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there are plenty of other softwares that can convert them
It used to be Iray products becoming increasingly demanding was slowing down me trying to do more with Daz|Studio, but now that Filament has become a good option that's no longer a problem.
The FBX Importer could be used - we are pointed to https://github.com/daz3d/StudioFbxImporter/blob/6bb9172dcc605d6ade1363e57946fc323d4154c2/FBX Importer/DzFbxImporter.cpp#L243 - though I think that is a some-assembly-required answer.
You know what does a cracking good job of 3ds import? Carrara! It's true!
My confusion, sorry - this is in the current build, selecting FBX or all as the import format will also enable the import of the others.
Filatoon was new. You can't expect new-new features that often, they have to be developed first.
Funny story about relative time. In the Air force I worked in radar. Old fashioned vacuum tube stuff. During one operation we were trying to get the timing to mesh with the computer guys and they kept saying we were too slow. We told them that we had a perfect 6 microsecond pulse. They yelled back that was the problem. Their equipment would crash if it had to wait a whole 6 micriseconds.
I don`t think that there is anything that would make me use it less as I have been using it almost every day 8-12 hours for the past 8 years except for when I was in the hospital for a coujple of weeks.
That said, the thing that frustrates me the most, is that it takes so long for Daz to properly shut down for even clear a scene.
Richard explained why in another thread a while back. But I really don`t care why it takes so long, what I really care about is why don`t they fix it?
It seems Daz is more into adding shiny stuff, and bells and whistles instead of fixing age old problems like the old disappearing cursor, or the cursor jumping out of the text box with the slightest move.
Anyway, I have deadlines to meet, and it takes so darned long to clear and shut down. Once, it took over 2 hours to completly close.
Ctrl+Alt+Delete is all I have as I dont have time to wait for Daz
I can live with pretty much all of the other flaws....heck, I have been for the past 8 years :)
...I used to do that as well as shut down via Windows Task Manager but on a few iccasions the scene file was corrupted and wouldn't open again..
What I usually do now is after saving the scene I clear it from the viewport first by clicking "New" in the File menu. then shut down the programme and it clears fron system memory much quicker.
Because they can't overcome the delay without sacrificing useful features? It is an area that has had attention (not just shut down, but loading and posing too) but there are limits to how fast a complex, extensible system with potential interactions can work.
That is living dangerously - it risks various forms of data corruption.
The way almost everything is an object in DS does slow the memory freeing process down a lot. It's an unfortunate consequence of the approach taken to make DS as extensible & capable as it is.
If you imagine every bone in a figure is treated as a different object, with its own destructor (clean deletion method) and these objects can be nested many, many deep with DS going to the deepest level to delete the deepest objects first and then recursively working its way through the feature tree. There is a lot of work to be done. The destructors are also called when a character is deleted but the user continues to work on the scene, so after that happens there is re-indexing of memory, locations updated etc. This is not needed when closing, but is needed when work continues. So, there is a high probablility of un-necessary work happening when a scene is closed. This un-necessary work could possibly be saved by having a scene destructor separate from the object destructor, where the intermediate tidy-up doesn't happen for a fast kill. However.. it's not dead easy to create a separate destructor and the programming team don't seem particularly receptive to 'helpful' programming method suggestions from users - especially as the users can't know exactly how the code is created with the closed source DS, and there's a fair chance the suggestion is either plain impossible or inappropriate given how it's currently programmed.
I have created a modeller that can store several hundred million facets & vertices when saved as an obj. file from DS (limited to 2Gb of arrays). The model in my modeller is not saved as a series of objects, instead it's done the old fashioned way, and is kept in a number of arrays, each of which has a number of attached vertex lists and quick access cross reference arrays. Killing the same model as takes 5 minutes in DS, only takes a couple of seconds in my modeller. It's all that extra information associated with a model (skeleton objects, weight map objects, texture objects etc etc) and the likely intermediate re-indexing that takes the time to kill the scene.
Regards,
Richard
Does someone know why DS will clear an empty scene before loading a new (in my test) character in it ? It does it even right after being launched when loading the character is the first thing I'm doing.
Content disorganization. No fault of the program, it's DAZ not enforcing proper content directories for PAs to follow. I'm still finding products that I didn't know I owned because of the insane randomness of where content gets installed.
This!
Reflects my experience completely.
I LOVE DAZ Studio, but the time it takes content (characters specifically, and 'smart content') to load into a scene is THE limiting factor to my creativity and the source of most of my frustration.
I find many individual items are to blame and end up never using them, such as the item that makes hair from G3F fit to G8F better by adding a ship ton of morphs to the hair. That one item alone adds so much time to save and load times that it just isn't worth using it.
One PA's hair products also bog down scene load times to a crawl. Used to be THE PA for hair for me (before dforce was available) but I keep away from all their products now. I just don't trust them,
I would love to know if part of the DAZ product acceptance standards is tied to performance. I find so many products that could be made more effeciantly (using instances, or not using ridiculously sized textures for small objects and such) and wonder why DAZ doesn't force the PA to do things better with regard to performance. I think that ultimately we users blame DAZ itself for the poor performance when, and I am guessing, a lot of the blame can be leveled on the content creators.
On the plus side, the terrible performance makes the 'Optimize your scenes' - type tool vendors happy, I am sure :)
I used to work in video games, which has to do this stuff in real time. The first thing I'd do on any codebase would be to write a custom memory allocator. Rather than letting the operating system handle every discrete allocation and deallication - and C++ combined with Windows is the absolute worst when it comes to the speed of doing that - it's good practise to allocate and dump whole blocks that you manage yourself. It's a very solvable problem, although I'm sure using QT complicates that somewhat.
