Huge scene files making loading and add/deleing objects take forever

Riggswolfe

Ok, so after a full Daz reinstall due to a failed hard drive I'm noticing my scene files which I salvaged from the old hard drives are HUGE. The one I'm working on currently is 1.7 gb. The scene has a house, some lights and a single G8 figure with 2 hairs. One hidden. I'm trying to delete that hidden hair now and DS is just...sitting here.

Is there something I can change to fix this? Is it the hairs causing the scene to blow up? Is there a check mark I can look for to compress scenes on saving? Does d-force hair save some hidden files or something that blow up scenes?

 

Edit: Looking back, my scenes from early last year were 60-100 mb. Sometime in the fall they started shooting up in scene size. 

Umi no Senshi no Ishi

Size of the t4exture maps? I've noticed more items are now coming with muliple 4k maps. That adds up fast. 

Probably not what you want to hear, but Scene Optimizer https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer is your friend.

Riggswolfe

I have scene optimizer but that's just for renders isn't it? It won't change the size of the scene file? 

Edit: Before my first post I was trying to delete a hair from the scene. The delete is still going and Daz is just sitting there, hopefully doing the deletion in the background. It's been roughly an hour so far.

Richard Haseltine

Textures are not embedded in the scene file, so they won't affect the size on disc if that is what is hitting 1.7GB. Does the scene contain dForce simulations, for hair or cloth?

Riggswolfe

The hair is Dforce hair so yes? Are you saying when I simulate the hair it saves those simulations as part of the scene? Is there a way to remove those simulations from the scene file and get that space back?

PerttiA

Using products originally made for Poser, using converted clothing and keyframing something like hair, especially body hair with multiple items, can quickly get the file sizes to Gigabytes. 

Riggswolfe

PerttiA said:

Using products originally made for Poser, using converted clothing and keyframing something like hair, especially body hair with multiple items, can quickly get the file sizes to Gigabytes. 

This is all stuff from the Daz store with the exception of 1 object on the Genesis 8 figure. I've used it before and it didn't blow up file sizes. I'm not doing any keyframing as I believe that is animation?

Riggswolfe

One thing I just discovered. My scenes have hundreds of reality metadata sets in them. I had reality once but haven't used it in forever and it's not even installed. This is a fresh install of Daz though the scenes in question are carry overs from my old install.

Riggswolfe

I found a thread where Richard mentioned saving a scene as a subset to get rid of that meta data. I did that plus cleared Dforce simulations then loaded the subset and saved it over the original scene and my scene went from 1.7 gb to 10 mb. That seems extremely drastic but the character, house, lights, her clothes and hair all seemed to be there so I guess it worked!

deepswing

Glad it worked out. I just checked my scene files as well, as I am doing some complex scenes as well, and have nothing even close to 1.7gb. My biggest file (including dForce, some characters, light, environments) is just sitting at 15 MB. Really weird if file sizes grow so insanely high.

fred9803

Are you using ZevO's Fit Control on multiple clothing items?

Riggswolfe

fred9803 said:

Are you using ZevO's Fit Control on multiple clothing items?

I think it was all down to those hidden files. I had a custom made default scene with my preferred lighting set up and such and it had like 200 of those meta data files I mentioned. 

My workflow typically goes like this: Make a character. Save them as a scene. Make an environment. Save it as a scene. 

So, this current scene was a character and an environment. The character had actually been a character scene. Then was merged into another environment and modified then resaved as a character again. The environment, likewise, had had at least 3-4 characters in it at various times. (I make comics, so I'm constantly reusing characters and environments.)

So basically, this scene had, I think at least 800 of those hidden metadata files. Then I added in a character that had, I think around 600 of them due to my workflow plus Dforce simulations. I think it probably had many more metadata files than that to be honest. 

I saved it as a subset after clearing d-force simulations and I went from 1.7gb to 10 mb for my scene size.

marksinister_0f3a44cacc

Riggswolfe said:

fred9803 said:

Are you using ZevO's Fit Control on multiple clothing items?

I think it was all down to those hidden files. I had a custom made default scene with my preferred lighting set up and such and it had like 200 of those meta data files I mentioned. 

My workflow typically goes like this: Make a character. Save them as a scene. Make an environment. Save it as a scene. 

So, this current scene was a character and an environment. The character had actually been a character scene. Then was merged into another environment and modified then resaved as a character again. The environment, likewise, had had at least 3-4 characters in it at various times. (I make comics, so I'm constantly reusing characters and environments.)

So basically, this scene had, I think at least 800 of those hidden metadata files. Then I added in a character that had, I think around 600 of them due to my workflow plus Dforce simulations. I think it probably had many more metadata files than that to be honest. 

I saved it as a subset after clearing d-force simulations and I went from 1.7gb to 10 mb for my scene size.

How do you see where the metadata files are in Daz Studio? Because my save files can run up to 1GB with 1 or 2 Genesis 8 characters fully clothed. I've notice mainly my G8 characters are the ones that create huge file sizes.

jbowler

Riggswolfe said:

I found a thread where Richard mentioned saving a scene as a subset to get rid of that meta data. I did that plus cleared Dforce simulations then loaded the subset and saved it over the original scene and my scene went from 1.7 gb to 10 mb. That seems extremely drastic but the character, house, lights, her clothes and hair all seemed to be there so I guess it worked!

Just clear the simulation before saving the file (Simulation tab, "Clear" button at the top right.)

You could try reducing the size of the files by reducing the "FPS multiplier" and the "Sub-frames" settings in the simulation settings.  I believe it is possible to increase the "Iterations" setting by a corresponding factor so that FPSmult x Sub-Frames x Iterations is a constant; this seems to keep the gravity and air resistance constant - but I haven't verified properly that DAZ really is storing one set of bone positions for each of the sub-frames rather than one per complete frame; the latter would make dForcing round a frozen simulation difficult because the sub-frames and iterations of the frozen object would not be present to simulate round.