Which Genesis generation puts smallest load on processor and memory?
mavante
Posts: 734
I have already girded my loins in preparation for a raging storm of the slings and arrows of outrageous and contradictory opinions. But I am prepared to face it if I can end up with some kind of sane answer.
I've been through too many theads and posts to count trying to figure it out. I'm hoping that by creating this thread, and begging for the decency of posters to stick to the subject, I might be able to get somewhere.
I'd also like to confine this to discussion and comparison of Genesis 2, Genesis 3, and Genesis 8. I'd really appreciate leaving the earlier Victorias and Michaels and other less-than-Genesis-2 creations out of it.
With that, over to you ...
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I was under the impression that each Genesis iteration had less polys than the one before. So the answer would be, Genesis 8. Of course, all of that is dependent on the size of the textures used, the amount, resolution and texture size of clothing, hair, accessories; the use of HD morphs, the amount of subdivision you use, etc.
Having said that, a naked Genesis 8 with no subd and no textures would be the lightest load of the bunch.
Laurie
What are you trying to figure out exactly? Lauries answer pretty much answers the specific question.
except that's actually not true, it also depends what is in your data folder
at least I found the more morphs etc you own the heavier the recource use
G1 is vastly lower poly than gen4. G2 added a couple of thousand polys for more detail. I think the polycount dropped a bit for G3, and the polycount is slightly different between the male and female now. But I don't know whetherthe total is as low as G1, and my understanding is that G8 is pretty much the same polycount as G3, but slightly better weightmapping and rigging.
as others noted, if it's about "poly count " for the base character then hands down to G8, it's the lowest count of all with the poly count being under 17k for both male and female while G3 is around 17k, now as also others pointed you have to take in account, textures size if 4k and bla bla bla type of hair like fibermesh is a huge process eater, also mor´hs, hd morphs, character and others, i don't know too much about the "dforce hair", then since g8 is the current model which is being applied a lot of "new features" then its can really become "heavy", maybe even more than "others old models" if you mix too much, G3 would be the second, but like G8 also suffer a lot when come to the "extras" many g3 hairs and outfits are heavy high poly count, also high textures and bla bla bla then it can lead to then to also become "pretty high".
well to be fair it's will matter what type of "pc" you are working, most of daz stuffs are "high demanding" then using a really "low budget and "old pc" would be a huge issue, no matter what genesis you try to use, you need to have at minimum "pc" to be able to run it which i really don't, because whats gonna really matter will be the "scene you are trying to render. the more stuffs the more demand it will be.
The problem with the question is that the polygon count isn't likely going to matter much at all overall.
Most GPUs (or CPUs) would barely notice the difference between the generations based on the minor difference in polycounts.
Stuff like bigger texture sizes and more complex shaders (and other things) is going to have a bigger impact, which depends on which shader/texture is being used.
Have to say, when using a G3 or G8 figure, if the character comes in both flavours, I have noticed no significant difference in rendering times between the two. So, with my setup, there appears little benefit to either. When posing the scene, there appears little practical difference between the two, I can't pose using iRay preview as it's too slow, and texture shaded seems equally fast for both. So.. undecided.
Geometry is relatively minor as far as memory and resource usage is. I think the base skin textures might be where the greatest load per figure comes from.
I'd further guess that G2 which came before iRay and relies on the uber shader for iRay has the lowest resource usage when loading iRay textures.
But this really depends on intended usage. There are way too many factors invovled to definitively say this or that figure is the lowest resource user. For instance when was subD added? That increases geometry geometrically per step which rapidly does get to be a lot, a single G8 at subD 4 brings my system to a stop.
In practice my old 2 core, 8GB machine can handle a naked G1 or G2 character with a decent texture, simple hair and oodles of morphs easily with quick and smooth scene and camera manipulations, but falls flat on its face with a similar G8 character. Don't ask me to explain why. Although I suspect that bodyhair geometry shells and HD features are easier to come by on a G8 character. But still, I really hesitate to work with a G8 on my old machine. The problem is on screen manipulation, i.e. rotation, posing, camera movement etc. But when it comes to rendering G1 characters are hands down the fastest probably because of simpler 3Delight textures. When I start rendering complex textures the it takes a long time to even begin posting pixels but the simpler textures in G1 and its predecessor M4 the simple 3Delight textures start rendering almost immediately and are finished in 30 seconds typically.