But if you're in full control of the codebase, the time savings can staggering - back then, typically around 600 times faster in a lab setting. In a game, those savings would be dispersed, but at bottlenecks like loading data or shutdown (which is where Daz has an issue), very noticeable. Shutdown is essentially instant. There was a AAA game that launched with load times of 10 minutes. Gamers complained. They rewrote their allocator, patched and anecdotal feedback from customers was that loading was down to 30 seconds.
Not really on the original topic, but DS doesn't do that for me, and DS should not clear a scene when you load a character.
DS will do it for me whe when I load or start a new scene.
To counter this I always SAVE the current scene, even if it is the default empty scene (I use a custome default scene setup). It seems the sction of saving the current scene tells DS it does not have to clear the scene in order to load the next one. Go figure <shrug>
This!!!!
My other major issue is small and poor contrast fonts. It's really hard to read things, and the way the UI is designed, there is no way to make all font/background combinations high contrast for everything!! True, this is partially my own issue with old eyes, but I had the same issue 20 years ago!!
You add not being able to easily read things with the total disorganization of content, and it can take most of the joy out of creating. Forget trying to use smart content, there are so many things that I simply can't find in smart content. Using the content library is difficult because it's hard to read, and a general mess to slog through. It's a pretty sad state of affairs when DOs install to the wrong location!! DAZ can't even follow their own "rules". The image below shows the installed location for Cyberpunk Unlimited for G8F - a DAZ Original!!! Add to that all the back catalogs from the new vendors from Renderosity that DAZ isn't creating smart content for, they have made their own smart content even more useless.
Due to the frustration over trying to read things and spending too much time (and eye strain) trying to find products that I want to use, I stopped using DS completely for several months. I realize the font size is an issue with QT4, but they should design a high contrast option that doesn't try to make use of visual gradients, which while they look nice and help organize the interface a bit, they simply don't provide enough contrast to be easily read with older eyes.
I've been making maps and doing public presentations using PowerPoint professionally for over 40 years. The whole low contrast font/background issue is something I learned to completely avoid 40 years ago, why can DAZ figure it out?
OK, done with my rant! Over the next year some of my vision issue will be addressed, but seriously, medium to low contrast font/background combinations make if very difficult for anyone with vision impairment to use your software. This is something I think DAZ should be able to address, even if they can fix the font sizes in the current version. (Oh, I should add that I have tried several times to fix the issue myself. Unfortunately you fix the problem on one "menu level" and it make it worse on another.)
The only infuriating thing about Daz Studio is the scene tab's item tree.
If you don't select an item with pinpoint accuracy, it slips and "parents" itself to another item along the same tree, or whatever item is currently selected. It's incredibly infuriating!
The solution would be to have the items from the tree snap to a grid in conjunction with a selection/drag/drop feature, rather than a freeform selection/drag/drop feature.
But then again, that bit of irritation does not exclude my use of this addictive program!
Have you tried the current Public Build (beta) - that has a higher contrast colour scheme for the Darkside style.
They could also just simply change the colour of the interface themselves...
I find it curious that a large majority of users don't even customise their interfaces, I mean, that's what the customisation feature of this program is there for...
I can answer that, at least for me. First, the default has been fine for me. The grey is familiar and inoffensive. The yellow is very yellow, but it works and there's nothing I want so much more that it's worth it to bother about. So I leave it Occasionally, I may accidentally change something, and then some items change settings too. Then I have to change them back, or at least change them to something that's ok. Beyond that, custom settings can get lost or reset. Then I have to remember how to change them back to the custom version. It's a bother, and I'd rather not. TL;DR: LAZINESS!
BTW: Happy New Year, my friend!
it makes no difference to legibility of the "faded" parameters, no matter what colours one chooses those always blend into the background and rarely highlight if moused over
Thanks Richard! I'm rendering in the Beta right now, I'll give it a go when it's finished.
Hmmmm .... if you read the last statement in my original post, you'll note that I have attemted to modify it myself. As Wendy noted (see below), no matter what you do, the faded parameters are always low contrast ... no matter how you edit them. Hopefully this is better in the new beta.
I don't customize my interface much because I just don't care. The most I've done to customize my DS interface was to close all the panes on the lower right side of the screen beside parameters, surfaces and cameras (and I could probably do without cameras as well). Hell, I loaded a product recently that turned my viewport black, and I haven't even bothered figuring out how to fix it back.
It's the random crashes. I'm testing the limit of what i can do with my 3090 Ti. I made a render with 5 people. The render was doing its thing for 20 minutes. while waiting, im watching YouTube. I got a call, took my eyes out for a few minutes and when i went to go check, Daz was closed, the render never got saved, and im re-rendering the scene. There's been time in the past where im zoned in and Daz crashes and i lose over 2-3 hours of posing, scene set ups, custom morphs, et. Its the only reason why i keep coming back is because i want to learn the progrram.
Hmm, I don't have a "Darkside" option in the beta (4.23.1.8). There is an option listed as "Full Service (Beta)", it might be a bit better??? but it's still difficult to see (plus it will take some work to get it shaped into something framiliar). If that's is the one you were thinking of, let me know and I'll give it a real test. Any improvement would be greatly appreciated.