Daz Setting default resolution for newly loaded materials

[anonj73]

Does anyone know if Daz has a deep preference ability to define a default resolution for new materials, shaders, or really anything loaded that has resolution?

I'm getting tired of constantly searching through every item to make sure I don't miss one when I get on a spree with loading things. And yeah, I know it's counter to the direction most projects are going but I need base resolution for everything I'm working on...

It doesn't stop my project... but it slows it down. I checked the surface level preferences and don't see anything about defining a default resolution, but there must be something internally that does this because everything loads as high resolution... as if by default.

If anyone knows if this can be done, thanks... if you don't, thanks also.

 

[Rich]

AFAIK, there is no global setting that says "render everything like X, even if the individual asset is set higher."

But, you need to be a bit careful to separate what you mean by "resolution." "Base resolution" usually refers to the geometry of a model, and, specifically, how many levels of subdivision DS applies when it goes to render it. That's an entirely different thing from something like the size of the textures used on the various surfaces. If you're worried about not overloading your GPU's memory, then it's the textures you need to worry about 99.44% of the time - usually the total amount of memory that the geometry itself occupies is quite small compared to the texture memory sizes, and subdivisions can be very important in having characters look good when rendered.

Textures always load at the resolution of the underlying images. That's just the way it is - DS will not resize them on the fly. If you're looking to reduce texture sizes, I would suggest the Scene Optimizer plugin - it will iterate through all the textures in your scene, show you their sizes, let you pick ones that you want to down-scale, reduce their resolution, and update the surface settings appropriately. Taking a 4k texture down to 1k usually doesn't affect the visual quality of the scene, but uses 1/16th the amount of memory. (And some items have a LOT of textures.)

The other thing you can look at is the Texture Compression setting, which is on the Advanced tab in the Render Settings. This provides two thresholds that affect how the textures are compressed when being put into the GPU. This doesn't change their resolution, it just tells DS to sort of "zip" them to save space. It's a lossy compression, but, again, there usually aren't visual artifacts unless you're really close to a texture in the scene. The savings from texture compression aren't nearly what you get by downscaling textures using Scene Optimizer, but they're still measurable, and this is one place where there is a global setting.