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I posted my user-viewpoint analysis here:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/6541996/#Comment_6541996
That's in the general release thread because other threads on exactly the same topic keep popping up:
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/477596/how-long-does-it-take-you-to-load-g8f
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It takes too long to load characters, so I contacted Daz for a solution.
I asked Daz how to fix it, and he said, "Uninstall Morph from your PC. There is no other way.
I have now stopped buying Morph in general.
It takes so long to load that I don't have the energy to use Daz, so buying it is a waste of time.
I would not take it all on the processor, but more at the memory that is usable + the video cart.
When I upgraded it was still my 4670k intel but a double memory to 32GB and a RTX2060 super video cart.
The files you have to load a very big today and your RAM memory may get short of it. See it this way... it is reading, buffering into your RAM and spitting it out through your screen. The videocart accelerate the texture building. That a processor update to a generation 10 or 11 will help ok, but then you need to upgrade your mainboard, your processor and your videocart. To that you need a new copy of Windows, because your license of it is baked inside your bios of your mainboard. Upgrading to more memory has become 40% more then end last year and they are testing the new generation DDR5. If I were you I would change if needed the videocart at this moment and wait before you buy other hardware. But if you want to upgrade now, double your memory and your videocart or one of both. The new 3000 RTX series will begin around 500$ and these videocarts can be used in your new machine. A upgrade to a serie 10 processor with mainboard and memory could be available around 500 to 600$ and you are able to buy a cheap oem Windows 10.
Sorry, but this is just not the case. Sadly I am at the point where the software is killing my creativity; My current setup has 128GB RAM, 2 x Titan RTX and 1 x RTX 3090 GPUs (slowed down by poor singlethread performance of the i9 10980XE). Rendering 4K images in seconds, but having to wait 4-5 minutes to load a single G8F character with complex scenes loading in 10+ minutes.......
It's just not right that Daz's solution is to not use assets we've paid for.
While it is a fact that the more characters/morphs/expressions you have for a Genesis 1-8 Figures, the longer it will take to open/load Characters that use Genesis 1-8 as their base, there are still things you can do to speed up the process without removing content.
1.) Before loading "Genesis 1-8 Basic Female/Male" into an empty scene, clear your log (Help->Trobleshooting->View Log File, delete everything and close/save the file)
Load the "Genesis 1-8 Basic Female/Male" and open the log again, save the log to some easy to find location.
You will probably have a number of warnings on the log, start going through them and if you cannot figure out the meaning, ask the forum for help.
Sometimes just one warning can cause minutes of delay on loading the figure.
2.) Expressions/poses... The expressions and poses that have their own Dials, often come with "Alias"-morphs, these Alias-morphs can be found if you select the figures head or hands in Parameters-tab.
Some difficult to find warnings in the log are related to these Alias-morphs. Removing these will considerably reduce the amount of morphfiles to read while loading a figure and doesn't remove the actual morphs from the figure
The only Alias-morphs I would leave, are the ones saved in ...\Data\DAZ 3D\[Generation]\[Gender]\Morphs\Daz 3D\, as there are other expression files that are incorrectly calling Daz Original Alias-expressions instead of the actual expressions.
One should also consider, what is the use of some expression packs that add 20-40 expressions named "Expression 1...xx", or "Smile 1...xx" when you have other expressions with somewhat descriptive labels on them instead.
3.) How many morphs do you need for the lashes?, 50, 200, or is 500 enough?
Going through the above makes already quite a difference in loading times, or at least is a good starting point for everything that you may decide to continue with.
If the loading time is still too long for ones patience, one should ask oneself the question "Have I actually looked at the product I have bought?", the promotional pictures especially for characters tend to steer your focus on things not included in the product, like hair, clothing and nice sunny environment (or the opposite)...
As the loading time is about the morphs, load the "Genesis 8 Male/Female Dev Load" that load without textures by default and go through your character dials to see if the geometry of the characters body and/or face is actually something you would ever use for anything - It is amazing how different those characters look without deceptive textures, makeup, clothing and hair... Do you really want to keep someone looking like that?
Thanks for those great pointers - I will definitely keep them in mind going forward!
True - but still, these are assets I've paid for and I doubt DAZ will refund older products I deem no longer useable - not to mention how tedious it would be to have to buy products, load them and scrutinize every aspect of them in order to decide wether to keep them or get a refund (most of my purchases these days are sale items I MIGHT get some use for down the road). The problems definitely won't go away, since many users have years worth of purchases in their constantly growing libraries, and it's a slippery slope when a company survives on selling assets for a free piece of software when every time you invest in them, you suffocate the main application even more..
What I am doing is running a main content library on my core systems SSD, then a secondary content library on my much larger storage drive. My Victoria 4, Genesis 1 and 2 live on the 2nd drive.If I decide I am not using a G3/G8 morph group, don't like the character, only need one eyelash morph and have 5 etc... then those extra can go to the large drive. I'm mostly working in G3.
