Using V3 as scene filler/extras
This is a "in general question" but I'll post it as the specific usage at the moment.
I'm making a bar scene. I'm using G2F/M characters as the primary figures, but I'd like to populate the bar with extras.
I have in my Daz Account older gen stuff.. Victoria 3 stuff that were promos at the time, I guess(..things I'd sign up for and then never use since I never got around to learning the programs til now).
Is there a way to use these older stuff as scene filler characters and avoid a huge performance hit? Really just want to have some sitting in booths, at the bar, around etc, they don't need to do much other than be put in a basic pose and be in the background.
Would I just do that? Would I, i dunno, convert them to objects? invis parts of them?
Any recommendations? Any better way get extras in a scene?
(I tried using some stock photos on a plane, but they look too real with the 3d characters.)
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Even Victoria 3 RR (reduced resolution) has a higher poly count than Genesis at Base Mesh resolution.
V3RR is about 22,000 quads, and Genesis (original) is about 19,000, so nothing saved there. The normal V3 is about 69,000 quads.
Genesis 2 Female is about 21,000 quads at Base Mesh Resolution, and 84,000 at High res, so use the High Res version for close to camera work, and Base for the further away figures. That way, you can have four Base figures which will only equal one close up figure in poly count and overhead.
There are also lores figures available from Predatron called Loretta and Lorenzo LoRes which are only a few thousand polys each, it really depends on how large your scene is going to be if you need that type of figure or not.
There are also lores versions of the V4 mesh, 17k, 8k, 4k etc, and these can sometimes come in handy too, but you would probably want to edit the CR2 file to load these particular meshes if you went down that road. I can tell you more about that later if necessary.
So it's the polygon count that determines the ...load on the computer? (I know this would be in addition to render time by more things in the scene and light calculations).
So would using Genesis be the way to go? Or once you turn it from a manaquin into a person, do you gain a bunch more polygons (if I'm using terminology correctly).
Would instancing figures help? So 1 figure used in different places, or is the benefit from that in altering one to alter all, rather than performance? (I'm using instances to control several TV's in the bar).
I'd be interested in hearing more on this...
(Can you tell my newbie status from this? :D )
Also bear in mind that the textures can use up a lot of RAM, and the older figures had lower res textures than current ones (although you could resave lower-res versions of the textures for use on background figures).
Resave how? By opening , like, the skin.jpg in photoshop?
So a smaller jpg file size would be good?
I'm not sure what you mean here, Genesis is never a manikin, Genesis is a fully rigged figure, and the rigging (bones) do not add to the polygon count. The way that the figure is posed, should not add anything to the render time.
What Mike means about the textures, is you could reduce the size of them in pixels, from say, 2048 x 2048 to 1024 x 1024, or even 512 x 512 and save them, then apply these saved textures to you far-away figures since they wont need high res textures anyway. That may save quite a bit of memory for the Scene (RAM)
There is very little difference in using Genesis (original) and G2F at Base resolution, you do know how to do that? Using the Parameters pane?
Instances all reference the same mesh in main memory, so if you have 10 figures, they still only take up the space of one in RAM, but they all would have exactly the same pose, so not a lot of use usually (except for marching ranks of soldiers for example)
I'm not sure what you mean here, Genesis is never a manikin, Genesis is a fully rigged figure, and the rigging (bones) do not add to the polygon count. The way that the figure is posed, should not add anything to the render time.
Would featureless protoplasmic entity in a humanoid shape get my point across?
Thanks for the additional info!
One thing you can do (well 2 ways to do it)
#1 my preferred method (as I don't have to re-apply skins manually) If you have Hexagon and after you've posed your figure: select your figure, and go to file -> send to hex
then delete your model out of Daz (sometimes you need to send all parts of the model to Hex 1 at a time so textures don't get messed up)
Then, in Hex select all your pieces and go to file -> send to Daz
When this happens, it converts the figure to an un-posable prop
#2 pose your figure, select everything you want to go with it (hair, clothes, etc) and then go to file -> export and export as an obj.
then you can import your object, re-apply the skins and again, you have a nice prop.
