Stager is shambolically bad

[Equil]

I'm in need of some serious assistance here because for the last year I've been dealing with non-stop issues with anything Adobe 3D-related. The entire suite borders on just about useable at times anyway. 

I'm not even going to get started on my thoughts in regards to the Substance suite being a completely separate subscription, which by the way, is totally not worth the price Adobe is leeching from its unfortunate users simply due to the fact that it, does. not. work. 

The rest of the suite works relatively smoothly. Issues are mainly PR and AE issues here and there which are usually quickly resolved. However, AE and ME refuse to communicate with each other. 

Now, the problems I can't seem to solve are the ones related to 3D programs. I recently switched from Dimension to Stager, since I have the educational package granted to me by my University I'm able to access the Substance programs, and having used Substance prior to Adobe's acquisition I was quite eager to use this suite. Plus Dimension is utter garbage that 9/10 times can't even finish a Render. 

Fast forward to now and I'm having MORE issues with Stager than I ever had with DN only this time, I can actually produce a finished render 5/10 times! Well worth the additional £500 a year! (If I manage to get that far fighting through consistent hangs, and crashes.) Clearly, Stager is built on the same broken foundation that Dimension was. 

I'll put it in a nutshell. 

Stager constantly crashes.

- 5/10 times it won't finish a render and I have to restart the application. This usually happens after stager has just completed ONE render in a series of renders, so it'll reach the end of the second render and just hang. 

- I cant switch to another application while rendering otherwise it crashes.

- I cant move decals on a 4096px res model otherwise it crashes. 

- I cant apply decals while in RT mode otherwise it crashes. 

- I cant work with scenes that have more than a handful of objects otherwise it crashes. 

- I cant put more than several decals on a model otherwise it crashes. 

I've tried fixing it. I dont see how it could be my PC, when my specs are what they are. I have ZERO issues in Maya & Blender. I dont know what else to do, Ive tried all go-to solutions that Ive seen on the forums. Non helped. 

I'm literally at a point with Stager that I DREAD having to use it. I'm not exaggerating when I say I'm in a constant state of stress when using DN or SG, My hands literally started shaking the other night as I opened it because I know the hell I'm going to be put through for the following few hours.

As a student, I get the Substance suite for free, and once that stops, like hell am I going to pay £500 a year for a rehashed version of Dimension. I understand I get the other apps, but now that Substance is under your development, I don't dare touch it. I'm happy with actual reliable programs such as Maya or Blender. Because they work. 

But in the meantime, I have projects that are somewhat done in stager, and they need to be finished. Once they are, I'll be moving my 3D workflow entirely over to Blender probably as I quite enjoy its UI/UX. 

Until then I'd appreciate some assistance in getting Stager to work at a level where I can produce work without experiencing 57 crashes in the space of 5 hours. That's not a made-up number. Last night I counted. 

I need help asap, because I have my deadlines coming up, and Stagers issues are literally going to delay me from completing work on time, which directly affects my degree. 

System Specs:

- CPU: RYZEN 9 5950x

- GPU: RTX 3080

- RAM: 32GB 3600mhz 

- SSD: M.2 2TB Samsung 980 Pro  

- MOBO: ASUS Crosshair VIII Dark Hero 

- OS: Windows 10 (Build 19044.1526)

- GPU Drivers: Studio Driver (Ver 511.65)

[Equil]

I hate the fact you now own Substance, how long before Substance Painter & Designer go to pot I wonder?

[JMathews]

Hi Equil.  Jeanette here, I'm the product manager for Dimension and Stager.  I'm so sorry you're having this experience and it is not acceptable for Adobe, Substance, or Stager, on any level. There are always 'reasons', but let's skip that and just acknowledge, this is terrible.

What can we do about it.

Our top priority right now is quality and we're setting internal measurement goals around this to make real progress.  First, we're working on a crash reporter.  5 years later than it should have been built, but this will help us moving forward in gathering crash reports and fixing them much faster.  We hope to have this out to everyone very soon.

In the mean time, I can send you an invite to access our prerelease build which has some fixes for some rendering crashes specifically that we've been iterating on.  If you're able to share your scenes we can test them out a bit more and try to dial in more specifically what's going on if there's still the same number of issues.  I will send you a direct message for details.  

[Equil]

Honestly Jeanette, anything that will help me at this current time is more than welcome. I appreciate your response I understand I said some harsh things here, but you must surely understand my frustration of having dealt with this for the best part of a year. 
Since writing this I've encountered a new error with stager, which seems to be exclusive to my laptop. 

Specs of which are:

RAZER Blade Advanced (2018)

-i9 (unsure which model)

- GTX 1070 max-q

- 32gb Ram 

- 1TB 970 EVO SSD

After about 15 minutes of use in a brand new file, the undo function just simply ceases to work, and after 30 minutes of use with the program, I encounter a never-ending loading wheel for what seems to be no reason. Everything else within the program continues to work except for undo. 

I can't seem to replicate this on my desktop PC, Absolutely bizarre.

It's worth mentioning that some but not all of the issues I listed in my main post are also apparent on my Laptop. 

I've also spoken to my peers at University and many of them have reported similar issues albeit on less powerful machines, but nobody should have to spend £3000+ on a machine just to use the Adobe suite. 

