Studio 4.5 genesis bias
ManStan
Posts: 0
Has any one else noted the loading time difference between genesis and any mil4 figure?
Geneis loads fast like pop there it is. Where as V4 takes close to 4 minutes to load, why?
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That wouldn't explain the massive difference in load time, we are talking a few seconds verses several minutes. I could understand taking twice to 3 times as long to load, but that would still be less then a minute.
It's entirely a difference in the way morphs are handled in Gen4 vs. Genesis. Especially if you have a lot of morphs injecting into your Gen4.
If you want a more accurate comparison of load speed take your fully loaded Gen4 character and save a scene file. Then load that scene file and compare that to how fast Genesis loads (because that's what the Genesis file more or less is, an advanced scene file).
V4 and the other Mil4 figures, if you are loading them from cr2s (which within them call large numers of pz2s) are Poser figures, entirely in Poser format. This is not - and never has been - DS's native format. When you 'load' them in DS, you are actually importing them via a plugin that converts them into DS figures. This takes more time tha simply loading something that's a DS native figure in the first place. For instance, DS has always used weight mapping for joints 'under the hood'; loading V4 from cr2, for each joint the data for the Poser legacy spherical joints and their zones have to be read in, then converted by the importer into weight maps that give very similar (though not absolutely identical) results on bending the joint to what the Poser legacy joints do in Poser (much as Carrara does, I believe). Converting from Poser figure to DS format figure on the fly while loading the data takes much longer than simply reading DS figure data.
I aven't looked into this, but I also have the impression that DS does something regarding cacheing DSON figures on loading and saving, so subsequent loading of a DSON figure is quicker than the first ever load of it.
What? So you're saying that V4 takes so long to load because studio has to convert a studio figure to use in studio? And you wonder why this stuff confuses me.
No, it takes so long to load because Genesis loads morphs AS they are used, not with the figure. If you load a Genesis Figure with a huge number of active morphs, it'll take just as long or longer to load than Gen4.
Genesis is just a more advanced figure that takes advantage of advances in the technology that were unavailable or not widely known back when the Gen4 figures were created... what? Seven years ago?
The original V4 was released in December 2006, but V4.2 didn't arrive until 2008
oh... well... so I was off by a year... I can be wrong! I've done it before! I'll do it AGAIN! :P So there!
No; because it has to convert a POSER figure to use in Studio.
You know what, that never occurred to me. Genesis is the very first DAZ Studio NATIVE!
No; because it has to convert a POSER figure to use in Studio.
Indeed, that is what I was saying. V4 is a Poser figure, that has to be converted into a DS equivalent figure when you load V4 from a cr2. As it has always been. Genesis is the first native DS figure DAZ have ever released.
And it is at its worst when you load V4 from a cr2 that also injects all the Morphs++, Elite, A4, Creature, S4 etc, etc morphs you have. Not only does V4 have between three and 4 times the number of vertices as compared with Genesis, meaning three times as much data to load for the geometry, but the morphs, of course, also contain at least three times as many deltas because of that. So if you load a V4 in DS from a cr2 that injects all the morphs for her you have (even though all or most are set to zero), DS has to load over three times the data for the mesh as with Genesis, and over three times the data for each morph as with Genesis, AND it will load all that morph data whereas with Genesis it will actually only load the data for any morphs not set at zero; and on top of THAT, DS has to convert the Poser figure into a DS figure on the fly during loading, inlcluding creating weight maps to (roughly) match the effects of the joints in Poser, and try to create all the ERC linkages between the channels in the DS system where ERC does NOT work the same way as in Poser.
Ah, I see it. There's a cache folder for DSON figures in AppDate. For each DSON figure I've loaded, there's a .dsf file in there containing all the morph channels (though not the deltas) from all the morph files for that figure in the Library data folder.
So first time load of Genesis DS has to load each morph file from the data folder (one per morph) to get the info for each channel as it loads the figure. All those separate file disc accesses take some time. Subsequent loads of Genesis it just has to load the one cached file for all the channels, which is much quicker. So subsequent loads of Genesis (or any other figure in the library in DSON format) are quicker than the first.
I would imagine that loading V4 from cr2, injecting all morphs, saving V4 in DSON format, then loading that so it is cached in the DSON cache would then give much faster loading of V4 from a .duf file than from cr2. Though likely still longer than Genesis as the figure is still higher rez, so more data.
Interesting train of thought...
It should be considerably faster than a 'stock' V4 load, slower than Genesis...but probably not 3x slower...
Also, since most of the load time involved is disk based...it stands to reason a faster hard drive will give faster times. A 'green' drive will extend the load times to painful levels...an SSD...don't blink, you'll miss it.
I exported V4 with all her base and ++ morphs to a Cr2 file (I use it for Generation X), loads faster than Genesis in my installation of D|S4.5
Forgot I had it. Just timed it and Genesis is about half a second slower loading. 3 Seconds for Genesis, 2.5 for V4
Hmm, but didn't V3 load very fast too (including morph injection)? I think V4 reads parts of files and/or sorts them or does some other slow type of operation.
The issue with load times is three fold, at least as far as Gen4 are concerned.
1) Poser content has never been compatible with DS, it has to be dragged in through an importer plugin, which converts Posers ancient rigging into a crippled WM rig.
2) When DAZ were designing the Gen4 family, they knew they would end up releasing even more updated CR2's than they ever released for the Gen 3's, so they created the EXP system so they wouldn't have to. Problem is they also got it into their thick skulls, that loading hundreds or thousands of little small files was better than loading one or two big files, it isn't as it's as slow as ****, which is why virtually nobody outside of DAZ used it.
3) While DS1, 2 & 3 were designed around Poser content, DS4 wasn't, it's designed purely for Genesis, so not only does DS have to convert Poser content as in 1 above but it also has to convert it to work similar to Genesis (ie single skin mesh with all of the morphs hidden in the BODY, with ERC'd ghost dials in the body parts).
With 4.5 you are actually better off loading all of your Poser content into an empty scene, and then saving each item as a scene subset, in the case of V4.2 you should INJect all of her DAZ morphs before you save her, and load those DUF files instead of the Poser files. They don't take as long to load that way, or have a large RAM hit as none of the deltas will get loaded until you spin a dial.
That's one thing I love about DS4.5, that you don't actually load a morph till the dial is set to anything other than 0...