Still a bit confused on installing 3rd party content
cwlcak_994ef1dab6
Posts: 12
Hi,
I get that 3rd party content (both free and purchased) should go into C:\user\public\publicdocuments\My Daz Studio 3d Library\ folder and that I should unzip files to this folder. But should I leave the file structure alone after I unzip them or should I put environments into the environments folder, people in the people folder etc? Not all my content has install exe files and sometimes I get error messages about not being able to find things like tiff files, even though they are there I can see them. This has happened a couple of times with content I got from rendere*****. It seems like DAZ doesn't know where to find these files. Any help is appreciated. TIA
Daz 3D is part of 
Connect
DAZ Productions, Inc.
7533 S Center View Ct #4664
West Jordan, UT 84084
Licensing Agreement | Terms of Service | Privacy Policy | EULA
© 2025 Daz Productions Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Comments
It depends on how the product was packaged, as everybody does it differently. Commonly you will find folders one level too deep and will need to move everything up on folder. Sometimes products have no folder structure and then you would need to create the whole string of folders (or move them to an existing set if you have only one content/runtime folder), but this seems to be a very small percentage of the content, and I'm guessing you probably won't want sort folders like environments, people, etc. as you describe above. Of course, don't move any files unless you know where to move them. It may help to temporarily unzip the product into an empty test folder and compare to what an existing working product's folder structure looks like if you have questions.
It may also help to pick one product and see if anybody else has it and/or post screenshots of the folder structure so we can get you sorted on that one just so you get a feel for it.
Also note that a lot of products are unfortunately broken, having missing materials becuase they are just in the wrong folder is pretty common. It may be of value for you to learn how to edit files to fix this if you commonly run into it.
Thanks sriesch.
Q: Since DAZ (for some nutty reason), doesn't provide a popup about where it expects these files should be (i.e."Can't find XXXXXXX.tiff in c:\file structure where DAZ thinks it should be), I don't know where DAZ is looking. Does the error log provide that information? I guess I could look, but the log looks like an XML dump that isn't easy for me to decipher.
Can you provide a screenshot of the error message you are seeing? Maybe it's not what I'm thinking of. When I get a missing material, it looks something like this: I'm able to identify the filename, then although in this case I know where it is I could run a full search of my PC to try to locate it if I really need to, although of course there's a bit of guesswork there since there could be other files with the same name. In this case it's obvious because I know where I installed the product.
Here I located the likely culprit of the bad filename, the product's .pp2 file. Make a copy and temporarily rename it to .txt and open it in wordpad and search for the missing texture filename (minus extension), and here you see where the product is actually looking for it. If appropriate, you could change this to a valid location where the file actually IS located in the product, then rename the file back after you fix it. (my example isn't a great one, because I'm not actually sure where the materials were supposed to get installed, however other products actually have the content alread installed somewhere within the runtime folder tree and it would make sense to fix it to actually use that location.) Of course remember to make a backup if you fix a product so you don't have to do this every time you reinstall, and maybe make a backup of the original in case you think you know what you are doing but accidentally do something else.
Ahhh, I got it. I just had to put the zips in the /install manager/download folder for DIM and then use the DIM to install. Everything is now working. Too easy.