Random Extended Lock-Up times
Doc_1189058
Posts: 30
Hey, folks. I think this is an issue a lot of people have had, and I've read as much as I can about it, but I'm still left with a lot of questions!
So, I use the timeline a lot to make animations with, and one of my biggest enemies is Daz Studio locking up without reason for an extended period of time. I detail my animations quite heavily, so I often create keyframes for all objects in a scene for every frame, and I wonder if that's what causes it, but it's even locked up when I'm not using the timeline at all sometimes.
It's the usual "not responding" issue, which is ordinarily fine/normal, you just wait a moment and it wakes up on its own, but sometimes it locks up for 15 minutes to an HOUR. Sometimes even more, and I work for a living WITH Daz Studio. I don't have time for these ridiculous frozen periods. - If I'm lucky, it'll happen moments after I've saved, so I can just end process and open Daz fresh.
At first I figured my computer was old and crappy, but now I have this brand new super-duper command-center of a computer, and the issue is STILL happening. I'm trying to eliminate what's causing it specifically, but I've honestly got now clue. I have a library of Daz gubbins that spans over 10 years of collecting, which has caused multiple content libraries - so I consolidated them. Then I thought maybe Daz stuggled the longer the PC hjad been on for (I know, I'm clutching at straws) but I'm genuinely running out of ideas for what's causing it.
It happens a lot when trying to record a bunch of keyframes, which is usually fair enough, but it's unpredictable how long the loading time will be. Sometimes it's over an hour and I begin to think that it's not coming back! - But some days it's just like Daz is in a bad mood and will lock up for absolutely no reason. Like the click of a mouse (clicking ANYTHING) will just send it on an unresponsive bender. I highlight the keyframe-making process as what can typically set it off, but only covers a small portion of these lock-up times - I just highlight it as a more dependable example.
The LOG has absolutely NOTHING. There is no identifyable last action before the pause, and none after. As far as the log is concerned it is "12:00 Business as usual, 12:00 business as usual, 12:55 business as usual" jut a huge chunk of time missing.
Because I have completely switched PCs and this issue still remains, 1 of 2 things are going on here: either it's Daz, or it's how I do things, that's why I'm trying to explain a little bit of how I work as well, just in case that's contributing to the issue. But I feel that Daz may be routinely doing something that doesn't show up in the log that reacts to what I'm doing. I think I'm accusing us of butting heads, I guess.
Does any of this rambling strike a cord with anyone? Can you think of what might be going on here?
It's not like Daz is unstable, far from it - but these lock-ups are like a coiled cobra striking. I'll be in the midst of a roll, deep in the jungle of a project, before suddenly "blip". I'm locked out for the next half an hour or so. It really REALLY sucks. Any help would be greatly appreciated!
- Doc
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Comments
How much system RAM does your computer have?
When one creates keyframes for 'everything', that is a huge process. It means every morph and every joint movement gets pinned in that frame for every character, their clothing and hair. This information is then saved in the scene savefile, which increases in size exponentially, which means the time it takes to open, save and close the scene gets longer and longer.
One thing to improve the experience, is to keyframe only things that do change.
Yeah, I think your point is very fair, which is why I tried to explain my work-process as detailed as possible as I suspected that to be a serious issue. A second opinion agreeing always helps.
The rig I'm using now is generally quite powerful, and with 32gb of ram to boot, so if the machine is ruled out - then it's me who should be on trail for Daz abuse! --- Probably a decent starting remedy would be to move the clothes of the scene to a seperate folder, so that I can select the scene and the figures, hit "select children" and do it like that. That's at least triple the keyframes reduced to be recorded alone.
But I'm still interested in the inconsistancy of the matter. Sometimes I can have 2-300 frames of keyframes on everything and the program is running sharp as a dart, has no problem adding now keyframes, etc - but other times these big lockups start happening, and there doesn't seem to be any identifyable triggers as to what does or doesn't make it happen.
