Anyone seem a nice discussion of the DS Save-As options?

coralyn

When I do a DS 'Save-As', one gets things like (Scene, Sub-Scene, Wearable, Character, Pose, etc). The names kind of lead to the obvious, "Err, the 'POSE' saves the pose". Yet the Character seems to be a super-set including pose. I'm wondering if anyone has seen a nice discussion like "Character include A, B, and C things. Or use the "Properties' instead of "Character" to save just the B things and not A or C things?

I have started some trial-and-error experiments, saving & reloading, but would be nice to have more formal statement of the intended design. The normal DS 'help' doesn't even have an entry for SAVE, which was little surprising as most apps at least a help doc which (sadly) includes a pointless page saying the 'file -> save menu items saves your data to disk'! 

PerttiA

If you hover your cursor above them, you get a hint at the lower left corner of the interface.

Leana

Scene: saves the whole scene

Scene subset: saves selected items.

Wearable preset: saves the various items fit to / parented to the selected figure. Typically used to make a preset which would load all parts of an outfit at the same time.

Properties preset: saves pose, shape and materials (surface settings) for the selected item. 

Shaping preset: saves only the values of shape parameters for the selected item.

Material preset: saves only materials for selected item. A material preset can apply different surface settings to multiple surfaces, but applies only to surfaces with the corresponding name.

Shader preset: saves surface settings for the selected surface. The resulting preset can apply this set of settings to any surface, whatever its name.

Hierarchical material preset: saves materials for selected figure and all the items parented to it. Typically used to have a material preset which would be applied to all parts of an outfit, or a skin which would be applied to figure, lashes and anatomical elements. The downside is that it only works if you have the right figure selected, for example you can't use a hierarchical preset made for G8F on G3F.

Pose preset: saves only posing parameters for selected item.

Hierarchical pose preset: saves posing parameters for selected figure and items parented to it. Same restriction as hierarchical materials, it works only on the figure it was made for.

Character preset: saves shape and materials values for the selected figure. Also, if you load a character preset while the figure is not there it will automatically load the figure and apply the preset to it.

 

For the various presets you can select which parameters to save in the save options dialog.

marble

One thing I'm never quite sure about (I really should do some experiments to confirm what they do) ... are "shapes" the same as "morphs"? And does saving shapes (or any other option) save the state of geografts too?

Leana

Shapes are parameters (morphs or properties which control morphs) which have been setup to appear in Shaping tab, as opposed to those which appear in Posing tab.

To save poses or materials for a figure with a geograft you would use a hierarchical preset. No idea for shapes.

PerttiA

Leana said:

Pose preset: saves only posing parameters for selected item.

 

This I have found not to be accurate - If you save a pose preset and do not check what will be saved, the file will be huge and applying the pose will take forever compared to properly saved store bought poses.

Found this out when I was wondering why it took so long to apply my own poses and opening the pose file in Notepad++ revealed what was going on. 

Leana

If you don't select precisely what you want to save it will save every posing parameter for every body part of the figure. So yes, it can be huge.