How to create a new separate installation of studio without...

lamoid_5f20d3e469

My current version of Studio (4.16) has become so bloated with contents that it is becoming extremely slow. In particular, loading any scene with a G8 or G8.1 figure in it takes many minutes. From this, https://www.versluis.com/2020/05/why-do-daz-characters-take-so-long-to-load/ , I learned that the problem is all the thousands of morphs I have added over the years get loaded one file at a time when ever a G8 figure is loaded. I actually use very few of them. It is difficult for me to uninstall them using DIM, because many of them -- most of them -- I installed manually.

I have my entire content folder hierarchy on a secondary drive.

It seems like the easiest thing to do would be to start over. What I would like to do is install a brand new instance of Daz Studio. Preferably the latest one. And have it point to a brand new content folder hierarchy without disrupting the current one. Essentially I want to have the equivalent of seperate python environments for each one. I want to sandbox each installation so one does not interfere with the other. Can that be done?

I presume that if I am successful in creating two separate, distinct installations with thier own distinct, separate content hierarchies I will not be able to use the new instantce with any of my more than 3000 existing scenes. I presume if I try to load one of those in the new instance of DS I will get thousands of errors as it tries to load the morphs it cannot find.

Is there no solution to this problem? I know there are lots of complaints about it here -- extremely slow loading times. If it does not exist, there needs to be some way to exclude unused morphs from a character or a scene, and simply add them as needed to each one. Is that even possible with DS?

Richard Haseltine

No need for a separate instalaltion (which would, in any event, share settings if it was the same release channel).

Go to Edit>Preferences>Content tab>Content Directory Manager, make sure the radio button next to the Current set is selected and click Copy (this makes a back up of your current set up). Then edit all the paths as needed to set up your new content directory structure (including a new database), I recommend installing through Daz Studio as it can be fiddly to do two independent installss through the other tools, One everything is working go back to Content Directory Manager make a copy of the new set. Now switching si just a matter of selecting the set you wish to use in Content Directory Manager.

Leana

The only option to have two installs with completely separate settings is to install one general release and one beta.

And yes, if you don't install morphs to your second version of the content library and they were used in a scene you're trying to load then you'll get errors.

These products are very useful to deal with the "G8 with tons of morphs" problems:

https://www.daz3d.com/turbo-loader-for-genesis-8-and-81

https://www.daz3d.com/turbo-loader-booster-utilities

lamoid_5f20d3e469

Thank you, RIchard and Leana! I'll try your suggestions.

crosswind

General Release + Beta will be a pretty nice choice, suggest you go for this way, and Turbo Loader of course, a must to have good tool. I used to have the same issue like you. There were around 24k active morphs in my lib resulting 4 mins loading time of a base G8F figure, and much longer time of loading scenes for sure. I used Turbo Loader to just enable 9k morphs (figure morphs + others) now the base G8F loading time is less than 40 secs with cache. Really nice~

Not sure if you have any idea about how many figure's morphs you've installed, and how long it takes to load a base figure? Actually for most of the cases, long loading time results from 2 major factors: 1) TOO many character morphs installed; 2) Duplicate formulas errors.
For 1)，Try to just install character products that you really like and need.
For 2)，Is there any duplicate formulas message in DAZ log file? Sometimes 1 or 2 wrongly-defined morph dsf files from a single character will significantly delay the figure loading. One of my friends ever asked for my help with the slow loading issue, 7 mins of a scene loading. I checked his log file, there were lots of duplicate formulas coming from a 3rd-party character's morph files (named 2B... sth. like that). I asked him just to simply delete the related dsf files, then the scene loading time was down to 2.5 mins.

So you better check the log file periodically and try to fix duplicate formulas errors if there's any~