Feedback on Substance 3D Stager

[BentVector]

I've used the new stager for about 8 hours now, and have some feedback (Build 1.0.0-20210616.r.5070-67fda79, Windows 10 21H1 x64, Razer Blade 15 laptop with NVIDIA RTX 3070, 16GB RAM, Samsung SSD 970 EVO Plus 1TB storage).

- First, the Help->Give Feedback... option isn't working. It goes to a page with a 404 error.

- If I start a render then alt-tab to another application, I can go back and see the render status right up until it is nearly done. However, if the render finishes while I'm in another application, it says 'Render status: estimating...' for a LONG time before finally coming back. The rest of the UI is responsive, and the render is actually done and saved, but I have to click Cancel All or wait >10 minutes for it to figure it it.

- Stager is a major memory hog. I added 16 cubes each with a material on them, mostly variations, but it uses 100% of my 16GB already. Seems like memory management could be better implemented in Stager for improved performance? With this much memory use it takes > 10 minutes to load this scene back up, constantly paging memory in and out!

- The save file is also 16GB in size! Can't you link to the materials externally rather than embedding them?

- It doesn't look like material instance randomness is working. I changed the random seed on each cube, but the material doesn't change (each row in the attached image is the same material with a different seed).

[Jeremie Noguer]

Hi, thank you for the feedback!

I am surprised about the 16GB project size, we've built some really large projects internally and I've never seen the size of a .ssg file go higer than maybe 5GB with hundreds of objects and materials.

About the randomness, some materials may not be randomizable if they are based on scan data for example, even though Stager shows a Random Seed parameter. Which materials did you try?

[BentVector]

Sorry, it should say the file itself is 6GB in size (6,074,867,318 bytes to be exact). I can no longer open it; it needs > 16GB of RAM to load all of the materials. Just tries to load with 100% memory use and loads of paging in/out forever.

I'm using SBSAR files from my Allegorithmic account for this Stager project, including moher_cliff_rock, french_coastline_cliff_rock, stone_cliff_strata and others. These seem to mostly have some randomization, certainly in Unity3D, I can change the seed and it changes the material.