Daz Morph / Large library load time issues

jd2878971

Hello, I'm having some major issues with increasingly long Daz load times. Average load time for a Genesis 8 figure is around 30-45 minutes. In addition viewport navigation has slowed to a near crawl when posing & moving camera. Texture shaded mode helps some, but overall the system is laggy. 

I had been working with Poser for years. But it was beginning to show it's age / limitations. So I switched to Daz. While the UI, workflow and other factors weren't my cup of tea I stuck with it and began learning. And began buying their assets. Over the years with every sale my Daz library has become rather bloated.

I'm aware of the way Daz handles morph files and how large libraries such as mine can lead to the extremely large load times I'm experiencing. Unfortunately at the time when I first started using the program I was not aware of this and continued installing files.

I don't use the Daz install manager. Due to inconsistent vendor file organization, vanity folders, etc I've always manually installed my content.
I download my purchases, repack into something that's easier for me to locate and drop it into my library. (I don't change any of the organization of files in the data or runtime directories.) I then zip that content folder and back up to my external HDD.

Lately I've been working on a visual novel of about a dozen characters. (Each a spun up custom of several character packs.) But the load times are killing me. So I've decided to bite the bullet and clean house.

My plan is to keep the current library (Let's call it "Daz Bloat") for back up and character creation.
Then create a new library (call it VN Production) and do my posing, fitting, renders from there.
When I'm not working on character creation I would unlink Daz Bloat library to improve load times.

I've seen a few videos online about exporting characters but apparently I missed something in their instructions. All it ended up doing was moving nearly every possible morph out of their folders and into my personalized vendor morph folder. So far everything still works. And there is no why for me to fix that without a wipe / reinstall.

How do I export my custom characters, wearables & scenes so that I can:
1) Back them up in the event of a HDD failure?
2) Get them packaged up as a complete character pack (morphs, hair & skin) and installed into the new library without having to reinstall the various characters they are customized from? (And just end up right back where I'm at with morph-bloat?)
3) Send the scenes (again without having to reinstall all the original character morph packs) to my other computer so I can render on that one while working my day job on this computer?

Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Richard Haseltine

Daz Studio does allow you to have separate content libraries, each with its own database (not, I suspect, that you use any of the database-driven views). You can do this via the Content Directory Manager (available from the Content tab of Edit>Prefrences) - copy the current set first, then create a new set and give it its own locations. One you have your new directory set up you can install content, or in the case of content from Daz you should be able to let Daz Studio log-in to your account (Connect menu) and when you load anything that requires products that are not installed DS will offer to install them for you.

middle_watch

Hope this helps. My load times were getting stupid, but I had a clue, I have two almost identical machines and they have the same Daz packages loaded, yet one was taking circa 15 mins to load the Genesis 8 character and the other was taking a fifth of that time. This applied to all the characters I use.

So logically it was not an issue with the quantity of morphs etc, so I wwent a different route. First the log file, and how odd, the same loading time issue, very slow on one, dreary on the other. So I cleared the log file, saved it, and loaded a G8 figure so that I had a clean slate to trace what was going on.

Only now the G8 loads in seconds! Same for the other machine, clear the log file, almost instant load time!

The machine with the better load times pre-clearing has the log file sitting on an SSD disk, the very slow machine has it on a standard disk. But clearing them made the difference insignificant.

If there is a way to limit the log file size I have not found it, but it is simplicity itself to set up a windows macro to clear the log file once a day. So far I am back to the good old days of load times.