Slow posing over generations with clothing & without

Sasqwach

Hey folks, hope this doesnt sound like the regular "oh things are too slow" moan post, but looking for an assist and my spec and investigation seems to point to "this shouldnt be happening"

I've been a Daz user for years now and noticing over time how sluggish things are getting over versions with both new and old characters. Generally getting to the point of losing interest in using Daz as it is just too slow, but can’t really as I have invested a great deal of time using it for comic and illustrated story work I do. (Recently got commissioned too, so my work will be “on the clock” so speed is of importance)

Going to try raising a ticket with Daz but wondered if anyone here in the forums might have same experience.

Faults in Brief.

• Viewport navigation is fine, but posing characters is too slow! Even just 1 figure!
• Early Generation figures are "lightening" to load and pose with "light" clothing...but getting very slow with more complex outfits.
• Later Gen characters (2,3,8) have increasingly long and glitchy load times, painfully unresponsive.
• Later generation figures (3 and 8 especially) are extremely slow to pose even unclothed. Once they have any clothing or are in scenes with multiple other figures it’s almost impossible to get any momentum going due to time it takes for loading and posing.
• I’ve experimented a lot; various "lite" clothing and "heavier" clothing (have several video examples I will upload) for example some vendors clothing is high texture, high resolution and expectedly sluggish but even the most "basic" of outfits can be unusably sluggish.
• Unexpectedly, per generation and studio version jump performance is getting slower for example…
  - M4V4 (unclothed or "light" clothing) -> Super fast load, decent posing speed. But a scene with a above "basic" clothed character (or two), and performance dives.
  - Genesis (clothing or not) -> Fast, I din't really do much with Genesis as when it was "new" I was on a bit of a Daz hiatus so I missed the boat and don't use it much.
  - Gen 2 -> reasonable (until clothed), again a fully clothed, haired, proped character can be very slow, having multiples and even slower.
  - Gen 3->Sluggish, too slow when clothed, because of this I haven't really used G3 that much...but WANT to!
  - Gen 8-> forget about it....a real pity as there is some interesting characters out there, from the few clothing items and characters I have, they are slow as drying paint to move.

As you will read below, I have been thru A LOT of debug and pretty rigorous with trying to find the cause, and it can't be my machine spec.

• Two Intel Xeon E5 2690 @ 2.90Ghz Processors
• 128 Gb Ram (yes...I know...excessive)
• Two Nvidia Titan X with 12Gb..each! (again…yes…excessive)
• Running of SSD's for content and .exe

Ok so troubleshooting...

The Obvious Checks – Within Studio

Edit->Preferences->Interface->Display Optimisation – Trying all options (None, Better, Best), Disabling Per Pixel Shading, Trying on / off for Hardware Anti-Aliasing, Texture Performance Pixel Buffer, etc. No changes.

Interactive update always off. (does anyone use it on!?)

Inactive viewport delay set to on. (I don't use Aux viewport or anything fancy)

Checking Log file for any issue with Plugins at startup. Nothing odd there.

Disabling / reenabling plugins - Octane, Fluidos, Powerpose, etc, or any "superfluous" plugins, have even stripped down to just the "bare minimum”. Still very sluggish.

With figures and clothing; setting resolution to base rather than high resolution, disable or set smoothing iterations to lowest. I used to do this manually a lot but. As I have to do often I even made my own little script "De:Re LOD” it’s not perfect but pretty handy! (see attached – works on most figures and clothes!)
Going this route of setting all to base and no smoothing for pose work has "some" improvement but not as good as I would like and as you see per video, still very laggy.

As per videos (see links below) and good posing practice I extensively use pins for transform, universal and active pose tools. (Without doing so performance is almost unresponsive)

Adjusting Tool settings of aforementioned tools such as ActivePose to "fast" rather than accurate for Drawing Options. Not much change.

Checking there are no "dumb" collision items other than the base figure.

Trying clearing DSON cache files via Preferences->General. No change there, if anything slows loading times.

With Draw Settings ensuring Subdivision Updates is set to Delayed and Manipulation binding to Optimized

Studio Checks Conclusion

While Rotate Tool and the top left “pose tool ball” (whatever you call it) are pretty responsive, ActivePose, Transform and Universal pose tools are very unresponsive. Using Pins DOES help but nowhere near as fast as it should be (or was...I can’t remember Daz feeling this slow…) You can see in my referred videos some good examples. Basically, by the time a character is clothed, base resolutions set, etc it can still be a real drag moving stuff around.
 

