Daz Please help me understand Mesh Smoothing, Interactive Update and Collisions

[Sakrilas]

Hello there,

I would appreciate if someone could help me understand the quirks and tricks related to Mesh Smoothing.

Do you use the "interactive update" option often? I still don't understand what the Interactive Update does exactly, but I noticed that whenever I enable it, it takes a lot of effort in my machine to continue working on the scene, even translating the models around starts causing my machine to run DAZ very sluggishly.

The impression that I have is that Interactive Update just makes the mesh to sit even better over whatever other mesh you want the collision to be set against, but if that's all its doing, wouldn't the same be achieved by raising the number of smoothing and collision interactions?

If interactive update is important, can I choose to just enable it before pressing the render button? Or does it need to be ON the entire time because it uses the movements of the model to compute the mesh smoothing process (which I'm guessing is the case, based just on the name).

Sorry if this is a silly question, I couldn't find good resources about this Interactive Update flag.

 

[xAsurax]

Hi, I'm not really an expert in Daz, but a smoothing modifier usually uses to smooth out the surface and poke through. Here a link to youtube about the smoothing modifier that might be able to help you. It totally depends on you to use the smoothing modifier from the start or at the time of render.

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[Sakrilas]

Hi there Asura,
Thanks for replying.

My question isn't so much about the Smoothing Modifier, but rather how the Interactive Update flag works. I would also appreciate if I could learn what thought process people follow when deciding that Interactive Update is required.

PS: I had watched the video you referenced before, sadly they don't go into explaining what the Interactive Update is about.

 

[recreation]

Interactive update just means that smoothing is applied instantly and all the time while you do stuff, when it's not on it will wait for you to finish whatever you do, like changing the pose, move an arm, add new clothes or whatever and then apply it.
The result is the same in my experience.

 

[xAsurax]

Hi,

My Interactive Update is off by default, and I have never used this feature before. As I'm writing this, I just try it myself. It depends on the smoothing and collision value the software is trying to calculate every time you move the figure in the Interactive mode. It does slow down when I move my model only when the value is high for smoothing and collision. I don't have any in-depth knowledge about this feature that can help you. Here is one more link, but most of the answer is same like keep it turn off. 3rd reply by

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[Diconica]

I haven't used DAZ but I do a 3D software development.
Understanding the following will probably help you understand how the interactive flag is working and why it causes a slow down.
I can probably answer this one well enough for you to understand. First, there is no one set way of doing Mesh Smoothing. There are a number of methods and they don't all do and act the same way.
There is a general idea of way think of a surface drawn with a lot of bumps. The program looks at the vertices and reduces the change in vertices so as not to be such sharp changes. So if it finds a sharp change going between 3 points it reduces that change by moving the center point closer to the middle slope. How much of a change can be either preset or adjustable it could even have an larger or smaller area of effect. Think of it as similar to image smoothing and blurring.

Probably what is going on when you set the interactive flag it means any time you move that mesh it constantly updates the smoothing calculation based on the original model. Thus it ends up doing all those calculations every single time it updates.
That's a crap ton of work. So yea it would slow your system down. especially if the software is poorly optimized.
The developer of the software could have done something like weight the areas based on movement and only update localized areas that actually change but they probably didn't so instead the entire mesh is recalculated each update.
A good example: would be if you moved the arm at the elbow only an area in and near the elbow should need to be recalculated.
That said if the arm was in contact with clothing on say the stomach then that mesh also moves and it would also need to be recalculated in that area. That would be much much smaller than recalculating the entire body and all the clothing over again.

 

[Sakrilas]

Thank you all for the explanations and discussions.

I really appreciated the help.

 

[Elohiem]

I use this feature.

I need to export models with morphs applied through automated daz scripts. In a script you would just sequentially apply the morph and export but there is no way of knowing if the smoothing calculation has finished or not. If you turn on interactive update then the script blocks until smoothing is applied. In a different context you can use it to automate renders.