Over the last six months I've had a reoccuring problem with Daz Studio 4.9 crashing after I have exited the program. I save my file then exit Daz. The GUI closes and everything appears OK. Then, anywhere up to a minute or two later (and particularly if I open another program right away), I get a crash notice from Daz. I have put up with this little quirk until it corrupted a file I hade been working on for ages, even thought I had saved it prior to closing the program.
I Think I have found what the problem is and have a work-around that has worked for the last week without fail.
BEFORE exiting daz, and after saving my existing file, CREATE A NEW FILE. Then exit as normal.
By noting that Daz took up to 3-4 minutes to clear the scene and delete files before creating a new, blank file I deducted that Daz holds on to its stuff in memory for a period of time even when the GUI has shut down. Seems like Daz is a bit of a memory hog as I have had to flush my memory buffers at times after using the program too. A "close file and exit" button in Daz would be a better option for Daz programmers to work on.
. This will be my biggest challenge: Keeping as much of my workflow as possible inside DAZ. But there one necessary reason to export geometry and that is for facial animation. Daz doesn't have a realistic way for facial animation yet. Currently, I plan to use Faceshift for facial animation. Faceshift tranfers it's animation via FBX. It seems DAZ only exports low resolution .fbx files and I find that insufficient for realistic animation. I'm sure many of you have found this same roadblock. iClone has interchange software, but there is a polygon limit (17k?). Here is my first question: If I just export my Daz character's head, would I still be able to use the max 17k limit? If so, by extension, couldn't I just export body parts individually instead of the whole character at once, each of the parts maxing out the limit? I could assemble the body again back in DAZ and keep my high resolution. Am I that clever or has this been tried before?
Actually, I just need to export the head for animation and then re-imported back to DAZ. If this trick can work, I can proceed with my workflow pipeline plans - character creation and animation in DAZ with head export out to Faceshift for facial animation, reunite the animated head with the animated body. Final animation goes out via alembic to Clarisse IPX for assembly and rendering. I choose to render in Clarrisse because of it's fantastically quick and memory efficient renderer. This is my current plan. But you know the rule about plans.....