Dforce hair vertex count so high it's unusable?
doibhil
Posts: 30
I'm new to Daz, but I recently bouught this hair: https://www.daz3d.com/mrl-dforce-long-morphing-hair-for-genesis-8-females ;
I like the hair, but I'm unable to render any scenes with it because (I think) the hair has an astronomically high vertex count at 3.8 million. I checked my other hairs and most of them hover around 200,000 vertexes. I'm not exactly sure why this hair has so much more? I'm usually able to easily render a scene with two G8Fs and a full background in less than an hour, but with this hair the render geometry jumps up to 2.7 GB and won't even start. Am I missing something? It seems I'd have to have the most advanced machine available to even use this hair at all. If anyone can give me any advice I'd really appreciate it. Thanks a lot!
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Comments
What are your system specs?
dForce hair uses strands generated at render time to look more like real hair, but it does have a high overhead if the number of strands or their ability to bend is set to a realistic level. You can reduce the number of strands or the number of vertices per strand to try to lighten the load, check the Surfaces pane and the Parameters pane.
It may help to check the Viewport and render line tesselation setting in the surface pane for the hair. Viewport line tesselation needs to be at least 2, with higher numbers really impacting performance.
I'm not so sure that is strand-based hair. The description says "MRL dForce Long Morphing Hair combines hair created using fibermesh with Daz's dForce technology...". That sounds like the dForce cloth engine to me, like Linday uses. The original posters complaint of a huge vertex count sounds valid. I don't own the product, so I can't verify this hypothesis.
@doibhil if you cant use the product, submit a help request and ask for a refund. You have 30 days from purchase to get a full refund.
I just loaded it into a scene, and it's definitely dForce SBH hair.
edit: I loaded a second dForce hair (Alexa) and compared the surface settings. The most obvious difference that might be bogging down the system is that the PS hairs per guide setting, which is set between 1 and 20 for different surfaces on the MRL hair, but 0 on Alexa. If it's creating as many as 20 additional hairs for every guide, that could certainly be impacting the render geometry. I haven't tried changing the settings to see how it affects the look or rendering, but it's worth investigating.
Thank you to everyone for the help! I checked the surfaces pane and played around with the parameters, reducing PS hairs per guide and whatnot. Unfortunately the hair looks abysmal on any setting that my GPU can actually handle, so I'm gonna enquire about a refund. Is this standard for strand-based hair? Or is it dforce hair? I've never used any before, but it'd be nice to know so I can avoid them in the future. Thanks again!
At 0, oof, it looks bad. see attached, left character.
Dialing back the two highest offenders, Base and outer, to 10, it's noticeable in the thinning on the bangs, right character, but the longer parts, it's not too bad.
Definitely taking a couple GB of VRam at default.
Side note, while the Alexa hair isn't using the PS hair guide, it is using the PR hair guide, and has values of 60 on the 2 fringe surfaces, and 50 on hairs 1-4 with 12 on 5 and 6.
Looking at the vram usage, it's only about 600MB less in my test setup.
On a clean load, the alexa hair scene is showing 3.5GB and the Long hair scene is showing 4.2GB
Base scene with no hair, 1.7GB.
So, the hairs themselves are using 1.7 and 2.5GB respectively.
In answer to your question about Vram utilization, it's any hair.
While SBH(strand based hair) may run heavier on average compared to poly based hair, they can all be memory hogs.
The advantage to poly hair over SBH, is the texture sizes might be able to be reduced without sacrificing quality.
You can do this with the "Scene optimizer" or by using LIE or in photoshop.
SBH seems to use very small textures and even removed doesn't seem to free up much vram.
This was just in relation to the ones i tested.
Thanks for checking. The product description that says it uses "fibermesh" must be wrong. Strand-based hair is not fibermesh.
I see, I suppose I've just gotten lucky with the hairs I'm using. I have 5 or 6 different hairs, and none of them even come close to the size of the MRL hair and I can render no problem. I have an RTX 3060 laptop GPU with 6GB vram. Would you say this is not enough for most high-quality hairs? I was considering buying the Alexa hair but now I'm thinking my GPU can't handle it.
Try reducing "Render Line Tessellation Sides" if you are running out of GPU memory. You can monitor your GPU utilization using Task Manager's Performance Tab. See attached. In my example, "Render Line Tessellation Sides" has been reduced from 3 (low GPU utilization, all work done by the CPU) to 2 (most of the work done by the GPU).
Great thanks for the advice, I am gonna try this next time I use the hair and will report back.