My new machine has 6 cores and 32GB of ram and a decent graphics card and even it stutters during manipulation of a G8 character
I don't know how my experience tallies with the lower polys facts but there you are.
Yes, this is true also...forgot about that. Your Genesis of any version is the sum of all character morphs you have for it (at least on loading), in which case I would think the winner would be G1, simply because there was less FOR it and it likely had lower textures sizes on average (and fewer of them) than the newer Genesis generations do ;). But it's just a guess ;)
Laurie
Poly count is only one part. Skin texture is another. G8 is by far the heaviest, as G8 uses (by default) chromatic SSS. You could have two same exact G8 base characters...put a chromatic skin on one (say...CJ8's skin for example) and then a mono skin on the other (say...Victoria 7's skin for example)...and the mono skin character will render out much faster. The size and amount of texture maps used are the same...but chromatic SSS is way heavier due to the way it utilizes scattered light.
I agree with most of what has been said above. It really depends on what someone wants to do, and how much work you are willing to put in to optimize figures to minimize the resources required. If you don't want to do any optimization, and just want to use all characters "out of the box" then you are probably best using Genesis 2. Even though Genesis 2 has the highest poly count, in the grand scheme of things whether a base figure is 17K (G8) or 22K (G2) does not make that much difference in total resource usage. What does make a big difference are the texture maps. Genesis 2 uses one full set less of 4K texture maps since legs and arms are on one texture map, whereas G3 and G8 have seperate maps for the arms and legs. Also G2 is less likely to have additional maps for SSS etc, as people above have pointed out.
If you are willing to optimize, then I would say G8 is the best to use, but it doesn't make much difference, just use which ever you want. Here are a few tips to reduce resources:
1) Buy this product if you do not own it: https://www.daz3d.com/scene-optimizer
2) Reduce texture maps by a factor of 4 (ie to 1Kx1K) for all characters in the medium or background. Reduce texture size to 2K for all characters that are not in close up. (eg face takes up a lot of the screen size).
3) Strip off normal and bump maps for background characters, you will not see any difference.
4) Pay careful attention to the choice of hair models. Most hairs use far more polys than the figures they are placed on. I have hairs that are 400K even at base resolution.
5) Close up figures to use Sub-D 2 or higher, medium background resolution Sub-D 1, and far background should be set to base (ie Sub-D 0).
6) If you need to save RAM rather than just VRAM (and since the OP is a Mac user then I assume VRAM is largely irrelevant), then as Wendy above points out, some Genesis figures that you own a lot of add on morphs and/or characters can use huge amounts of in memory RAM. One way to significantly reduce this is to convert the figure to a prop after you are happy with the final pose.
the days of loading only the morphs you needed are a bygone dream.
i heard of a script that will strip out the mophs not being used, cant remember who made it.
During Studio usage( not render)
G3 or G8 - lower polly count in figure; however, clothes and hair will have an affect - more recent items 'seem' to have more geometry, although this is definitely not always true.
Depends on your render engine
Studio isn't particularly affected by geometry in comparrison to 3Delight.
Textures, or to be more descriptive, their resolution and quantity can easily overwhealm the graphics card when using Iray, which will result in CPU render, or time to get it to fit on the card; time taken can be fairly quick, or not so much
Other render engines will differ - for instance, Octane, handles things much better than Iray, and if there isn't enough GPU memory it uses system RAM too.
Sorry I don't follow? What do you mean?
This is my opinion specially if your interesting in creating animation. The the first original Genesis characters are less resources intensive. Most of the genesis 1 characters don't come with normal maps which is a #1 Vram killer. secondly why genesis 1 works better for animation is because of the easy of cross figures generations use meaning you can change men into women and women in to men or a Genesis into creatures much easier with out requiring having a script to convert cross characters creation or having special UV maps and lastly genesis 1 characters can use generation4 and genesis 1 generation aniblocks and most bvh motions files with little to no fussing around the do not work with genesis 8 content though,
Genesis characters won't have the fine details as genesis 8, and you can not fit g8 clothing to g1 easily but you will not be eating up your gpu resources either with normal & 8k tex-mats
But that is my opinion for looking to use a daz generation character that does not eat up all your GPU resources
created with Genesis 1 click to play
Not sure if the script would be relevant in current morph loading process. First of all, the unused character morphs and their relationships are not saved with the characters/scene. Those character morph dependencies are derived based on all installed characters that are available in the content library during the character/scene loading process. Secondly, even if one were to write such a script that prunes all character morphs from the loaded character/scene all those morph relationship would still get recalculated on the next reload of the scene.
