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I mostly ignore Smart Content, metadata, etc. Just for kicks, I took a look at my brand new DAZ content install. Everything is exactly the way DIM installed it! There are 795 items in Lost and Found!
Sounds like DAZ needs to get its act together.
Thank you @Barbult for the above tip. I had never ventured into "Scene Identification" before but with your clear instructions above I just managed to make the correction for the shirt. Newbies like me would have simply purchased items and either not found them or not understood/figured out why they weren't working as intended.
Well, I've had my say. I wonder if this problem will ever go away. I'm done here.
The shirt was one example. You can do the same for all the rest of the items in the product. When you click on the little ... next to the button that says None, it will open the database. In this case, all of the base compatibilities for the product assets were defined in the database, but they weren't assigned to the scene items. You can select the right one and assign it yourself.
If Daz has hired a number of new people, who all have to work from home, I have to wonder how easy it is to train them to do the QA and the metadata build or whatever goes into packaging steps. I have done long-distance training by computer and it is not easy. I expect companies all over the world are dealing with this now. For everyone who has ever walked into an office or a new job, think about how much you learned just by sitting near others doing similar work.
And at this time of Covid-19, if they are in the USA, they may have family at home, may have kids who need schooling or child care, or someone sick who is not ill enough for the hospital to be cared for.
But, I am also tired out of my mind, after downloading new purchases, to open Smart Content, and go to 'Lost and Found' and see what has shown up there. It is a drag on my enjoyment. And the ones that never leave, even when they seem to have everything accounted for. Looking at you Holt 8 Pro Bundle.
Sadly for me this isn't a new problem. I tried to go with it when I installed the original Genesis figures when they were released and persevered for a long time. I had to go back to my library so many times to find things I knew I had just installed. I found tutorials on how to edit/correct bad metadata but I found that I was spending more time editing these things than I was using them. I went back to using the library directly and haven't ventured back since. I've sometimes wondered if I should give it another go but the experiences in this thread had saved me the time and effort, so thank you.
I toyed around and decided to take a trip to Lost And Found... and found MANY products inside there... should I assume that these are all the items that I had purchased but weren't categorised by Smart Content such that I would never have found/used them? Or are they duplicates? (ie. showing up correctly within Smart Content directories and also showing up in Lost And Found)
Question: is there a difference between Barbult's Scene ID step mentioned above and Slosh's Youtube video on adding metadata? From my current understanding, I would use Barbult's advice for items that had wrong/incomplete metadata whereas Slosh's tutorial is for adding metadata to products that are completely void of metadata. Right?... or left :P
Thank you!!
ps. I have a ton of M4 products so it would be impossible for me to add metadata to them all via Slosh's steps
Same here, tried it and found it too much trouble for what little if any it's worth.
@DMax, guess what, it's complicated!
Lost and Found is a dumping ground for things without a category assigned. A product will appear in Lost and Found if it has even one asset without a category. It doesn't mean that the product has no metadata at all. Look at the Smart Content Files tab instead of Product tab if you want to see how many assets (characters, garments, materials, etc.) are missing categories.
Metadata consists of much more than categories. An item can have the right category, but the wrong type or the wrong compatibility, etc. and still not show up properly in Smart Content. It is possible to add missing metadata information yourself, and you can change metadata errors that you accidently make while adding metadata yourself, like if you give something the wrong category. But Daz Studio was changed around the 4.10 release time to NOT allow you to change "vendor" metadata. Meaning that if Daz delivers a product with the wrong category or wrong compatibility, a user cannot remove that wrong metadata. So, we have to submit a help request and ask Daz to fix it.
Years ago, Slosh created an excellent video teaching people how to add metadata. It is still useful today. Additional methods have been added to Daz Studio, like drag and drop to assign categories. The Scene ID assignment is just one step in creating complete metadata for a product. There is even a tool in the store now that attempts to assign metadata to product that don't have metadata. I don't own it and can't comment on how well it woks.
You can make metadata for your M4 stuff, but like Haruchai mentioned, you may spend more time creating metadata than making scenes and rendering. It can be rewarding in its own way, to actually get it working, though.
I have a gazzzziliion items in Smart Content > Files > Lost And Found.
I followed Slosh's video and managed to create metadata for about 15 M4 wardrobe items and their corresponding materials but it already took over an hour. Wasn't a fun activity except the magical moment when the products showed up on Smart Content when I select M4. Not sure I would go down the list and perform the same actions on perhaps more than 100 other products. Moreover, I was stumped by some items that had poses, SSS, MATs, etc etc... all strange notions to me. Anyway, I am going to stop housekeeping now and begin creating instead. It's complicated.
DMax, the older items don't come with metadata, so you get to add it yourself. There are a few exceptions but those are joyful surprises. What I did after watching Slosh's video and getting it down to a smooth operation, was to have an interesting TV show on or video and do it in increments. A little a day. You will eventually run out of files to work on. And get a chance to really look at some wonderful old products. Of course, there were some items I tore my hair out trying to figure out what they were for. So the sales page helps a little.
