DAZ – !”&%$!!

Performance

… is making me mad!

I bought a couple of Assets and installed them… and it got maddening slow. I am not sure what the root cause is… but I travelled far and wide the internet… and did a couple of things – and now it is working again in a managebale speed.

Many sources suggested that MORPHS are a main “lag” problem.

I tried uninstalling many morphs – but actually – they did not reset – I mean, they were still available. I even removed them manually from my “Content” directory! What does DAZ do?

I then discovered… that I am not only using “DIM” as an install manager – but that DAZ per default seemingly also uses DAZ Connect… and most of the assets were so “double” installed – namely in the “My DAZ Connect Library” “cloud” directories.

Bravely I then deleted the cloud folder… and the products were not available anymore.

I can’t remember the exact issue (as this was done a few days ago – and I tried out so many things) – but I still had one issue.

I know the last thing I did was clear the CMS – the content management system. You can do that from within DAZ – reset the database. It warns you – and it sounds really dangerous…

But after the steps:
– uninstall everything with DIM
– delete the cloud folder
– create a new content folder
– set the new content folder in DAZ and DIM (and remove the old content folder)
– reset the CMS

DAZ appeared “clean”…

I then continued installing products (DIM) from which I knew they had no “global” morphs (morphs that are used with every Genesis figure).

I then sorted through all the “manual” assets I got from third party sites… and did the same – it was a little pain to do so.

But I finaly had something I would call a DAZ “Base”… with which I could actually work.

Creation of a Gen 9 figure took about 10 seconds (before … minutes).

Then I started loading my scenes and own characters… and started “activating” the assets I needed… it was a bit cumbersome – to get them all together… But now I am working with a DAZ content library with only the things I need.

Now – that I know how and what todo – I can clean DAZ in about an hour.

A time well spent and well invested… scenes that took several minutes to load… characters that took minutes to add…

All that goes “smoothly” (hahaha – whatever you define as smoothly) and takes at most a minute… and I can actually work with DAZ again.

The invested hours – will be regained in a couple of days I am sure!

Animation Trouble

I wanted to add small! animation – only 2 seconds.

It drove me NUTS!

Following procedure…
– I created a scene
– expanded my timeline to 61 frames (30fps)
– I wanted the animation looping… so I copy and pasted the necessary key frames to frame 30 and frame 60
– than I changed frame 30 to the intermediate state (as a first step)

Then – all hell broke loose. As soon as I switched to any intermediate frame (not 1 not 30 not 60) my DAZ “froze”.
(It was enough to play the animation…)

I tried it several times… re-did the scene 2 times.
I thought I might have installed something wrong – installed DAZ again and all assets…
It took me two days to figure it out!

The gist is, that the “computed” intermediate frames can be computed using differen algorythms. The default one is TCB (Tension, Continuity, Bias).

BUT!
That algorythm sometimes produces values (positioning…) that are NAN (not a number).

Why it computes a number that is NAN for a position that does not change for all keyframes – I really don’t know.
Anyway NAN is a very bad “number” especially when DAZ tries to place a figure to a NAN position…
Whatever it tries to do – it hangs.

GEE! People!
If the default algorythm can produce those catastrophic results – at least give me a warning message! That I KNOW what happened.
It can’t be that difficult to check if a value is NAN and give me warning!

Anyway – as always once you know the problem – the solution was not difficult – change the interpolation algorythm to “linear” instead of TCB – done.

But it cost me TWO freaking days to figure it out…



Comments

One response to “DAZ – !”&%$!!”

  1. Anon Avatar

    Also hate Daz, thing is literally a program still stuck in the early 2000’s, it’s UI is just horrendously shit. It’s unfortunate that it’s pretty much the easiest way to get realistic customizable human meshes that have naughty bits.

    You may have more luck just using it as a raw character builder then importing over to Blender for the actual work. More to learn for the whole import process and learning Blender’s systems and all that, but at least you then get to use a modern stable software with a way superior renderer and a larger support community. If you happen to have AMD graphics, the performance is insanely better over Daz’s CPU rendering.

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