YAY! It Renders - (solved) Help Please DForce Hair?
JasmineSkunk
Posts: 1,902
So I have a couple of Dforce hair products, but I can not get them to render and I am assuming there is something I am either doing wrong or not doing, First... the hair does not look "right" in Iray preview (pic attatched). I have had strand based hair render okay without issue and I have had dforce clothing simulate and render for me, but whenever I try to use dForce hair all I get is the loading screen saying "retrieving geometries" and it will just NOT render and crashes. Just trying to get a quick and dirty peek at the hair. I have not messed with any settings and I have not even run a simulation on the hair. What do I need to know?
What I do...
1. Load character
2. Load hair
3. Render
but nothing happens. Empty png screen in the render window till it crashes
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I have that hair and can confirm that it looks "straggley" when in iray preview but, for me, it does look correct when actually doing a render. I believe this is done for performance reasons but I cannot remember where the setting for it is.
EDIT: See example comparison below for the hair "out of the box" - looking odd in preview but fine for an actual render. The setting to change this behaviour (if you use Smart Content) is under Materials/Iray/Hair/Settings/"Volta 20 Preview Render On"
So, I think the not-rendering and crashing is a separate issue - is there anything in the last few lines of the logs that may help?
I do not know how to read the log but here is a little bit of the bottom of it dated for today... Does it tell you anything? Also....further up in the log I saw Cuda version installed is 0.0 but 11.8 required. What is CUDA?
(edited for brevity)
I don't understand something... Is dForce hair not possible without an NVidia graphics card? I am able to render in Iray.And other strand based hair renders for me
Ahh, you can probably ignore that since you don't have an nVidia graphics card. Let me repeat my test on my mac - just incase the render issue differs with CPU rendering.
Awesome. Thank you
I usually use my windows/nvidia machine for dForce but pretty sure it would work fine - if slower - via CPU. You can probably remove those CUDA errors by unchecking "Allow GPU Detection" and "Check GPU Driver" in the Advanced tab of the Render Settings. If you have GPU checked in the two panes above then uncheck them there - they do not show up as an option on my nvidia-less mac but windows might be different. Either way I don't believe those are related to your crash issue.
Your tip did improve the image in preview. Thank you for that.
But.. if it shows in preview shouldn't it render?
Well, I have successfully rendered an image via CPU - again it's on a mac so not a perfect test - but the fact that you have a preview with the hair is probably a good sign that it should work.
I've also checked and the hair does not appear to have had any updates listed in the wiki and so if you have it installed then it should be the latest version. But just in case, make sure your version is dated 27/04/2020. The wiki does list a slightly later date but presumably that was to allow for the QC process before being made available in the store.
Just for info, the snippet of your log you posted only seems to be from launching of the Daz application to the moment the user interface was available. This was probably from when you re-launched after the crash i suspect. If you scroll a bit further up you should see some items which relate to what Daz was doing right before it crashed. It can be a bit confusing so what you can do is put your scene together but just before you push the render button open up the log, delete all the text and save it. Then when you start your render and it crashes you can find the log file via Windows Explorer and it will only contain the log entries relevant to the steps leading up to the crash. You can then attached that log file to a post rather than pasting the text into the comment.
I'm trying to post the new log but it says it's too many characters... hold on
Well, it's not a perfect comparison but within the logs of my render "Retrieving geometry" was listed twice and both times it moved on to the next thing within a few seconds and so being stuck at that for several minutes does not bode well :( Ideally you'd need to let Daz crash - if that is what it's going to do - since I think that may reveal more info in the log than killing the application. Although, there is also no point waiting forever :(
If it's still being stubborn I would try doing a render with the exact same scene but with the hair hidden - just to make sure that it's not something else causing issues. If that works then try with the base visible but the rest hidden - i.e. so just the skullcap. If that works then perhaps try with the whole of the hair visible but maybe dropping the "Volta Hair dForce"/"Line Tesselation" to lower values to see if that helps the render start working. Also, you could try rendering just the hair, all by itself in an otherwise empty scene. Also, for these tests, I would keep the render image size nice and small 800px or so - both for speed reasons and also to minimise potential memory issues.
I appreciate these steps are going to take a while and not be much fun but we have unfortunately moved beyond my knowledge and so, outside of someone more knowledgeable helping out, I tend to revert to doing more tests to try and narrow down where the issue may be as closely as possible.
