Why does Braided Band Hair take 2.3 GB of space?
BlueFingers
Posts: 904
Why does Braided Band Hair take 2.3 GB of space on my drive? Don't get me wrong, I like the hair and use it quite often. But after looking through my installed files, I just don't understand why it needs so much space. This doesn't even include the textures pack that is separately sold, and it comes standard only with three colours. Sure it has "25 Texture, Transparency, Specular and Bump Maps (up to 3072x3072)", but is that really necessary with this hair?
This is not a complaint, okay it’s a bit of a complaint, but I just really would like to understand this. It’s the biggest product installed on my system.
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Comments
I too use it quite a bit i have to admit BUT I have it installed through connect and its using 693 mb unless its lurking elsewhere.....
Where a large amount of the file size comes from is the Braidedband hair data folder, which comes in at just over 1.15 GB in size while the texture folder is quite small..
Okay, I got the 2.3 GB from the DIM:
Are you guys saying the size given by the DIM is actually not representative for the space it takes on the drive?
It appears that there are two copies of the morphs. One in "/data/BraidedBand/..." and another in "/data/Goldtassel/BraidedBand..." Only the second is used, so the first can probably be deleted.
I just checked by renaming the first directory, and it had no effect on the hair at all. I still I don't get why they make us download and put the extra 1.15 GB on our drives, would there be any reason for it?
A lot of hairs take up an very large amount of disk space. If I sort the products I own by size, largest to smallest, then hair products are often the ones at the top of the list.
As someone already said, a lot of that is space used in the data folder. This is due to the fact that hairs are frequently very high poly (sometimes having more than a million polys), and also have a lot of morphs, and since the morphs are a list of movements for each vertex, then each one takes up a lot of space. Add to this the fact that some hairs are also for multiple figure bases (eg G3F and G8F) and/or are for male and female, this will double or quadruple the space needed in data.
Poor testing and quality control. Hundreds of megabytes of redundancy should be noticed prior to release. Maybe Daz noticed the download and installed file sizes and said "it's functional--put it up for sale". I don't know if we should or shouldn't let goldtassel (an outstandingly good hair PA) off the hook.
Even with the redundancy addressed, this hair will require hundreds of megabytes of storage. The "23 Adjustment & Movement Morphs" in the promotional copy lets you know that. Hairstyles with multiple components with adjustability almost always take up a lot of space. A lot of loose, fine hair as well. Hard to imagine that it renders quickly. Only three color options, but 3DL materials are also included. Most Genesis 8 hairs don't bother with those. I doubt Genesis 8 gets much use in 3Delight. Probably better handled by users using 3DL hair shader presets to resurface the hair.
Also, if the morph files were compressed, they would take up about 1/4 of the current disk space (the combined size of the compressed install zips for both hair and addons is just 727 MB, and that includes the redundant files).
But I don't know if DS supports compressed .dsf files?
Compressing files to save storage space is one thing, but when those files are being read into memory, they must be uncompressed just like the image files.
Sure, but we're talking disk space here.
Product size is actually a really big factor for me when purchasing. I've returned a significant number of products because they're too large, and I've completely stopped buying from some vendors becaue their products are always so large.
Yeah, it is pretty good indicator for products that are not optimized in any way and quite often the UV mapping has been done in a way that you cannot even reduce the memory footprint without doing it yourself from the ground up, and I'm not talking about sacrificing the quality or level of details .
That is the thing, it doesn't have more options if I compare it to other hair assets I own that are often only half the size or less with better textures as far as I can see. And it also does render relatively quickly I have to say, hence confusion.
Yes! I remember a particular set of boots requiring 4GB of VRAM to render with just the auto-headlamp. ;-) I think that was my first post.
Doesn't seem to use a lot of VRAM either - I loaded a G8F character and checked VRAM use when rendering in Iray preview, then I loaded the hair and VRAM use increased with only about 400 MB.
So, what is it actually, that's taking the space on the disk?
The morphs - 1.1 GB, and the double because they're duplicated.
Wow... 1.1GB's worth of "move point(xyz) to point(x+0.02,y+0.0001,z-0,008)"... Means that everytime you touch a morph dial, the memory consumption will increase considerably.
I've wanted Daz to include the download size for products on the product page for a long time. If I remember correctly, the reason given for not including it is that the ratio of download size to installed size will vary from product to product. Install size could also vary considerably based on the end user's machine. As excuses go, these are rather feeble; the download size gives you a rough idea of what to expect (Dozens of megabytes? 500 MB? One gigabyte or more?). Even for those of us using external storage, the download size is a legitimate concern.
It's an example of "customer unfriendliness".
I had a quick look, there are just 17 shaping sliders + 18 for different DO characters, I think even 1.1 GB for morphs looks excessive.
What's the vertex count of the hair?
Here is the data:
Name :
BraidedBand_804034
Label :
Braided Band Hair
Class :
DzFigure
Vertices :
804.034 / 804.034
Triangles :
2.219 / 2.219
Quads :
468.050 / 468.050
Total Faces :
470.269 / 470.269
Total Lines :
0 / 0
Normally the memory is being released again when the process ends, otherwise you have a memory leak.
Maybe I formulated my comment poorly... When you move the dial the first time, that is when the deltas for that morph are read into the memory (as we have been told), which in this case means reading 804034 lines of coordinate information per morph dial...
OK, I'm not sure how morphs work really. I can see that every time I move one of the hair's morph dials and release it, memory use goes up a bit and then down again, I assume that's some kind of process involved that starts and then ends. It just doesn't go down quite to where it were before. I've tried to move every dial that hair has and after that total DS memory use had increased from 2899 MB to about 3115 MB, and there it stayed for a while.
Then there was something else I had to do which too about 15 minutes so I couldn't keep an eye on it, when I got back DS memory use suddenly had dropped to 1851 MB. But that's probably Windows Memory Management which has moved some data to the page file which it usually does when a program is idle for some time, or if memory use gets close to the limit. Checking again now it's down at only 805 MB, while DS is using 4046 MB page file.
I am currently building a scene with the hair, and I got to the point where I had to adjust it. I used just 3 sliders and the save file went from 5,780 KB to 304,162 KB. I did delete some of it to fit it under a cap, don't know if that adds anything to the save file. I thought the difference in size was pretty shocking aswell.
Okay I am talking KBs here but still, the difference.
The morph on disc does not store zero deltas (those which don't move a vertex), so most lists will be considerably shorter.
It really does matter, because how much drive space it takes up is part of the cost of the product. So even if a product costs 37 cents, it might take a couple of dollars worth of storage space. And there's the non-quanitfiable aspect of "cost", too. For those of us who don't want/can't get an external HD, we have to consider how full our harddrives can get before our computer's performance begins to be affected.
Ok, so it's different from importing a morph as OBJ.
That means that movement morphs which only affect a part of the hair, are smaller in size but the fitting morphs (for DO chars) which probably move every vertice, have a bigger effect.