In fact, I made a detailed suggestion couple of days back on a new approach for adding/removing morphs into a loaded character, but that would require significant changes to the morph loading process. In the meanwhile, I would suggest avoiding installation all characters that you own in your main content library which should contain only the base genesis characters for each generation and some common morph packages (a "minimum viable set" of morphs). If you are using manual install, you may benefit from creating separate content libraries for each of your scene and having only those characters installed in them that you require in that scene. Otherwise, as Havos suggested, saving a scene-subset of each genesis figure in your scene before converting them to a prop may help in some scenarios. Not any cure by any standards but probably some band-aids on the shelf, at least for now.
What's your Display Optimization setting? If it's anything but "Best" that may be the problem:
Iray rather than Studio, I think. Though it's difficult to compare as Iray is sent fnal mesh while 3Delight does its own subdivision.
There are two things that drive up memory, geometry and textures. It is true that newer models like Genesis 3 and 8 actually have slightly less geometry than say Victoria 4, though HD morphs can increase that a lot. So just don't use the HD morphs then.
But textures have grown wildly since the days of Victoria 3 and 4. Many textures are often 4096 x 4096, but some characters might have a few 8192 x 8192 size textures. Some textures might be saved in giant tiff files, I have seen single textures for a normal map that are 80+ MB in size. Not many do that, but many characters have a lot more textures than the old days, too. There are a lot of different surface options for Iray, and you might have 5 or 6 textures for every surface. Many use at least 4.
All of these textures add up real fast when they are large.
But it doesn't have to be that way. You can resize and compress textures to save memory. There are even several products all dedicated to optimizing scenes to use less memory.
So while new models generally do use a lot more memory, it is possible to optimize them down quite a bit. How much you save depends on just how much you want to do and how far you take the compression. If you make a texture 1024 x 1024 and compress it even more, you will probably notice the drop in quality. But maybe if this character is far away from the camera you might not notice. Its all variable on what you do.
Large tiff files should not make any difference to the resources used by Daz Studio, since any graphic files read in will be converted into an internal format used by the program. Big tiff files do however waste a lot of disk space, and personally I would prefer it if PAs avoided that format.
The number of base polygons doesn't really matter, the level of sub division used really does ramp up memory usage, it's not just polygons you're adding, there are normals, uv's, weight maps, and sub division curves for each polygon added. Gen 3 didn't really have many HD morphs so is usually easier on the system even though the base mesh is mostly identical. Gen 8 has lots of HD morphs that require sub division 4 to show up correctly, your not just multiplying the number of polygons by a factor of 256 your multiplying the size of the data set by 256. I dare say most graphics cards won't be able to handle a single subD lvl 5 data set with textures, with a data set that big, textures become trivial in comparison. To demonstrate the point, my computer can't handle a simple cube with sub division 10, the data set is too large, without textures.
With higher sub divisions you start running out of memory for textures and have to start reducing the size and number of textures, which really defeats the point of using HD.
You shouldn't think in terms of different generations having different loads on the cpu and memory, but which generation is more usable, genesis 8 has better rigging and can use genesis 3 textures so is a much better product to use over the previous generations, there is also now much more content for gen 8 than gen 3.
HD morphs don't in themselves change the mesh resolution - DS/Iray uses the Render division parameter (or the displacement SubD value from the model's surfaces if greater) to dtermine how much mesh Iray handles, HD morphs and displacement potentially move the vertices of that divided mesh from their creation location.
Unfortunately, it's already at "Best".
Is it in Texture Shaded or Iray Preview mode it is slow?
My understanding is that 3Delight suffers more from high polly count than Iray. Sorry, I put Studio.
You may well be right, because I don't use IRay so can't compare;) However, this I made a long time ago on a Macbook 2012/4GB RAM and a chickenbrain CPU. All characters with 4k maps, no scene optimizing. Those are M4 with SubD applied...
Sorry @mavante, no more M4 characters, I promise!
even as old as m4 is, for crowd scene like you made it looks pretty good , a heck of a lot more people then i could fit in iray without doing it in png layers . nice work
Why would you Sub-D an M4 figure? They are already 80K, and none in that scene are seen in close up.
Tks Ivy:)
Good question LOL! This was before I knew anything about stuff like linear workflow, polygon count and pretty much anything.