Make sure you are attaching it as a text file - if you paste it into the comment body the forum won't like it and also it may make the thread difficult for someone else to read and help out with.
2024-01-05 16:38:29.449 [INFO] :: OpenGL hardware features:
OpenGL provider: ATI Technologies Inc.
(edited for brevity)
Okay....that's the bottom part of it. Do I need to show more?
Sorry, that just looks like the "start-up" log entries again. e.g. What Daz is outputting from the moment you launch the application until the user interface is fully displayed.
If you look into your log and do a search for "Retrieving geometry" - find the last instance of that and then the interesting part should be between that line and the first line you have posted above (e.g. "2024-01-05 16:38:29.449 [INFO] :: OpenGL hardware features"). If you can it would be good to copy just that part of the log and then paste those lines into notepad, save that as a file and then attach this log snippet as an attachment to a comment.
If it's crashing then they may not be any lines between those - but I am hoping there is some sort of error message that would provide some more info as to why the crash is happening.
2024-01-05 16:10:37.726 [WARNING] :: \src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(376): Iray [FATAL] - API:MEMORY :: Memory allocation failed.
2024-01-05 16:10:39.656 [WARNING] :: \src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(376): Iray [WARNING] - API:DATABASE :: 1.0 API db warn : Transaction is released without being committed or aborted. Automatically aborting.
2024-01-05 16:10:39.739 [WARNING] :: \src\pluginsource\DzIrayRender\dzneuraymgr.cpp(376): Iray [WARNING] - DB:DATABASE :: 1.0 DB db warn : Aborting transaction while transaction is blocked!
(edited for brevity)
OK, it looks like your issue is here:
Your machine does not have enough free memory to render the image :(
Do you know how much system memory your have on your PC? The log file indicates 5.8 GB - and so probably you have 6Gb - or 8GB would be more likely? That's really not enough for Iray rendering really :(
You can just attach the log.txt file to your post.
But I render sucessfully in Iray otherwise all the time... lol I don't understand! Yes I have 8GB Ram
Okay, I have attatched the .txt. file. Thanks, Richard! Also a photo of my system specs..
Okay...can I adjust anything to make this work?
Granted these are not on sale right now, but these will probably fix your problem :)
https://www.daz3d.com/line-zero-dforce-strand-hair-shaders
Unfortunately this a rather complicated combination of shader mixer and line tesselation in order to utilize the low weight curves.
It can be done, but then you are still stuck trying to mess with the dual lobe hair settings. Since you don't have a lot of memory available, there aren't many other options, and it still may not render, even with that shader set. The set will reduce it significantly, but no guaranatees. Dforce hair is by nature, heavy,especially the older ones.
Thanks for the clarification, chevybabe.
I've been doing a little research and if I'm understanding everything correctly... (no guarantee that I am) I (think) my little laptop should have one soldered to the board 4GB and one "removable" slotted 4GB of RAM... Again - I think. And... buying a 16GB compatible stick of memory to replace the removable one -if it has it (I didn't quite understand how to find out for certain) is only about $50 bucks.
But - I think I'd be nervous to do it myself. So... How hard is it to add RAM to a laptop anyway? Is it simply pulling out the old and putting in the new, or should I have a "professional" do it (and cost more than I want to spend to fix this. Lol)
I got it to render!
Had no idea what Line tessalations meant, but a bit of a search revealed that they can be found in the Parameter tab under "General" Turning the Setting from 3 to 2 allowed me to render the hair! WooHooo!! LOL. I might see if there is a way to get it looking better but right now I'm very hopeful! Thanks for the help everyone! 
Yay! I'm glad you got it working on your machine in the end :)
Just on this bit - laptops are a little less easy to modify than desktop towers due to their nature of being tightly packed into a small formfactor. However, for most things these days there is usually someone on YouTube to walk you through the process. I found this video which appears to be for your laptop (double-check it tho) and shows what you would have to do to replace the RAM and so you can decide if that is something you are comfortable doing. That video does indicate that the laptop has 1 stick of 8GB (despite having the capacity to have extra soldered on) so it may not be the exact same model that you have.
Thanks, SofaCitizen! I appreciate your help! I will definitely take a look!