Or perhaps the RAM thing is it. I don't know much about temporary memory or stuff like that (I'm sub-Techy, not brilliant with machines) but the issue does seem to get worse the longer Daz Studio is open. So maybe it could be a buildup of something? Restarting the program doesn't help, but perhaps a complete system restart might? Would need time to test it, tho
I have barely scratched the surface with animation, but when I started with DS4, I tried to use the same methods telling my stories that I had used with Poser - Ie. using the timeline like a storyboard, but I soon found out that in order to keep finished frames from changing due to me doing something in later frames, I needed to create keyframes for every frame I didn't want to change, pinning everything (didn't realize the consequences yet) at least on the characters that were moving around. For one character that meant creating a memory point for the character, all of the morphs on the character, any and all rotational data (and morphs) for all the children of the character (fingers, toes, everything), even when the information had not changed. That alone is a huge amount of data, and if the character had body hair for different parts of the body, the keyframe was memorizing all the morphs on all the parts of the hair, the same with clothing and the hair on th the characters head - All of that for just one character.
I had a scene with maybe 25-30 keyframes and two characters in a tropical environment, the size of the savefile was over 3GB's before I lost it due to running out of space when I allowed DS to save the file while closing. Opening and saving the file took well over an hour...
That is how I know what creating keyframes for 'everything' can do.
DS is a RAM hog and 32GB's may not be enough for what you are describing. I didn't think I was doing anything that heavy, but when I upgraded my 32GB's to 64GB's, I noticed the computer becoming more responsive as Windows didn't have to use virtual memory (disk space) to compensate for the missing RAM.
Record? Are you using Puppeteer to populate your timeline? If so you gotta be careful with your actual puppeteer process. That can lock up big-time.
Ram is only one part of issue. Have 128gb 3600mhz with all hard-drive disk-caching disabled. So zero chance of dropping to hard-drive caching. So feel safe saying that.
Suggest slowly test different scenarios to find your bottleneck. Can be quite revealing.
Interestingly no one has ever made an advanced analysis publically of DS animation-timeline best practices.
DS with its umpteem awesome morphs and various controls that fire in background and dense hair and other assets, it doesn't take too long and the timeframe will have more burden with all those vert changes. This means DAZ is not suited for long animations in one scene if using newer dense mesh with lots of figures, assets and enviroments.
Unfortunately animation is still single-core for foreseeable future, drooling at the GPU rapid evolution, and DS really has so many much going on.
Thanks for the input, dude. From the sound of it, your work process is actually quite simular to mine (like using the timeline to storyboard, etc) so your info is extra useful because of that.
Things have been improving steadily will of this in mind. I've been taking the old fashioned phrase of "pencil milage" and applying to keying methods. When I star a new scene, I open a group for all the clothes, for the set, and for anything that is not typically going to move frame-by-frame, and put all the actors and moving doodads into a different group. Thus, when marking a frame I just need to select the latter group, selecty children, and mark the frame. It's still keyframing in bulk, but cutting the CPU/DAZ some slack while doing it.
Another process I've developed are pre-keyed zero-poses. --- I basically get G8 solo in a blank scene, make sure all their transforms/poses are zeroed, select all, keyframe about 10/11 frames on the timeline, and save the pose. This method allows me to pose the model freely without being concerned about whether or not making the keyframe is going to cause any stress. Also, if I'm using importable poses, I can have 2 G8's in a group, import the pre-keyed poses for each of them, and apply poses freely, perhaps moving the group if I need their placement moved.
It's working like a dream. It's just a case of finding tips and tricks to make the marking of frames as easy as possible for Daz, in my opinon. The lock-ups seem at their worst when CREATING a keyframe, but not adjusting or updating it, so that's what I've been attacking the issue from. Thanks again for your input, it significantly helped how I was approaching and understanding the whole thing! This is considerably less of an issue now.
- Doc
Cheers for your input! - My computer knowledge is very patchy at best. 32ish gigs of ram is about as much as I know, aside from 5tb of SSDs. I'm not sure what disk-catching is, or how to disable it, but I wonder if that'd help me, give the amount of space I've got on this thing?
It's a shame there's no advice for the best practices while using the daz timeline. I've used it for opver a decade now, and even I could do with a LOT of pointers!