Porefectionist Errors, Disappearing Drive Space

zombiewhacker

Strange problem this morning using Chevybabe25's Porefectionist HD on my i3 laptop, 8GB ram.

Took limits off and was able to crank SubD up to the recommended setting 5.   Dialed in Porefectionist morphs one by one.  Studio froze for a few minutes but eventually caught up and I could see the HD morphs had loaded correctly on screen.

Here's where it got strange.  After exporting my G8F mesh to an external drive, I went to my flash drive to check results.  The drive listed the 3D file alright -- at one kilobyte in size!  I opened the alleged 3D file in Notepad++ and this is all it said: 

# Exported from DAZ Studio 4.14
mtllib G8F-HD-A.mtl

o Genesis8Female

I have 80GB free on the flash drive, so it couldn't have been due to a lack of drive space.

So I tried the process again, this time a G8F without Porefectionist details but still at subD 5.  Same result.  Meanwhile, space on my laptop drive temporarily shrunk by several GB. Given I'm currently running low on laptop drive space, it's possible that Studio is swapping my already scant SDD disk for additional RAM and this is causing that hiccup. (Restarting Windows appears to have freed the drive space back up.)

Previously I'd exported G8F at subD 3 to an .obj file with Porefectionist details included -- that process went smoothly.  So if it's loading a subD 5 mesh correctly, why won't it export the mesh?

Richard Haseltine

Have you checked to see if there are files from the attemtped export in the Temp folder -

%appdata%/daz 3d/studio4/temp/

zombiewhacker

Looking for this directory now, can't find it yet.  Starting from C: and working downward through directory tree, would it be under C:\Users\Public or C:\Users\(My Directory Name) ?

Richard Haseltine

Paste the address into the browser's address bar and you should go straight there.

zombiewhacker

Pasting the address brings up these subdirectories under C:\Users\(My Directory Name)\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4\temp:

Face Transfer
PBR
render
RenderAlbumtemp
textureConvert

Okay... where to from here?

chevybabe25

My guess would be that Studio never finished exporting the figure. At subd5 major patience is required to export even with a higher-end computer. I would try again maybe prior to going to bed or when you can leave your computer on for a long time undisturbed.  See if that makes the difference. Ive had several programs write the 1kb files like that when I'm exporting largish stuff and I don't let it finish doing its thing.

zombiewhacker

Hi, chevybabe25! 

The problem is I did let the laptop do its thing.  I hit export and walked away.  The save status bar started (X% completed or whatever).  When I came back the .obj export was complete, at least in theory.  The whole process took maybe less than 20 minutes. 

Note: one trick that worked with subD 3 figures was to hide (eye icon closed) everything except the head, since Porefectionist only affects the head anyway.  This way the subD head alone gets exported, and then I open it up in Blender and bake it against a base res head to create my normal map.  That's what I tried doing with my subD 5 mesh, only this time it didn't work.  Maybe at subD 5 even the head file was too large for my laptop's memory.  How much system  RAM does a process like this need?

chevybabe25

Waves :)

When I have exported large items, quite often the program doing the exporting will appear done, and only after trying to import the object in a different program have, I noticed that part of my object is missing. Allowing the computer some more time usually remedies the problem(must be writing to disk?). It also could be a system issue like not enough ram or storage space to both run and simultaneously export. Have you tried exporting out at subd4? 

zombiewhacker

Not yet.  I'm hoping I won't have to because I really love the quality of detail displayed at subD 5. 

What I'll try next instead is to clear some more drive space.  My laptop SSD is really running low -- maybe 6GB free at most -- and perhaps Studio needs to swap drive space to create enough virtual memory to create and export the .obj file.

chevybabe25

If it is of any help, at export, a full g8 female at subd5 is just shy of 2 full gigs.

zombiewhacker

Update... don't know if clearing more space on my drive was the answer, but I was finally able to export all my Porefectionist sub-5 .faces to obj.  (Yay!)  Now my problem is Blender crashes whenever I bake normal maps,but at that's a Blender problem, not a Studio problem.  Anyway, thanks to chevybabe25 and Richard for trying to help.