Decimator LOD not saved in Scene / Daz3D Crash
oliver.baumgart_7c0713193b
Posts: 2
Hello,
looks like the LOD created by the Decimator is no longer saved in the scene. In addition to that DAZ3D crashes when you rework surfaces after decimating a model.
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Comments
More information needed I think.
What figure are you decimating, and how are you saving it?
What are you doing to rework a decimated surface?
Using DAZ3D 4.7.0.12 on Windows7 x64
1. Drag and Drop Genesis Figure into new Scene.
2. Start Decimator, Select Figure, Prepare for Decimation and reduce Polys.
3. Save Scene, Restart Daz, Load Scene -> LOD wasn't saved, textures are messed up, you have to start over.
And the crash :
1. New Start, add Figure and Textures.
2. Decimate the figure using Decimator.
3. Go to Geometry Editing -> Surface, select a few surface, apply them to an existing surface.
4. And here it crash : Delete surfaces with Polycount 0. Once you delete it the render screen shows that you selected the whole model with gaps/missing vertices and crash. Can repeat it every time unfortunatly.
I haven't used Decimator in years, but I just tried this. When I loaded my saved scene, it just showed as if it was a freshly loaded Genesis, but when I loaded the Decimator pane, and clicked on Prepare to Decimate, the original version appeared There was then under Mesh Resolution > Resolution Level an extra option 'Decimator Working'
I tried saving as LOD as well, but I don't know where it is supposed to be saved to, but I couldn't find it by name on my PC.
Hopefully someone who uses Decimator can help you further.
Thanks for confirming this. The problem is that if the LoD is not saved on the Scene you have to "re-decimate" the figure every time - the problem here is that your surfaces/textures will start to miss-align and you need to reapply the material to get it fixed - however, if you used the TextureAtlas or changed Surfaces you cannot do that anymore so you are getting stuck.
i am also having an issue with decimator saving the LOD. I have tried saving as a figure asset as one article suggests, but even then the lod is not stored in the daz scene file or in the new figure.
no crashing though.
i opened a bug report in hopes they fix it one day as I plan to use this a lot.
I have never tried saving such files in a scene ... I have exported out the .obj file though and for what I was doing at the time, that worked fine.
Yeah that is what I was doing to get around it for a bit, however that doesn't work so well for all workflows.Decimator is advertised with the ability to save LODin the file. There is a wiki guide on it. Even following those steps it did not work.
Keeping the LOD in the file gives you access to all the morphs and stuff, and lets you change the LOD dynamicly based on need. (so you can use lower level of LOD in a big scene if you want, but use higher LOD when close up). Etc etc.
Daz asked me to give steps to reproduce which I did in the bug ticket. so hopefully this will get tracked down.
Hopefully ;-) Would be nice to save LOD properly.
they said it was not working with DUF properly...and advised me about OBJ. I explained the value of keeping the LOD in the actual file and pointed to a few Daz Doku docs that talked about using that feature. I also posted a piece of the decimator product page that talkes about the dynamic LOD (which is pointless if you can't save the lod in the scene).
They said they would pass it to the devs, but visibility is now lost and it may never get fixed :(
Okay, thanks for letting us know too.
no problem! i do wish there was a public way for us to track this however.
same issue here, will write them, maybe this way we can do some pressure.
Was this ever fixed?
I'm using DS 4.9. It still does not save or reload the LOD with the scene file. In response to my help request, customer service told me to export an obj file after decimating. Customer service said to use Edit>Figure>Geometry>Add Level of Detail to reload the LOD after reopening the scene. About half the time, this allows me to reload the saved obj as an LOD. The other half of the time, the loaded LOD has no faces or a few faces and logs an error message DEBUG: Unmatched vertices for LOD. Even when the LOD is reloaded successfully, it will not be saved with the scene.
This is what happened when I reloaded a decimated M4 obj as an LOD. When I decimated, he looked fine in the viewport. The exported obj looks fine when imported by itself. It is only when loading the obj as LOD that poor M4 loses the lower half of his body.
If I try to decimate Mil Horse and reload the obj as LOD, I get 0 faces, according to Scene Info. Nothing at all shows in the viewport when the LOD is selected in the Parameters pane Mesh Resolution.
DSF/DUF doesn't have facilities to store LOD information.
To my understanding it would require to split what's currently called "geometry" into "vertices" and "topology" and have multiple "topologies" for different LODs. This is major change in file format. And then to make it to play nicely with switchable UVs and geografts :) I doubt it will happen any time soon or even "DAZ soon" :)
As a possible workaround you can save decimated figure as new 'figure' or conformer.