Saving scene as package with assets?

varna

Apologies if this has been asked before, I couldn't find any pertinent information.

I've been tasked with looking into rendering stills and animations with Daz for a fairly large game project. So far, so good.

For archival purposes I would however need to save my scenes in such a way that I can easily open and re-render them in the future, perhaps on a different machine. The trouble I see here is that the Daz scene format appears to store references to the content library, but not the actual asset data itself. Great to keep file sizes low, not so great when it comes to making sure stuff still works in a year or two...

As I see it, when I'm on a new machine I'd have to go through each scene, determine all assets used, download and finally install them. This is far from ideal, especially considering that individual assets may have changed or even been removed from the store for whatever reason.

Is there any way to have Daz create a scene file that stores all required assets locally with zero external dependencies? I.e. it does not reference the content library?

Leana

This might be useful for you: https://www.daz3d.com/content-gatherer

Richard Haseltine

Also, for content from Daz that can be installed through Connect (even if the items used in the scene were DIM-installs) DS will offer to install any items that are required but not available, assuming it has been allowed to go on-line to learn your product library.

varna

Leana said:

This might be useful for you: https://www.daz3d.com/content-gatherer

Thank you, that does look useful indeed. One thing I'm not sure about from the description: Will this tool also change the scene file to link all assets to their local copy? Or is it just for collecting the assets into one folder?

Richard Haseltine said:

Also, for content from Daz that can be installed through Connect (even if the items used in the scene were DIM-installs) DS will offer to install any items that are required but not available, assuming it has been allowed to go on-line to learn your product library.

Thanks, that's definitely useful. Though I wouldn't want to rely on this, seeing as assets may be purchased from other stores and then the whole thing kind of falls apart.

Leana

varna said:

Leana said:

This might be useful for you: https://www.daz3d.com/content-gatherer

Thank you, that does look useful indeed. One thing I'm not sure about from the description: Will this tool also change the scene file to link all assets to their local copy? Or is it just for collecting the assets into one folder?

Scenes save references as relative paths for content from your content directories, so for example if you have a texture file T1.jpg in <one of your content directories>/Runtime/textures, a reference to that texture file in the scene would be simply "Runtime/textures/T1.jpg".

When collecting the files, content gatherer will keep the relative folder structure, so it will add the "Runtime" and "texture" folders in the local version and copy the texture file there. So the reference in the scene file will also works for the local version.

mindsong

varna said:

Leana said:

This might be useful for you: https://www.daz3d.com/content-gatherer

Thank you, that does look useful indeed. One thing I'm not sure about from the description: Will this tool also change the scene file to link all assets to their local copy? Or is it just for collecting the assets into one folder?

Richard Haseltine said:

Also, for content from Daz that can be installed through Connect (even if the items used in the scene were DIM-installs) DS will offer to install any items that are required but not available, assuming it has been allowed to go on-line to learn your product library.

Thanks, that's definitely useful. Though I wouldn't want to rely on this, seeing as assets may be purchased from other stores and then the whole thing kind of falls apart.

Like Leana indicated, Content Gatherer not only identifies all of the elements required to (re)generate a chosen scene, but it copies/zips all of those assets to a new location/zipfile, and yes, it preserves the original folder heirarchy exactly (merging all of the files from the various runtime/libs into a single runtime/lib), which lets you treat the zipfile like any standard installable/merge-able runtime/library.

It's also useful for simply identifying the dependencies in a scene, even if you don't generate the new runtime/lib/zip with it.

I'll use this tool to bundle/archive a project when I've completed it, as I always muck with my (many) libraries and may not realize I've broken a dependency that will haunt me later. With the project content zip and the project duf files (all burned to a removable backup medium), I can always regenerate a scene, flaws and all. For big projects, I even include the original DS version program installers now, given how radical and unstable recent updates/changes have made reloading of existing animated scenes.

I hope this helps,

--ms

varna

Thanks everyone, sounds like Content Gatherer will do the job!

alan bard newcomer

read the forums, learn about neat things,  follow the links and discover you bought it a long time ago.. Now to USE it. 
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Just ordered 24TB of new storage to gather up all the spread out stuff so should have room to store large backups.
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my daz library on C 24g
my daz drive G with most content and first level backups of all scene and render files uses 1.4 tb of which 137 g is scene files and renders
and 650g of dz installers o backup K. 
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and I have had enough of my old scenes get flake in terms of not finding this or that that saving an entire copy of a major project would seem to be a really good idea. 
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So time to wake up and use the content gatherer...
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so thanks for asking your question. 

barbult

Content Gatherer works fine on content installed with DIM or manually, but does not work with content installed with Daz Connect.

Athansor

I know this is an old thread but wanted to post to let anyone looking to get it newly; if you try to analyze a scene file that isn't in the default scene folder it crashes.