I am so tired of new products with bad metadata
barbult
Posts: 24,872
I am so tired of new products with bad metadata. The problem is getting worse and worse (at least for the products I purchase). I will submit yet another help request, but I don't have much hope. It has been many many many months since any of my reported metadata errors have been fixed.
Today I purchased Martha's Everyday Bob for Genesis 3 and 8 Female(s).
For the Genesis 8 version of the hair, 96 items are in Lost and Found, including:
- All Shaping presets
- All base colors
- All tint colors
- Most of the hair blending controls and alphas
For the Genesis 3 version of the hair, 30 base hair colors and the Apply First preset are compatible with Genesis 3 Female (the character) when they should only be compatible with the hair.
All these metadata errors mean that Smart Content won't work right for this product. I could categorize the Lost and Found items myself, but Daz Studio will not let a user correct wrong metadata, like the incorrect compatibility, because it is "vendor data". A user can make a change in the Content DB Editor, but the change will be ignored. This is infuriating. Daz will not correct reported metadata errors, but it will not let me correct them for myself either. The only choice is to keep a difficult to use product or return it. The metadata is not the responsibility of the PA, but the PA's bottom line will suffer when users return products because of metadata errors.
OK, I have vented now.
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
I am with you on this. What you described is very similar to other hair I had to report. Today I lucked out, everything had good metadata. But one computer still has most of Holt 8's release in Lost and Found, while everything is categorized, and my other computer that downloaded a few days later, everything is perfect.
I am also tired of submitting customer service reports when I know I can fix it for myself, but what about others? And like you said, Daz created errors can't be fixed at the user level. So I have male garments assigned to females, females to males, or missing being assigned compatibility totally. (I can fix it, others may not know how.)
So glad I use the content library and stay away from smart content
Honestly, why would a user return a product just because there isn't metadata? there are other ways to find the products and can't you create your own metadata?
Thank you for your empathy, Mary.
does changing scene identification and overwriting it with a save work?
I have no idea. I just file a report and when Daz tells me they are no longer responsible for metadata from a certain SKU on back, I just have to accept it. If it wasn't for a YouTube video Slosh had posted, I don't think I would ever had figured out how to fix metadata or to add it for non-Daz products. His instructions 'spoke' to how my brain works. Nothing else had helped. But I remember how frustrated I was those first years, so I send in reports to Daz, so others who are new don't get totally bent out of shape and give up.
I have never returned a product for cause. I just suck it up. I have found for some products, Content Library is better. Complex shader sets are a case in point. Smart Content just is wrong for them.
I use the Smart Content almost exclusively. If I load a character, I want Smart Content to show me what hairs, materials, and wardrobe items are compatible with it. If I load a hair or wardrobe item, I want Smart Content to tell me what materials are available for it. There is no way I can remember every product I own and what goes with what to find it in the Content Library! Smart Content is one of the best features of Daz Studio, when it is set up correctly in the product metadata.
I can add metadata categories for items in Lost and Found, but I cannot correct metadata errors, as I described in my original post. Daz Studio does not allow it any more.
If incorrect metadata makes a product too hard to use with Smart Content, I do consider returning it. That has also become a problem lately. 12 days ago I requested a refund on a product, because the metadata was so bad it made dozens of items show up as compatible with EVERYTHING. It made finding the actual compatible items difficult. Unfortunately, Daz still hasn't processed the refund request. 12 days is pretty unusual to wait.
@WendyLuvsCatz, which issue would that address? It sounds intriguing, but I don't know exactly what you mean. Can you give some more details about your idea?
I think "sucking it up" encourages Daz to continue business as usual. Why pay someone to fix errors, if the errors don't affect the bottom line? I used to "suck it up", too, but I am much less inclined to do so now. When I could correct bad metadata myself, it didn't bother me much if there were errors. But for the last few years, that capability hasn't existed in Daz Studio. I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the accumulation of products with errors in my library and Daz's apparent disinterest in correcting reported errors.
This one looks like it could be a bug in our new upload system that was deployed last week as the first big step towards moving to the new store software.
We wanted to split the file processing system out from the rest of the store so any issues could be dealt with sooner than having the whole store switch out at the same time. I'll be having one of my software engineers look at this product tomorrow and see what they can determine.
I appreciate your response! I hope they find a generic problem that will improve all product metadata for future releases. Getting the errors in this one fixed would be great, also, of course.
when I use genesis 3 stuff on genesis 8 or vise versa I go to edit change scene identification under the parameters hamburger menu.
I change the figure it is associated (as well as baking joint rotations to match) then save it as a support asset figure
it now is associated with that figure so I am guessing not tried if you did this with your wrongly associated garments it may work, on the otherhand it might only have to do with triggering Autofit.
can you post link to that video please?
I second that request! I'd love to see it.
I do the same process to convert clothing and hair between G3 and G8, but I don't think that has any affect on metadata.
Maybe if I created a whole new product with the assets of the product with the bad metadata, and then I assigned all the metadata from scratch to the new product, it would work. If that would even work, it hat seems like a hard way to solve a problem that Daz could so easily fix with a metadata update to the real product. Hopefully DAZ_Rawb's team will find and fix the problems.
I think this is the video that Mary was referring to. There are several online videos about creating metadata. A Google search will find them.
Excellent video, easy to understand and simple to follow... but if I were to undertake this activity, it would take me way into Q4/2022!