The growing level of performance inconsistency across the suite is something that's becoming more and more apparent as time goes on, not only from speaking to people but also what can be found here on the forums. It's honestly reaching a point of lunacy that Adobe charge what they charge for these programs vs the amount of problems people experience every single day.

It's utterly embarrassing for Adobe, and its going to be embarrassing for me as a customer to say I pay £600 a year for this sub-par experience. I cant imagine the weight you must feel as one of the CC product managers, but I think theres only so long that this can go on for before the majority of people start to realise that Adobe as a company isn't what it once was. Because if a worthy competitor comes along, which Adobe yet doesn't really have, I can see people jumping ship fast.

I understand every application has its issues. No program is free of bugs and glitches, thats perfectly understandable. But when a free fully-fledged 3D program like Blender works almost flawlessly against something like the very expensive Stager, a scene rendering tool, which constantly crashes, constantly complains, or has fundamental functions that just cease to work, the question of "Do they even care?" starts to arise. 

Stager is a fundamentally much more simple program compared to Blender or Maya, yet it has 10x more issues. How does that come to be? Bad coding? Poor optimisation? Surely a company as large and as dominant as Adobe can outpace a much smaller company comprised of 24 people? The evidence would suggest otherwise. Now that is embarrassing. 

Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve is a perfect example of people looking for alternatives. Word is catching on quickly about Resolves outright superiority in almost every aspect of the program, and the thing is, it's a one-off payment. I know as the word spreads people are jumping over to Resolve more and more and unless you guys change your entire approach to how you deal with strategy and pricing, and just your attitudes towards the design and functionality of your programs as a whole, Adobe will die a slow death. 

[JMathews]

I appreciate a harsh honestly!  It's the truth and your experience and the only way we can get better is to take it seriously and put effort to it.  I won't comment here on the pricing and Adobe's business model, that's above my level, but as a product manager, the quality and stability of the tools is firmly my responsibility.

There are reasons Stager is problematic, but really reasons don't help you.  I can just reaffirm that we're committed to quality improvements and are doubling down on fixing the crashes, hangs, rendering issues, and other worst offending bugs.

[pascalk12559297]

Dear Jeanette

It's nice to hear an honest comment about the substance issues from an adobe employe for once. I just chatted with technical support regarding 2 major bugs in substance stager - and the technician told me, that there are no bug reports comming in - so the problem has to be at my end. I got pretty angry - because obviously there are repports coming in - when I browse through this forum I see lots of complaints and bug reports. I use stager on 2 different systems - and I experienced different issues on both of them. I never used such a faulty software before. The concept of the substance product-line is great - the learning curve is not as steep as with blender - and while not cheap, it's still less expensive than Cinema 4D. But about 2 out of 5 times stager just doesn't work. I hope you can get substance back on track soon - and just be honest about it's faults. You could for example send out an email to substance customers explaining the difficulties - and maybe even inform about future improvement-plans etc... The worst thing is to stay silent - and act like substance is working great. 

[ZeusWork]

CAN you send me a link to your beta build, I'm in the same boat. thank you

[Bram287480615ajl]

Is the crash reporter operational?
thanks 🙂

[AJGoddard]

I am running Stager on an older iMac w/OS 10.15.x and 32MB of RAM and started a Adobe 3D Substance Suite trial on my personal Adobe account.

I am accustomed to C4D which is notoriously stable, but I wanted to try some use case testing of the more accessible Adobe 3D product(s) that I could present to our enterprise user group.

The Stager Scenes I am working with are not complex (ex: 2 cameras, 3 lights, 1 plane, 2-6 very low-poly models, and simple material usage), but even outside of any rendering, the application hangs up and won't display material or models' details consistently. The only thing fix are regular application restarts.

Regrettably I made the mistake of getting in too deep on a few scenes so now that the trial is over, the only option if I want to finish up demonstration use cases is to fork over a month or two subscription fee of >$100 for something that ultimately might be of questionable value. 

I guess my point is, if these problems are as widespread as they seem, a lot is being asked of users of something that's still in beta. 

[Holger24347452umic]

Same here ... Very unstable piece of ####.

[Sloan@Adobe]

My sentiments exactly!  I'd go as far as saying the Stager program (despite beuatiful render results) is a serious impediment to creative energy & flow!

The most unreliable software & package I have ever experienced.  Constant material change displaying from design view (ray tracing off -on) in program.  The viewport navigation so sluggish and chugs along as if at it's own pace.

I, unfortunately, didn't know, when eager to subscribe, the M1 Mac wasn't supported natively.  So stupid was I.

I purchased a Windows machine (for a whole other project / purpose), yet the PC version (of Stager) seem problematic also.  And I didn't scimp on the graphics and CPU kit.

Yet similar issues as with the Mac version.

I'd like my subscription money back - just for being a beta tester and having my hours of frustration affecting my passion for creativity!

Let's not start on "when" things may change. From the sounds of it, I don't believe Adobe Management give a flying.... about UX in this space (or other).  They've become institutionalised.

If it wasn't for every so often being impressed with the results of renders (despite the minimal amount of actual result I'd produced), and the hope things will get better... I would have given up months ago, shortly after I was sucked into the vortex of possibilities.

Shame on Adobe for the subscript - greed over customer satisfaction.

I'll be changing my subscription soon enough as a protest, if the next update doesn't drop soon.

As enough is enough.

Disgruntled to say the least!

[PascalKrebs]

Absolutely true. I have anxiety when opening a stager project...