Either way, I was able to go from only having about 60 total figures in my scene before my computer decided it was too much to having 160+ figures before my computer started lagging. And that was all without using the texture atlas to make the skins low res as I've not figured out how to do that yet.
I tried #2, and wound up with a solid figure of non-color with one surface..so how would I apply different skins to it?
EDIT: I tried a more preciese way and had tons of surfaces this time...too many :)
You could also use the texture Atlas plugin. It's designed to take every image map used by a figure and cram them all together into a single file, and you can control the final size in pixels as well as the relative sizes of each of the original images used to create the final single one. It hen replaces all your original maps with the one single new map set (so you could have a diffuse, a bump, an opacity, etc. still, or skip them and just use the diffuse, whatever is appropriate for your scenarrio.
That hits the spot :)
Had to go to bed, it was getting late where I live, but now I understand. Some people used to refer to the default Genesis as 'The grey Alien' or 'the little grey man'. It is just Genesis minus a skin texture (it uses the DAZ Studio default shader instead), and it loads a lot quicker.
I had forgotten about Texture Atlas (thanks Sean) but that is another excellent idea. See how you get on with the suggestions so far, you know where we are if you need more help.
Know you doing still renders and this can be used for that too
but one option is to export out lots of obj versions of same figure in multiple poses with any covered body parts hidden
keep polycount the same
you can also afterwards reduce textures if save maps done,
load them on to one figure with morphloader and save morphable props as assets
there can be animated for video as well as reposed for stills so long as changes not too extreme
you can use the morphing fantasy dress for a lot of different looks texture wise same model too
Wow..lots of concepts here I'm not familiar with, like the Morphloader and covered body parts hidden..so turn off visibility on the torso, for example?
Some of these ideas have already been mentioned, but you might find this useful: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/520662/
It's a list of various ways to render group scenes without a huge memory hit.
One thing that I don't think has been mentioned for crowd scenes are the low resolution characters. The ones available here are Loretta Lorez, Lorenzo Lorez and LoREZ Casual Man 1. I have those, and they use much less memory than traditional characters. I recently did a scene with a large crowd. I had 66 of those low resolution characters with a clone of each to give 132 characters. That scene used about ~7 Gb of RAM as I remember. I have a 16 Gb of RAM, so this scene was not pushing my computer at all. A scene with 12 G2F/G2M characters pushes memory much higher.
The downside of theses low resolution characters is they do not look great up close and they have limited wardrobe. They do not share clothes with any other figures as far as I know. A lot of their clothes are just different texture maps replacing their skin. They do have a few clothing/prop items. There are a few free clothes available for them on ShareCG
I actually am going to take back everything I said
I just tested, V3 and M3 use A LOT LESS RAM than Genesis loaded into DAZ studio
22 Genesis I hit 15GB
naked
28 V3 ,M3, M4 and V4 was around around 5GB
I am dressing them all now and only have hit 15GB with nearly all dressed fully
since I only have 16GB may not finish
Textured or untextured?
One side note, cloths. some items do take up lots of ram, others not so much. I once dumped my computer with just three cloaks, nothing else just the cloth. That was back in the 2GB ram XP days a few month back.
This has been on my mind, as I wanted to set up an army, and ran out of ram after four figures and the outfits. Looks like almost every item is at "High Resolution" and "one" SubDivision level. Yet setting this to "Base" resolution level, and zero subdivision, dose not appear to immediately show right now, tho the comp has been at it for a few hours. It may be time for a reboot any anyways. (EDIT, yea something else is eating up 4GB, and I bet it is the browser.)
Do all of the figures need all of there clothing items at maximum detail and polygon count? something to think about.
Textured or untextured?
textured
not only that I have now dressed ALL of them and only hit 15GB
So was the info on the polygon count wrong? Or is it that the V3 was done with lower res textures and stuff makes the differencE?
I messed around a bit with the Object/Texture atlas earlier...I got a bunch of maps out of texture atlas, and when I applied them...well, the object was colored, but nothing really looking like the way the base figure did.
