I'm frustrated, and I'd really like an update that focused on performance.

CypherFOX

Greetings,

I don't rant very often, but...I'm feeling really frustrated tonight.  I had an hour before bed to do a little scene work, and...well, you'll see.

<rant>

I have a large content library.  Not the largest, but it's...pretty big.  I have a few terabytes of specifically purchased-from-DAZ content on my laptop's SSD drive.

Despite the SSD, it takes a very long time to load scenes (my most recent, with five characters, took 23 minutes to load).  Adding characters takes a very long time...like, click to add a character and go off and make some hot chocolate kind of time.  I built a scene with five characters, and each one took that kind of time to load into the scene.  I clothed them, posed them, gave them hair, tweaked a few things, saved, did a few more tweaks, saved...and it crashed.  So I started it back up again with a sigh, and tried to load the scene, figuring...I have a few minutes left, I'll just set one or two more hair colors and hit render and let it do that while I go to sleep.

That's when it took 23 minutes to load the scene.

Typically the discussion from here goes, "Oh, yeah, DAZ Studio is known to have problems if you have lots of morphs.  Cut back on your morphs."

No.

DAZ Studio should _fix_ the problem with large numbers of morphs, perhaps by front-loading the ones that are referenced in the scene/character file, and lazy loading anything else that might be involved after the scene/character is up.  Yes, I understand that this might mean that the characters change slightly after the scene is 'finished' loading, but at least I can get to work on the scene while I still have the thoughts on what I want to change in it in my mind.  I don't care if this isn't the right answer, the point is to stop doing whatever it is that DAZ Studio is doing that makes it not load pretty much just as fast as it can parse the DUF JSON, and let me get to building my scene up faster.  I get that there are architectural decisions that were made years ago that makes this hard to solve; it still needs to be solved.  And I don't care if it's 'You can disable this set of functionality that we think is really useful, in exchange your scenes and characters load super-fast.'  I'd check that checkbox instantly, and let folks who need those features (default morphs, maybe?  I don't know.) use them.

Seriously, can you imagine thinking about a tweak you want to do to your code, loading up your IDE and having to wait half an hour before you could start coding?  Imagine the derailment to your workflow.  If you have an hour or two to spare and want to do some hacking, it'd eat up half to a quarter of the time you have for it.  The same is true for DAZ Studio.  I have a large library, but very little time to actually do scene building, and I'd like to spend it...building scenes, instead of waiting for loading.

Now I get that it's 'my fault' for having a large content library, and these problems don't affect most folks who have just a few figures, which are probably the majority of customers.  But I paid for that library.  And I shouldn't be punished for having it.

I honestly don't care about 90% of the things people complain about, like IK or exporting to other render engines, or better animation.  They don't affect my quality of life when using DAZ Studio anywhere near as much as the performance does.  Features are nice to have; performance is absolutely critical.

Please think differently about scene and character loading, and stop it from being slow just because 'that's the way it is'.

</rant>

I mean no offense to anyone, please don't take it that way; tonight just really sucked, and I really needed to rant. :(

Thank you.

--  Morgan

 

PerttiA

Banging ones head to the wall usually results only in ones head starting to hurt.

You can shave quite a lot off the loading time by getting rid of the warnings and conflicts in the log first and removing excessive Alias-morphs

Richard Haseltine

It won't help with scene loading, but are you loading character presets or loading the base figure and applying shape and material presets? I find loading a base figure and applying presets to be much faster than aplying a character preset, perhaps because theya re just changing values rather than refreshing the property list as a character preset does (though others don't see the disparity).