SASE Products Missing Files in Daz 4.20

[lazy_potato]

I don't really know where to post it but I guess here is a good enough place.

Recently I've updated my Daz Studio to 4.20 and an error occured when opening some of my SASE Characters.
For example SASE Briah


So I took a look into the folder Runtime/textures/SASE/Briah/SASEBriahEyesB_1007.jpg and the file was right there so why would Daz not find it?

I noticed that normally the path should look like this
Runtime/textures/SASE/Briah/SASEBriahEyesB_1007.jpg
and not
/textures/SASE/Briah/SASEBriahEyesB_1007.jpg
if the file was really missing.

I opened the SASE Briah duf file (People\Genesis 8 Female\Characters) with the Editor and scrolled till I found this

As you can see every path starts with /Runtime except for the marked one. For some reason it starts with //Runtime.
So I just deleted one and used the search function (CTRL+F) to find all paths with //Runtime to correct them. There were 2 more so 3 in total. I closed and saved the duf file. Now I opened Daz and loaded the character to see if it worked.
Et voilà it fixed the issue.

If you have more than 1 SASE Product with this error you might be using Notepad++.
For this I found a step by step instruction here:

You must be registered to see the links

I hope I could help those who encoutered this too or those who will encouter this.

 

[Vernacular]

Did you have any luck with this? I'm still on DAZ 4.12. I tried earlier this year to upgrade to 4.20. D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R! I had so many issues I had to install a back-up of my system to go back to 4.12. The new version of DAZ 4.20 drags the CPU to insanely slow speeds and extra long renders times. The ghost light thing is problematic. The environment controls seem to have moved or eliminated the dome settings for HDRIs. I'm stuck in the time of G3-G8 intro.

 

[lazy_potato]

Well this worked for all SASE characters but i found out when you do this without notepad++ you have to manually change all duf files even the ones for eyes and lips and that is just too much work.

To be fair I got a new computer a few months ago and downloaded DAZ 4.20 on the new system and then installed the products i got, so i don't know what happens when you just update it with the cpu and gpu.
The only thing i can think of right now is that your scene may be to big for your graphic cards VRAM and that DAZ used the fall back to cpu which is a real pain in the ass because it uses 100% of your cpu which would end in extrem slow speeds and long render times. Cpu rendering is not as powerful as gpu rendering. You can take a look in the log file to see if it really fall back to cpu. Another way to find out if your pc renders with cpu is to look in the task manager while rendering, if the cpu is at 100% well that's pretty self explanatory. To solve this you can use the scene optimizer which scales textures etc. down without that much of a quality loss.

I heard that the ghost light works different on all versions before 4.15 than after 4.15. I think there was some kind of bug that was fixed after 4.15 and the ghost light kits for before 4.15 don't work anymore.
Here is a little overview for the ghost light kits:
https://f95zone.to/threads/iray-ghost-light-kit.9260/
https://f95zone.to/threads/iray-ghost-light-kit-2.14021/
https://f95zone.to/threads/iray-ghost-light-kit-3.47300/
These kits only work on all versions before 4.15 if you have them and are on 4.12 they work fine, but if update now to 4.20/4.21 you can't use them anymore/they don't work.
All the other ghost lights like these https://f95zone.to/threads/iray-ghost-light-kit-one.111498/ should work fine with all versions after 4.15 but i don't know if they work on versions before.

I can't speak about environment options because i didn't encouter something weird there and i don't know what exactly you mean. A little tip if you played around with environment and tone mapping options and want to go back to default just delete the options in the scene tab and the next time you use iray preview the new (default) options will be generated.

Hope this helps a little bit. If not you can write me a pm with your exact problems maybe I can help maybe not.

 

[Vernacular]

That's a lot to digest. I started in DAZ in Jan 2017. Took a long time to learn the tools and techniques. It feels with 4.20, I'll start all over. The DAZ people seem to care more about selling things than a working platform. This hobby is becoming too much of a money pit.