Any tips on making Gen 8.1 less heavy?
novastrider
Posts: 208
Hey everyone,
I recently made the step to 4.15 and have started testing the 8.1 figures. One of the first things I've noticed is they are straining my system. Testing their memory sizes alone was a big step backwards from Genesis 8. A unedited Genesis 8HD figure with no hair or clothes uses around 2/2.3g RAM unrendered, and around 3.5/4g RAM in Iray. The unedited Genesis 8.1HD figure with no hair or clothes uses around 3g RAM unrendered, and around 5g RAM in Iray. A gig added per character makes a huge difference to people without NASA PC's, so yeah that would make 8.1 unusable to me (same to happened with DForce Hair..).
Since the figure has been out for some time, I was wondering if people had found ways to lighten it's load? Are there any useless maps I should be aware of? Rogue .tifs of 500mb per piece or needless options I should turn off or something like that?
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Comments
The main things with G8.1 are that the default subdivision for the figures is 2 scene/3 render (rather than the 1/2 used for G8.0), that a new material zone has been added for the back of the head and neck (meaning an extra set of textures for it), and potentially that the PBRSkin shader includes additional options for maps, like Ambient Occlusion.
The new UVs are a mixed bag. Theoretically good if you're seeing the top or back of the head, but if it's being hidden by hair, it's arguably worse than the G8.0 UVs because of the additional texture load as well as introducing a seam at the neck, which is often much more visible than one running down the back of the jaw.
As far as trimming things down, in theory, you can drop the subdivision down, and bake the "Head" and "Body" textures back to the old G8.0 "Torso" UVs using Map Transfer so that the same texture maps can be reused on both surfaces (it only loads the textures once if they're used by multiple surfaces.
Genesis 8/8.1 have next-to-no texture load time. If you do a dev load--which has no textures--it loads as quick as a Genesis 8 with textures. The Genesis 8/8.1 lag is just geometry/morph loading.
EDIT:
I didn't read close enough, I thought you were talking about load times.
When it comes to memory load, the figure's geometry only takes up about 50 megabytes, IIRC. Aside from textures, most of the memory is eaten up by SubD as Matt_Castle mentioned, which quadruples the geometry with every tick. Unfortunately, SubD is necessary for HD morphs to work. If you're doing a close-up glamour shot and need HD morphs and crisp textures, then you'll need to bite the bullet and use 3-5GB. But if the character is far-ish away from the camera, you can drop the SubD to 1.0 and maybe run the textures through Scene Optimizer (or do it yourself with GIMP), and it'll drop the memory usage to manageable levels. You really can't tell if the textures have been reduced 2x or 4x unless they're really close to the camera.
Thank you for the advice. New back-of-head zone sounds... wow, what a waste of resources. Only had a quick look, already didn't understand why the Torso was suddenly renamed to Body :-/. Does this cause problems with using Genesis 8 skins on Gen 8.1? Anyway, good tip. I always like to optimize my texture usage, makes so much difference (uncompressed tifs are a scourge; normal maps in the eyes? who needs 'em!). Will downgrade the SubD! Sub2 is more than enough. I am still trying to figure out what the new shader options are on the textures, that got unexpectedly confusing all of a sudden with all those make up layers and stuff now, oofph.
Yeah, i need tips on usage for my 16 gb pc...
Uncompressed vs compressed effects storage space only, once the images are opened in any application they will be uncompressed and reserve memory according to formula;
Width (px) x Height (px) x color depth (bits) / 8 (bits) / 1024^2 = MegaBytes
Personally, I'd agree that it's generally not a very efficient use of another texture zone for most human figures, who can be expected to have hair covering that area anyway, but it can be quite beneficial on alien or fantasy figures when they're not going to have hair.
Genesis 8.0 skins can be used on G8.1 though, as the G8.1 figures can still load the old UVs and are set up so that (at least for the base figure), the Torso mats are redirected to the Head and Body zones. It is however often more hassle where geoshells are involved, as geoshells do not retain the surface groups.
Note that file size on disk isn't actually that indicative of VRAM usage - the maps are not being sent to the graphics card in JPEG/PNG/TIFF format; Iray uses its own compression types depending on map resolution and type. Normal maps are a type that is never compressed when sending them to the card (these map types are too sensitive to compression artefacts), so having them in a lossless file type is actually a good thing. Changing this out for a JPEG file might save a little disk space, but it makes no difference to Iray's VRAM usage (unless you reduce the bit depth in the process). In fact, what it does is introduce the compression artefacts that Iray was trying to avoid in the first place.
Creators should absolutely provide these map types in lossless formats (although not necessarily uncompressed ones). And, indeed, even for the types of map Iray is going to compress, use of lossless file formats can potentially *reduce* VRAM usage, because JPEG can put compression artefacts right in the middle of areas that were supposed to be completely clean, which means Iray sees that data and uses it, even though it's complete junk that wastes memory.
4.15 in general uses way more memory. I have 32GB and with 4.11/4.12 I used to be able to run Photoshop and Daz and diddle around with textures all I want, editing them and seeing them in Iray preview right away. Since 4.15, can't do that anymore. Can't wait for the new rig to get built because I'm totally over running out of VRAM and RAM on scenes and/or characters I used to have no issues with. It's to the point where I really don't enjoy working with this stuff anymore, or at the very least it's frustrating so I don't want to bother. With the new rig (3090 and 64GB of RAM to be expanded as soon as my wallet recovers a bit to 128GB) I hope the itch comes back because I'll be able to do what I want and not have to deal with a laggy system.
The back-of-head zone was actually a smart design choice, because the neck material zone in G8 had about a quarter the resolution of the head, and it was very obvious. As for converting textures, it can cause problems, but there is an option in the Surfaces tab labelled (IIRC) "Legacy" that lets you use G8 textures.
If you're rendering far away you should decrease subd until you cant see the difference. and if you're really low on RAM consider resizing down all your textures. this is exactly how game engines optimize (LOD), based on distance from camera.
I will, I'm used to retexurizing a ton. :-) Interesting explanations about the Tifs; but the thing is; there are figures that had insane texture numbers like 1GB total in Normal Map .tifs, which did actively cause problems for my lower/mid end computer (slow load, slow render, slow turning). And compressing them down to jpgs in Photoshop (in Quality 11) fixed the heck out of the problems I had with the figures, without noticing any artifacts or other flaws whatsoever (my results looks on the same level as the Store previews here). I've been doing it ever since. On a professional/theoretical level it may not be the right thing to do, but on my dumb amateur level/ in practice it simply improves the heck out of my workload without any negatives (as far as the human eye can see).
You should be fine with that system. I have a 3090 with 32GB of RAM and am rendering with the regular Daz release and the beta version at the same time (please note I do render in layers so that needs to be taken into consideration), with After Effects or Blender running and sometimes rendering something, Spotify, and Safari all at once and have never ran out of VRAM.
Then I suspect you may not necessarily be able to make full use of your 3090 under all circumstances, as Daz Studio can regularly demand massively more system RAM than it does VRAM.
With my 3060, if I'm running it anywhere near its 12GB VRAM limit, I've seen DS use over 40 GB of system RAM at the same time.
Tifs or PNGs are used when you need the image to remain true and precise, JPG adds compression artifacts.