Viewport goes blue, and random crashing when rendering?
ZarconDeeGrissom
Posts: 5,412
The quick-start guide PDF is good for the first day user, I'm 6 days in at this point. The User-Guide PDF, is more like the slightely advanced version of the quick-start guide, and is missing a lot of basic stuff.
Like setting up the program to work with your graphics cards capabilities are completely missing. Edit > Preferences, "Interface" tab.
I turned off Hardware Anti-Aliasing, and that 'reduced' the Blue View-port when I moved anything in the Scene. It still goes blue and dose not come out of it when I load scenes on occasion.
Also, sometimes when I render something, then go to another tab to change a pose or light then go back to render it again, the program crashes.
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
Click the Current Hardware Features button - what do you have? You are presumably running 32 bit Windows judging by the Task Manager, , unfortunately it is very easy to run out of RAM then - though the peak value shown in your screenshot should be safe.
Yep, 4GB of ram. 512MB RamDisk for Firefox tempCache stuff, and the other 512MB taken by IRQ/DMA stuff.
More Screen-caps of a Crash that just Happened to me now.
That peak value was from doing a render.
Well...if that is XP and you have RAM disks set up you are only having about 1 to 1.5 GB available for DS usage. And when you go to render tdlmake, temporarily will consume quite a bit (2 to 3x the uncompressed size of the image file it's converting at the moment...it's converting to an uncompressed tif and making mipmaps), then the 3Delight renderer will eat another big chunk (basically at least as much as DS is currently using). Neither of those processes likes being swapped to disk, while running...neither does DS, itself, when it's in the middle of something. And to make matters worse, XP doesn't have a great track record when it comes to swapping out processes, anyway...it tends to try to swap 'active' ones, that it isn't really keeping good track of.
My guess...XP is running low on RAM and trying to force DS stuff to swap out to the pagefile...and things aren't going very well.
Studio and 3D work, in general, have really outgrown 32 bit environments...
My experience a year and a half ago with DAZ 4.5 on 32bit Windows XP was that I could only render very small scenes. I had to shut down everything else that was not needed, and could still only render very small scenes.
Even a 64-bit Windows 7 system with 4GB of RAM was able to render bigger scenes. I think 8GB RAM on a 64 bit OS is probably the minimum system. I currently have 16GB of RAM and some big scenes I've done have been using all of that. I am thinking of upgrading to 32GB. (I believe the board I have will support upto 32GB and I have Windows 7 Professional that supports more than 16GB).
I think there was a bit of a misunderstanding about the memory numbers. There is No swap-file at all, in any of my computers, I will never use them.
4GB installed in the motherboard (the max limit of 32bit address)
1GB eaten by the RamDisk + DMA addresses.
3GB available for windows and Daz3D, it was only using about half that 3GB when it dumped (51%).
The scene this time consisted of four walls made of primitives (No textures, two of them turned off), a floor made of four primitives (No textures), five lights, eight cameras, and the figure and outfit.
The program even crashes when it is just the figure and outfit in an empty environment. Something else is going on her.
So Daz3d is Exceeding the limits of 32bit, Shame.
I don't plan on upgrading to windows7 until I can toss 192GB of RAM at the motherboard, with a CPU fast enough to make it respond to my clicks as instantaneously as this computer runs everything except Daz3D. It's usually done before my finger has released the button, and That is how I like it.
Memory is like an orgasm. It's a lot better if you don't have to fake it. - Seymour Cray [On virtual memory]
XP by default will only allow, for program use, about 2.5 GB (max...but more typically it's 1.75 to 2.25 GB) out of 4 GB (1 GB, off the top is reserved for the OS and then an amount equal to the video card RAM is reserved for other uses)...so you are starting at about 2.5 GB and removing 1 GB for your RAM disk and DMA addressing (and yes, it does report ALL the RAM). That leaves you with a maximum amount of, if NOTHING ELSE is running, 1.5 GB for DS usage. And you are showing 1.5 GB of PF (pagefile) usage...which, IS Window's 'swap' file...
4GB - 1 GB OS reserve - 512 MB (I'm assuming that 8600 is the 1/2 gig version) - 1 GB Ramdisk/dma = 1.5 GB 'left over' for everything else.
Besides, after next week, it would be a better idea to retire XP, anyway...unless there is no connection between it and the internet. No more fixes/patches and most AV companies will be ending support shortly.
The impression I got was there were some bugs in the 32bit version of 3Delight, at least on Windows XP, or perhaps in how it is integrated with DAZ Studio.
Now, 3Delight is not made by DAZ. It is made by 3Delight. It is an industrial strength commercial render engine used in Hollywood movies. Hollywood studios are the paying customers for 3Delight. I doubt any of 3Delight's paying customers are using the 32bit version of 3Delight.
At least as of DAZ Studio 4.5, the 32 bit version has such limited capacity, I think DAZ should stop offering it. The latest technology, like HD morphs, are not supported on the 32 bit version of DAZ Studio.
I just checked the 3Delight website. 3Delight offers one free license for a batch render version of 3Delight, but I discovered that this is now only available for 64 bit operating systems.
The standalone version could have been a solution for your problem, but is apparently no longer available for 32bit OSs. I'm pretty sure it was still available a year ago.
I red about that Lux thing a tad bit as well, I just need the GUI to stop messing up. Then I'll look into getting this GT8600 doing something useful.
Daz3D is only using about 547MB out of 3GB, and I noticed the "System Cache" in that TaskManager I posted earlier was showing a ridicules 1.4GB. What do I need 1.4GB of file cache for, There all SSDs except my dedicated music/document archive drives, lol. Somewhere is a setting to completely disable that, I just don't remember where it was or what INI file to edit.
I'm trying the "/3GB" switch now to see if that fixes it a bit. It seams to be behaving itself for the moment, yet still creeping up slowly. They need to make and sell 64GB sticks of ram soon, really soon, I need at-least three of them in my next computer just to keep Windows7 satisfied. Don't ask me what the applications will need on-top of that 192GB of ram, lol.
Daz3D uses OpenGL for the GUI, Is there a DXdiag like thing for that?
update sort of, it looks like every time a render is done, Daz3D needs more memory. second render taskman screen-cap attached.
To create a Render DAZ Studio needs to run a Sub program called TDLmake and or, to do the calculations of all the lighting and shadowing in memory before the image can be output. So yes it needs more ram at render time than it does just for a set up of a render.
I am running out of memory with SonarX1, Autocad2000, and DAZ3D Studio. And the Culprit is the Windows XP "System Cache" consuming half the RAM after the computer has run for 24 hours or more. BOINC is not happy with me right now.
I need to upgrade to Windows7, and that implies a new 4GHz+ 8Full-Core CPU and 128GB of ram 'Bare Minimum Requirement'. Something I don't know if it exists yet, and I simply cant afford right now.
I truncated all the dead-space off of all my drum-set samples to make it work in this computer, only to find out that SonarX1 needed that dead-space to know the DC offset of the samples. Nooooo!
DAZ3D is simply dumping out, because it needs more RAM, that XP just cant handle. This computer already has 4GB in it (The max that XP will allow). Apparently there is no "Fine Tuning" DAZ3D Studio OpenGL interface to work with less.
I need more RAM, and that implies a new OS, implying, a new computer.
Yes that type system is available. The only way your going to get Win7 is if you do a custom build. All off the shelf machines come with Win8. Most systems now come with 8GB RAM