Wondering if this product (https://www.daz3d.com/content-wizard) will greatly assist with the meta-data update as I have tons of M4 items. Watching the product explanation video now.
I reported male clothing showing up in the female list several months ago and they still havne't been fixed. I don't know how to fix these things myself, so I would really appreciate it if DAZ would acknowledge our requests in a timely manner. I've never returned an item, but I know that other people do. This could be a big loss to the artists who create them, and for some of them, this is their sole source of income.
I was a content library addict but moved to smart data recently. And I like it. Only bad thing is that once it links you to the content library, it goes to the product section (A-Z) and not to the individual folders.
Regarding the product "Content Wizard", I highly recommend this. Use it for creating Smart Content for the stuff I purchased from Renderosity and elsewhere. Is a ginormous timesaver. I created meta data for some products by hand. Takes up to 10-20x the time of Content Wizard. Plus Content Wizard handles the installing as well. Use it on Mac. Only bad thing is that the integration of the text editor to alter some values is not working but on windows it should do. On Mac I also use a nice zipper which helps to optimize the structure of the zip before I do the installation.
If you are not fine with the meta data a DIM product comes with, you could just reinstall via Content Wizard. Updates might of course change things but those don't happen all the time.
Finally I'm more worried about lots of recent products which created a mess folder-wise. Quality management is not existent in terms of typos in folder names and such. One can fix the people folder but not the textures folder unfortunately.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-sdHEBNCB4
Just saw your requests guys.
Thank you for the insights! Now I shall just wait for a sale and then pounce on Content Wizard... with metadata and smart content, my utilisation of M4 will x100!
barbult, Most of the time when I 'suck it up' is when I have bought a utility or something that I think I will use, and it may be months before I can even look at it. I have one from August of last year I still have not had the time to dig into and figure out how the thing works! As many folks can relate to, when you have your personal time broken up into 15 minutes here, or 5 minutes there, and you are mentally exhausted from working on a computer, it is easy to shove off the problems to another day. I have tutorials purchased and notes I have taken, I keep trying to use, and never make it to them. Although, because one person asked a question on some monochrome lights in The Commons, I got the answer I needed and was able to use them last night.
I currently have a request into Customer Service on a very old sku that came without its geometries. I am hoping that it will be fixed. But it may not be possible, so I will have 1 item from that set that works, and 5 that don't.
To remove the wrong compatibility or to add the correct one? You can do the latter by having the base it should be compatible with loaded and selected, then dragging the file from the Content Library into a desired category in Smart Content. To remove a compatibility, right-click on the product cotnainer in the Content Library (the "folder" under Products)>Edit Metadata, go to the Asets tab in the dialogue, select the file(s) in the list at the top, then in the lower section go to the Compatibility tab, right-click on the erroneus one, and select the delete selected option.
Ironically, this is why I've never used Smart Content. I shop at a lot of other 3D shops and have somewhere around 15K non-DAZ products just from Rendo, RDNA, Content Paradise, CG Bytes and Poserworld, as well as who knows how many freebies and items from smaller stores, so even if Smart Content worked properly... which I think everyone can agree that it doesn't... and was on every product that DAZ sells, I don't see much use for a system that isn't set up for half of my content library.
Ooh, thank you for that Richard! All these hidden things I never knew about!
Question: The epic god rays product https://www.daz3d.com/epic-props-godrays-volumetric-light-for-iray is supposed to have folders that say “Use first”, “”Use second” or something like that but both in smart content and the content library, they are all mixed together. How do you create the folders they are supposed to be in or know what folders they are supposed to be in?”
Does your Epic God Rays product include a "Light Set" category with all of the steps categorized out? I don't recall if it came like that or if I added the "Light Set" category (which is used to refine a Light product's categories). This "Light Set" categorization mimics the product's folder structure that DIM installs into the Daz Studio Formats library. I've attached a pic that has Steps 1 and 2 expanded to see a sample of the refinement with the use of categories.
Richard, Daz Studio 4.12 does not allow a user to remove compatibilities or other "vendor" metadata. The Content DB editor will let you make those changes, but when you hit accept, it will not apply those changes. Go back in, and you will see, that same metadata that you had removed, is still there. You CAN change metadata that YOU added, but NOT metadata that Daz installed and designated as Vendor Data. It you know a secret way to change/delete Vendor Data, please reveal that to us!
One thing you might need to check before: Content Wizard works perfectly with the new file syntax (people folder). Not sure if that also works that well with the old syntax (poser runtime folder).
Most of the files are just text files, either compressed (Zip) or not. You can edit the contents even with Notepad, but Notepad++ is better since Notepad doesn't recognize "LF"
The files with metadata are in ...\Runtime\Support\... (*.dsx)
DS may be downloading the original metadata if allowed to go online - I dodn't usually (perhaps ever) bother removing the bad compatibility, I justa dd any that were missing as well.
The bad metadata on new products continues. I bought Protozoon's PRZ White Tie Outfit for G8M. The Compatibility Bases aren't defined, so the compatible materials don't show up in Smart Content when the wardrobe item is selected. This is not Protozoon's fault. It is a shame that bad metadata makes an otherwise excellent product more difficult to use. I will modify the metadata myself to define the compatibility bases so I can use Smart Content.
This is an example of how the metadata was delivered for the dress shirt
This is how the Scene Identification should set the Compatibility Base for the dress shirt to make it work in Smart Content
There are also presets with no Type defined. there are hierarchical materials presets defined as material presets. There are presets with no compatibility defined.