The Obvious Checks - Hardware

Disabling extra monitors – I’ve done this both by physically removing cards and just disabling in device manager. My main display is connected via HDMI, 2nd and 3rd via DVI. 3rd Monitor is vertical display, I don't use that often. I could try having my 2 main displays JUST HDMI, but I prefer 1 unutilized Nvidia card to be used JUST reserved for unfettered render (A Boon with Octane). But even if I just have 1 monitor and/or card enabled, no performance improvements.

Reinstalling Nvidia drivers, roll back a few versions, or using latest. No Changes.

Ensuring there are no "superfluous" display adapters present (Pc has no onboard Intel adapters or anything like that).

Running RAM checks with mdsched. Clean bill of health there.

Ensuring BIOS is up to date.

Conclusion
I'm either over spec'd, or have some seriously faulty but non error reporting hardware.

 

The Obvious Checks - Software & OS

Reinstalling Daz and all plugins. No Change.

Reinstalling Daz completely - I remove %appdata%\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4 and use CCleaner to remove any old registry entries.No Joy.

Before you suggest it…No I am not re-installing widows 10...I have clean bill of health all across the board..have dug DEEP using event viewer, done SFC checks, all up to date drivers, checked all Windows system updates, etc.

Checked and repaired all VS c++ redistributables.

In Event viewer - only issue I do have is WHEA logger errors. This has been this way since I had the system (5 years plus) it is due to high amount of ram and it's because it is dual processors with 16 cores each. The firm that built the machine (Scan.co.uk) informed me of this when I purchased (whish was $$$ as you can imagine and they are very reputable dealers) and the motherboard BIOS accomodates this with "suppress WHEA errors" - common practice in overclocked or higher spec'd machines.

Disabling Swap file (strictly you shouldn’t use Swap file on an SSD, the internet is full of endless debate on this one...but IT techs I know say SSD + Swap file = bad. Tried...failed.

Checked GPUZ see attached, nothing awry afaics.

Power management set to high for PC and NVidia cards.

Checking environment variables - only odd thing I’ve seen that seems slightly Daz related is QT_DEVICE_PIXEL_RATIO...hmmm…QT framework….

Trying disabling ANYTHING that might impact performance at startup (virus software, defender, dropbox, etc) Services.msc...mmm don't want to really go there...but by the looks nothing awry.

Conclusion

Outside of re-installing windows nothing is jumping out at me and...ugh re-installing windows...plus the amount of stuff I would have to reinstall and setup again..UE4, Unity, Cinema4D, Premiere,Photoshop, Games, Utilities, etc,etc <SHUDDER>

The Arcane Checks

In Nvidia control panel trying SLI (ok, not recommended with iray) just process of elimination. No Change.

In Nvidia control panel trying combinations of "Use my preference emphasising performance" & "Let the 3D application decide" & Experimenting with advanced "program specific" options. No Change.

Removing ONE of the Nvidia cards a) disabling in device manager b) physically removing

Unplugging and not using my 3D mouse (Connexion Spacemouse Pro - https://www.3dconnexion.eu/products/spacemouse/spacemousepro.html).

Using Process lasso and /or Task manager to set priority to High / Realtime for Daz.

Using Process lasso and /or Task manager to set I/O priority and memory priority to High 

Using Process lasso and /or Task manager to to specify less CPU cores via set affinity. (Tried various combinations...I've had some 3D apps in the past I had to disable seevral cores)

The "lets try something different" Checks

I made a separate runtime with "JUST" the base figure installed, no morphs or characters, nothing,  just plain "out of the box" Gen 2, 3 and 8. They do respond a little bit better…but with clothing attached…back to sluggish performance.

ALSO making my own "stripped down" version of the figures using "saving Morph assets" and "save figure Prop".

Both of these ideas have had a marked improvement, but as soon as clothes go on...slow...it is decidedly better, but not ideal because I want to cloth, texture, sculpt, morph, shape, etc with an active character with options for shaping and tweaking rather than "ok I’ll work with my "Lowly Base" figure unclothed and afterwards copy over the morphs I need or make a new asset.

