Checking Mesh Size in DAZ Studio

Some DAZ meshes have way too many vertices. Dealing with such huge meshes can be very time-consuming, and I personally avoid the biggest meshes. However, it not so easy to judge the size of a mesh in DAZ Studio. My own method has been to export the character to Blender. If exporting takes a long time, the scene contains some large mesh. Then I replace the large mesh, which usually is the hair, with something else.

However, it is a waste of time to wait a minute for the export script to finish, when all I want to do is to check the mesh sizes. Now there is a new script which displays the mesh sizes without actually doing anything else. The script is call Mesh Stat and is located in the Diffeomorphic script folder.

If you run the Setup Menus script Mesh Statistics becomes a new entry in the File menu.

My scene consists of a Genesis 8 Female with the Basic Wear outfit and Toulouse hair. The script displays a message box with a list of the meshes in the scene. For each mesh the number of vertices, edges, faces, and polylines are shown. The Export To Blender script will only export the base meshes, whereas the Export HD To Blender script exports both the HD and base meshes.

We see that the Toulouse hair has 35228 vertices. Exporting the scene to Blender took 2.308 seconds.

Now I replaced the Toulouse hair with Monica hair. It has 206277 vertices, i.e. almost six times as many as Toulouse hair, and the export time increased to 6.564 seconds. Still quite manageable.

Then I replaced the hair again, this time to Joy hair. It is a polyline hair, so the number of edges and faces is zero, whereas the number of polylines is 75758. But what is important is that the number of vertices is a whopping 1269892, i.e. 36 times bigger than Toulouse hair. As a consequence, the export time increases to 38.381 seconds.

In short, the Mesh Statistics script is a quick way to check the size of the meshes in your scene, and avoid the worst time thiefs.