I'm normally working in Beta 4.15 and I don't have the big drive mapped as a content directory. If my release version is slow loading I work in the Beta till it gets there... mostly I am using the release version to compose subsets of scenes I then grab into my main working instance.
In effect the 2nd Content Library is not gone it is just a "back bench" out of my main working flow. However when I am making assets and scenes using the release version it can still see all of this stuff. RE: Back Benching Morphs - I use SceneNotes text files.. where I say what I want to do and what the scene needs... and also normally have OneNote ready to pop up. The reason I mention this is if I decice to backbench a set of morphs I can just quickly expose the path in parameters... then snapshot a view of it into OneNote to tidy up later. This is to stop my work flow going off on tangents. When I do a session of "back benching" morphs I have a visual list on a OneNote page.
Mostly I will only do backups of the main content (in case of disk failure etc.) and as such keeping it lean saves time.
I've been reading this thread just as a curiosity because I have a different problem/question and this thread sort of touched on it. Nothing related to loading times but to loading morphs. Is there a way to create a new character with all these different morphs and save them permanently so they are no longer morphs and just a new character with all morphs at zero? Let's say I load G3F and I change her face and head to make her look different. How can I save her to have these morph be permanent?
Making all these zero next time I load my new character. I hope I've made it clear as mud but if this is possible, it may reduce loading times as well.
You can make a new morph and then load it onto a base figure with Morph Loader Pro. This is useful for other reasons too, i.e. if your character has modified scale. Scale can be a problem for some poses and animation key interpolation (I have found). There are numerous tutorials around on how to make a morph. In short, do your characterisation, change to base resolution, export as .obj (make sure no clothes or hair, lashes and so on is visible), import back again onto a base figure with edit -> figure -> morph loader pro.
It should be mentioned that you loose the corrective morphs which were connected to the dials you are no longer activating, whether that is a loss or benefit is imho a matter of opinion - I have exported several characters for my own personal and private use to clean up the list of Currently used morphs, but this doesn't stop the morphs still being read when loading the character.
Ah yes, I forgot to mention that. e.g. I made a character based on Brooklyn HD, with quite muscular back/shoulders (not extreme, "swole" style, just well developed), and I need to make a jcm for the delts when the arms are out front.
Good news, I had a program that automatically unhide morph based on the content of a scene file. Bad news it only work on windows 10.
You can find it here:https://github.com/TheNoobDucky/Daz-Package-Manager
It takes 8 minutes for me to load basic G8F. Can someone summarize what the (current) solution to slow loading is? It's very difficult to find it because different people talked different things.
First get rid of the warnings in the log when loading basic G8F, that will also teach you about the file structure and inner workings of DS that will have benefits later on.
Evaluate, which pose and expression dials you want to keep and which ones to delete
The "Alias" morphs are there just to show the morph dials on specific bodyparts, the real morph dials can always be found on the main body. Since not all morphs come with "Alias" morphs and some "Alias" morphs have errors in them, you could reduce the morphload by removing them
When done with the first three, load the untextured "Dev load" version of the G8F and start dialing the figures and morphs one by one and see if the result is something you would actually use - You will be surpriced of how bad some of them look.
Thanks for your answer. I will try your suggestion as soon as I got time
But one quick trick I tried and succeeded was making every folder (except for DAZ 3D) hidden in \data\DAZ 3D\Genesis 8\Female\Morphs. With the simple trick, basic G8F loaded in 40 seconds, Wow! And all sliders for morphs seem there for me to control. I have to examine more but I love the result so far!
There is a script called "Turbo Loader" that handles genesis 8 morph loading problems. It works just fine but requires a lot of fiddling to set up base and custom loading sets. Plus you have to open DAZ first and load the custom morph sets before you can load your desired character.
As someone else has said, Daz is about selling product and the current setup up is woefull. Loading times become even more of a nightmare with Genesis 9 male an female morphs all in the one directory.
I now have 2 directories for each figure (i.e morphs and morphsxxx) this allows me to copy morphs from the morphsxxx directory (which contains all morphs but is not loaded into menory) to the working morphs directory which contains only the basic figure morphs and the ones for my custom, or character from the Daz store.
I agree, Power morphs should come back so that we can choose which morphs we want loaded.
When I tested the basic Studio load of G8F in September 2021 (so 2 months after the message you replied to was posted) the basic G8F load times with my product set were:
NO (deleted) cache: 118s
WITH (pre-existing) cache: 103s
Now, June 15, 2023 running Studio 4.21.1.48 with significantly more G8 products the timings are:
NO (deleted) cache: 90s
WITH (pre-existing) cache: 34s
So, yes, the basic time to load a character is still comparable but the caching is much better. Some of this improvement seems to come at the cost of a longer start-up time for DAZ Studio itself and having lots of morphs plugged in to the character might slow down on-screen posing but those are separate problems. I'd rate that as pretty good improvement.