I'm right now trying a few G2F figs with their resolution set to base. Might back out from there though and try the V3 route, then..especialy with the freebies that Daz just put up encouraging it:)
I used them all as is
I have 16GB RAM it uses 15GB all up with hairs and took 16mins to render with one light and UE1
I think genesis triax info and data the issue, I have an awful lot of morphs, the older figures only added needed morphs to each to make different
The morphs shouldn't matter, DS doesn't actually load the morph deltas for Genesis into RAM until they are dialed. I suspect it's the textures that are taking up the RAM.
yes but I only used 2 sets on my 22 genesis
Octane render could handle it, showed 3% VRAM
whereas my fully dressed figures no way 150% used 3Delight to render
I textured the characters with more skins and very little RAM difference
I suspect the genesis ones as obj would be just as easy
there is something more at play
Well, my attempts at using V3 stuff was a colossal failure. I tried loading stuff in my account from DIM, and stuff in some zip files I've had lying around my hard drive for ages...just got errrors left and right. When I could get something to load, the clothes wouldn't show up in the right postiion on the figure...if they showed up in the right place, as soon as I tried posing the figure, V3 would move and the clothes wouldn't..I uninstaled and deleted the whole thing. JUST ANOTHER IN A SERIES OF FRUSTRATIONS IN USING THIS PROGRAM.
Maybe I'll try again at some point...maybe not.
did you fit the clothes to the figure?
fit to in parameters
also after select figure and go ro edit transfer active morphs if you reshape her
also if using DIM make sure your paths are correct and in studio preferences too
I have no trouble getting V3 and her clothes to work so it must be your set up
First of all, installing content from old ZIP files is NOT a good idea. DIM will always download and install the latest version of any figures or clothing that is available from your Product Library.
I just loaded V3 from my library, and it took about 5 seconds to load. I loaded some clothes, and they didn't fit automatically, so I right click on the item in the viewport, and select, Fit....To, and then select V3. Now, when V3 moves, the clothes move with her. They are said to be 'Conforming' clothing, and move with the figure. Nowadays, with Genesis and G2F, that usually happens automatically, but V3 is a very old figure, and was superseded by V4 and in turn by V5 (Genesis) and recently V6 (Genesis 2 Female). For older Generation 3 figures, you need to do the Fit..To part yourself.
If the only problem was fitting clothing to the figure, then that is a simple matter to sort out as explained above.
When you install content using DIM, you need to look and see where DIM is installing it to. Go to the Installed tab, select the item, right click, and use the Show Installed Files option to see what has been installed, and to where. What appears are blue clickable links which will take you to the actual folder if necessary.
It will also tell you the library that it has been installed to, and DIM, by default, install to :
C:\Users\Public\Documents\My DAZ 3D Library
Make sure that you have that listed as BOTH DAZ Studio Formats AND Poser Formats in the Content Directory Manager. All of the DAZ 3D Figures, prior to Genesis, were in Poser Format, and that is where you will find them inside DS.
Ok, tried again...moved forward and tried some V3 stuff again..Still some errors in loading some stuff..looked like missing morph packages, but I pushed through it. Some V3 clothes would fit (or fit to)..a bunch didn't, shoes warping and bending for no reason, shirts loading too high on the body and not being able to be moved.
Most clothes posed wrong, but maybe be able to be good enough..in moving past them.
But frankly, this is way more effort than it's worth. Any performance gain is outweighed by the frustration of trying to get them in any way to look ok (and I'm certainly not getting anything in the way of Wendy catz's results.)
Thanks for the help in this thread, anyhow.
I have never had any problems at all with V3 in loading and fitting conforming clothing. There is something very wrong here.
Shoes warping? Are these shoes made for V3, if so, there should be no problem loading them. It sounds to me like you are using AutoFit to load shoes that are made for other figures to V3? There can often be problems doing this.
shirts loading too high on the body and not being able to be moved.? What shirts exactly? Once again, are you using AutoFit? Are these 'Conforming' clothes, then they should work, if they are Dynamic clothes, are they made for DAZ Studio or Poser? Are they made for V3?
Most clothes posed wrong? What clothes exactly? I have never had this happen with V3 clothing.
Are you using actually using Victoria 3 or are you using the Victoria 3 morph for Genesis?
And you did use your Poser figures library NOT smart content?
Not much if any of my V2, M2, V3, & M3 or even V4 & M4 stuff in smart content