(Actually, I was writing a script for this too…almost like a “powerloader” in reverse: a script to go thru all the morphs in a character, detecting which ones are in use and then stripping out those unused either via save assets / prop method or deleting non active morphs in an automated fashion akin to Edit Mode in a  figure…I’d be interested in a coding buddy to look at what I have…a potential product I’d say...my attempts worked, but code is slow and the assets/prop method can be fickle)

Folder by folder removing and re-adding character morphs that just seem broken from the relevant data folder ie data/daz3d/genesis 3/Female/Morphs (there have a been a few from Rendo that just "break" figures)

Trying “merge fitted figures geometry” – This can have a speed increase for “heavier” clothing but to detriment of the ACTUAL geometry (ears get crinkly, some outfits just turn into a mess)

Final Conclusion (and exhaustion and exasperation)

So given all the above checks, attempts and even trying to make my own scripts to get round this and sadly…not much result.

I swear there is one tiny thing I am missing, but I am at a loss to find it and sadly it’s eating more time in troubleshooting than actually doing what I should be doing which is…ART!

Hope some of you folks have some ideas, because I am fresh out of em! Thanks in advance for any assists.

See attached too many screen caps of my sys if you need info. VIdeos can be found at https://www.dropbox.com/sh/jp4q445rq6zsadv/AACdpBzOLf9urDOsP0WJ5Gf6a?dl=0

Cheers!

Visuimag

Though this is somewhat old, I want to confirm that I have a very similar issue with slow posing (Genesis 8 Female is particularly bad). Not the 'Interactive is turned on slow' movement, but from one transition to another. It's also bad with Custom Poses rather than pre-applied poses from Vendors.

I've yet to find the cause either, but maybe we can draw more attention to this issue in here.

UHF

I'm currently 50 minutes into applying a pose.  I have a powerful new computer, and I just don't get why its chugging.  Its using 20% of my CPU and showing not responding.

I've applied Y'Vas to Young Minto, and out of concern for this posing, I created a fully adjusted pose in the original scene.  (What's the difference between a custom pose and a vendor custom pose?)

I've turned off all mesh smoothing in order to apply this pose.   My computer has 32GB of RAM, of which I'm using 4.5GB in Daz.  I use Octane but I always disable auto updates, I have to manually load poses and geometry changes.

https://www.daz3d.com/yvas-outfit-for-genesis-8-female

https://www.daz3d.com/young-minto-and-dforce-minto-outfit-for-genesis-8-females

Is there any way for Daz to tell me why Daz is seizing up and becoming useless when being used with products Daz sells?  I need to know how to fix this sometime like maybe this year, and there's only 7 more months for this pose to apply.  (I killed Daz after 1 hour.)

UHF

So... I tested.. I loaded Minto... Pose applies instantly.  I loaded YVas clothes, and the Pose applies instantly.  I applied the props to the YVas clothing, and the pose hangs for what I assume is an indefinite time.

If I load Minto+YVas clothes, and pose (instantly) then apply the props in the final pose, the props apply instantly.  The scene with the posed character can be saved and loaded without any issue.

The character can never be posed again.  If I apply one of the stock G8F poses to the loaded MintoYvasPropped outfit daz now hangs forever.

 

TheKD

The newer the figure, the more JCM are built into it. Another thing to consider, a lot of clothes use mesh smoothing, that will also slow down posing, and even moving the camera around scene for some reason in my experience.

UHF

It was only the attached items (potions, books, metal rings) on Yvas that killed it for me.  I tried it with and without smoothing, etc. 

Aeon Soul's models are my favorites, but they have always been rather hefty on the textures etc.

However this is a new issue for my render in progress.

 

 

rilla

I've run into this issue.

 

I tested each generation from G1 to G8 and found that posing in the viewport got slower with each generation. Genesis 8 is jerky and laggy. G3 is fine, still a little slow but acceptable. G1 and G2 move fast!! I created another libray with just G8F essentials installed. It moved a tad bit faster from my main content library, but not as fluid as G3F. It's making me feel like down-converting all my G8 stuff to G3 now. Oh well, I'll have to put that on the list and slowly chip away at that.