If you have many of the same generation Genesis characters, you can delete the textures for all but one character and use that texture set for all of your Genesis characters. 

jukingeo

superlativecg said:

If you have many of the same generation Genesis characters, you can delete the textures for all but one character and use that texture set for all of your Genesis characters.

Yes, but then in that case you would be stuck with only one skin type.   What I did as a first line of trying to save space was to delete full characters that I no longer use, or ones that came in bundles that I don't use simply because they are not interesting or do not have special makeup palettes.   The makeup palettes is what would encourage me to keep a style of skin.  But there are many instances in which I have ended up with a few characters that are created by the same artist and they look similar.   RawArts, Mousso, Emrys, Colm Jackson are names that have come up often in my library and I have noticed these artists create charcters that are very similar to one another.   So slimming some of these down would help.

So I guess I was on the the right track in assuming it is these 'extra characters' that is what is taking up the hard drive space, huh?  I guess in many ways, while it seems like a good idea (financially) to buy bundles, it is not a good idea from a HD space point of view.  

BTW, in deleting the extra characters, I have noticed that their morphs stayed behind.  It might be irrelevant to try and delete those as I don't think morph controls take up memory.  But this might go in line with what you are saying above that I don't fully loose the character 'shape', but naturally the textures are gone.

Still, I have morph controls out the yin-yang, so with less characters on board, it would encourage me to use those controls more rather than have a ton of pre-made characters on my machine that I don't use often and they are taking up valuable space.

I definitely want more insight and proper instructions on how to do this properly as I don't want to mess up how things are organized within Daz Studio and be left with non working icons, or links to nowhere.   But I been meaning to organize things better anyway.

Thanks,

Geo