@memcneil70 I have actually continued with the metadata activity... I know that I am too fastidious to not complete the activity even if it's going to take a while... one question though: if ever I have to reinstall my purchased items, etc... (backup failure, computer transfer, etc)... will I lose all these efforts? My fear is it will!
Export User Data.You can do that in the Content Library's Content DB Maintenance section. It will save it to a file in Runtime/Support. Later you can reimport that saved user data.
Periodically download your 'Export User Data' from the Content Database Maintenance'. I have to remind myself to do that on both my computers. I do know that when I have had to delete a product and reinstall it, the metadata has been right as I had set it up. I am learning as I go. I have also had to reset my database one time and had a small heart attack after, worried about the metadata, but it was there.
But, there are a few times, everything I have done has been wiped out, if I have done something wrong I guess. I can't think the number of times I have tried to do metadata for the same items, over and over. But that is in Smart Content. I think it is best to find it in Content Library, and use the Content DB Editor. It seems to stick better.
Someone has a saying in their forum notes to the effect of 'Hit button and see what happens'. I try and see what works and if I am worried, I back off, and send a request to Customer Service for advice. They have been pretty helpful in the past.
Mary
Thank you! I shall do that then! After about 3 hours, I have now arrived at "Cheo Wear for M4"... going on to "D" soon :P... for now I am skipping over V4, props, vehicles, environments and any unisex wardrobe... they require too much head power. This however has afforded me the invaluable opportunity to really take stock of my M4 inventory, so many forgotten purchases from 15 years ago!
So I haven't yet stopped creating new metadata after 6h of work, kinda working methodically like a machine now... question: for some products, why do I seem to have identical Materials files in both PoserFormat>Materials and PoserFormat>Pose? So far I have doubled my actions and applied metadata on both sets of materials but something is daz fishy...
Likely due to the old Poser system having two ways of handling materials. Used to be handled by Mat Poses in the pose library till they added a material library somewhere around Poser 6
Because a lot of Poser creators created both for the same product. Think of it like 3Delight and Iray files in DAZ. Older versions of Poser couldn't deal with the Material poses (in the Poser Materials folder - mc6 extension) and so a lot of creators created legacy pose MATs as well (in the Poses folder - pz2 extension).
Thank you @TessaractSpace and @Haruchai for the precious insights... I shall thus continue to add metadata to both sets of identical MAT files in a bid to reduce the stuff in my Lost & Found directory.
Also just to muddy the waters even more some creators obviously created DAZ Studio specific MATs (.ds or .dsa). So you could come across 3 sets of MAT files for the same texture.
I wish you well in your endeavor :)
It can now (Well, it can use them as well as pz2 MAT files, that is), but for a long time it couldn't.
And even in Poser mc6 could only be applied from the Material room (no idea if that's still the case), while pz2 MAT could be used directly from the main room like any pose.
Thanks, I did a test and discovered this so had edited my post 30 seconds prior to your response, so sorry for the disconnect in your quote and my current post.
So after about 20 hours of effort, on the third day I finally completed adding metadata to all my M4 poser-related products in >Figures, >Expressions, >Hair, >Hands and mostly everything in >Materials and >Pose. The toughest activity is locating the corresponding materials files for each wardrobe product, made even more cumbersome with some materials found in >Pose while others were found in >Materials and yet some others found in both subdirectories... and some products having add-on items in >Props, etc. It didn't help that not all PA's followed any strict naming convention... sometimes a "jacket" item had a material file named "top" etc.
At some juncture, things got hairy when I came across SSS files and morphs/REM/INJ files etc... all of which are totally alien to my current knowledge of DS and Poser. Whenever in doubt, I simply associated the item in question to the highest hierarchical level of the associated product. In any case, I am well pleased with the efforts... when I click on M4 now, a ton of "new" wardrobe items appear on Smart Content... I now feel that I will utilise these old products much more often.... M4 had some wonderful outfits... love the TOA Legendary costume and so many others including some really fancy military and general uniforms.
Thanks to you dazzlers for your encouragement, guidance and helping pave the way! <3
I just got done reinstalling everything on my HP Notebook. I used DIM to install DAZ Studio and the other software. I didn't let DIM install any content. I copied my content from the new PC onto an external drive, and copied it over to the HP Notebook. I refuse to waste more of my time and energy fixing problems.
Remember to set up the DS content directory manager on the notebook to include the folders you copied over, so DS can find that content.
I am assuming Dusti for Genesis 8 and Honni 8 has bad metadata since I added it to my wishlist and it appeared at the bottom, below an item for the Genesis figure.
AFAIK, metadata is active only inside Daz Studio. The wishlist and store position of those products is some other error, I think.
wow, for somebody as forgiving and 'splainen as you, it strikes me as a big deal that you are actually venting about anything =) I'm not a metadata user, but am hoping that they fix it for you!
New store software? I am cautiously optimistic. Is that warranted?
He never came back to tell us whether that was the issue with this product or not. I suspect not. The problem has not been fixed. I really don't see how a new store software will correct product metadata, but who knows. I don't know anything about the inner workings of Daz.