I'm running into what appears to be a flaw in Daz studio, but am uncertain and wanted to see if anyone else has encountered it. It appears that during the saving process studio creates either erroneous data into the file, or doubles the frames for the file. Someone might be better able to explain Studio's save process to me. From what i am able to figure out, after a save, studio has to then optimize the image, since the scene has apparently doubled in frames. This is something that I really do not understand, since I do not understand the technical aspects of the program. Any thoughts, suggestions etc. would be appreciated. What I do no, is it can sometime's make the scene unusable by my machine. I am considering reinstalling studio to see if that fixes the issue, but would like to know if any others have faced a similar issue? I appreciate your time, and responses.

Mark

What do you mean, "studio creates either erroneous data into the file, or doubles the frames for the file"? A clearer description of what you are seeing, and what problems you are having with your saved scenes, would help.

Well, lets see if I can make it clearer. I can set up a scene, it can take me hours to do so, and in most cases I can render in a half hour or less. Usually the time is dependant on the number of lights, and how drastic the shadows are etc.

I can then save the scene, reload it at another time, try to make alterations. In today's case I removed the fog from the scene as I wanted to postwork the fog into the image. When I went to render the scene, it had to optimize the scene first. I went from no optimization to 14 frames that needed to be optimized before it could render. In irritation I saved the file, dropped out of studio and reloaded the scene. The second time, it had to optimize again, this time with 28 frames. Now the main reason for my irritation is that studio has been known to occasionaly crash out when the optimization get's too awfully drastic. In a complex scene, I might expect that, since I'm not running a super computer. In a small scene such as today and yesterday's render, I do not expect that. And I certainly do not expect the scene to be altered in any way from the original, unless I make significant alterations.
I guess I am confused about what studio is doing with the scenes, that causes them to need to be optimized after I reload. *shrugs, I couldn't claim to be an expert on computers, let alone studio. It can be an extremely stable program under all but the most unusual circumstances. However, if I haven't made significant changes in the scene, have rebooted my machine and studio from scratch, I would expect the scene to render as flawlessly as it did the first time. Short of some unknown issue that only a programmer might understand.
Anyhow, I hope that claifies things. And perhaps you have the understanding regarding studio that I lack. And I appreciate you taking the time to reply to my question.

Mark

It is strange..
Before clicking on the scene, move your mouse pointer to the file and read the info tab to see how big the scene is. They will be somewhere in the 9 to 30 megabytes, depending on what you have in that scene. If you have a great deal of props included, try minimizing them by removing some and only keeping what you will see in that scene.

I only load into a scene what will be seen during a render and this keeps my loading and renderig times down significantly.

Quote - It is strange..
Before clicking on the scene, move your mouse pointer to the file and read the info tab to see how big the scene is. They will be somewhere in the 9 to 30 megabytes, depending on what you have in that scene. If you have a great deal of props included, try minimizing them by removing some and only keeping what you will see in that scene.

I only load into a scene what will be seen during a render and this keeps my loading and renderig times down significantly.

Thnx, I try to do the same thing. I should have saved the file by a different name to compare the two. However, the file is only 18.3 mb. I rarely render scenes much over that. However, I have rendered some as large as 56 mb. Those are rare, and usually have multiple figures in them. The scene I rendered had one female figure and her clothes, and one rock, a bundle of plants, and a couple of cattails and about 6 lights. It was pretty simple, the reflections would have been the only thing that would have added difficulty to the scene; however, it still rendered in about a half an hour the first time with no optimization. *Shrugs, oh well, thanks for the suggestions. I might be wasting people's time, although I figured if others had experienced something similar, they might have had a solution to the problem.

'Optimizing' is when DS converts the surface info into 3Delight's prefered .TDL format, these .TDL files are temporary files and get deleted when DS is closed.

When importing Poser content DS automatically optimizes the surface info in the background, and it's finished almost as soon as the files are loaded, but on loading a .DAZ scene file it can take it's own sweet time before it starts, if you hit render as soon as the scene is loaded you almost always get hit with 'Optimizing'.

Quote - 'Optimizing' is when DS converts the surface info into 3Delight's prefered .TDL format, these .TDL files are temporary files and get deleted when DS is closed.

When importing Poser content DS automatically optimizes the surface info in the background, and it's finished almost as soon as the files are loaded, but on loading a .DAZ scene file it can take it's own sweet time before it starts, if you hit render as soon as the scene is loaded you almost always get hit with 'Optimizing'.

ok, thnx. Something that almost makes sense. While it doesn't explain why it sometime's crashes out, it certainly explains why I have to deal with the optimizing issue. Oddly, it doesn't happen every time I load a scene; however, it certainly explains things I did not know. I guess I'll just be thankful it works right most of the time. Then maybe someday I'll get a super computer that can run circles around this one and my nightmare's will all go away. *shrugs, like that'll ever happen. The more memory I have the harder I make my machine work. Oh well, thnx.

Mark.

Try going into Edit>preferences>Directories and moving the location of your temp folder, which is where the tdl files are saved. I've not seen this problem, but there was a spell when DS would hang on exit as it tried to clear out the temp folder and I have seen people with something like this problem on the forums. Also, if you can catch it make a bug report with the log file attached 9which should repeat the optimising message).

Quote - Try going into Edit>preferences>Directories and moving the location of your temp folder, which is where the tdl files are saved. I've not seen this problem, but there was a spell when DS would hang on exit as it tried to clear out the temp folder and I have seen people with something like this problem on the forums. Also, if you can catch it make a bug report with the log file attached 9which should repeat the optimising message).

Thnx, I'll look into that. I appreciate all the advice.