Return to Daz after 4 years and find the same old Content problems
Xade
Posts: 236
I had a fling with Blender, after a catastrophic crash of all my saved files,and come back to Daz. I'm having minor trouble catching up bnut other than that I am doing fine. I am slowly but steadily working on rebooting my comic. I bought a number of things that I had downloaded from other means back in the day and found some minor and old woes.
The default content library stinks, basically. It still has mats in with the poses. Before I quit I made an effort to organize the massive runtime I had but I must have done something or another wrong because sometimes it wouldn't load the files after I rearranged them. I noticed that there is a new mats option in the default poser library. Now what would happen if I moved all the pz2s that was related to mats into the mats folder? Would I break my run time again? Or should I add a subfolder that for mats and park them in the poses?
I like to keep things tidy, although you cant say that by my room :P, especially in something I use all the time like my runtime. How can I tame the mess without borking it again?
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Comments
The obvious answer, to me at least, is to use your own Categories. That way you can put anything anywhere you want, since you do not need to move anything on the disk, it just uses the database. That way, it makes it more logical for you, but any references to other files in the system will not be broken, since they will all be where they are supposed to be.
You could have a look at this:
Creating new Categories by AdamR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=_nnPf8nCcc4
To be clear it is the Poser content library that stunk. Early material presets for Poser where a 'hack' of the pose file format that some user discovered and that is why they needed to be in the Pose section.
You don't...at least on a file level. Part of the problem is Poser. Content made for Poser HAD to be in very specific folders (yeah, whoever thought color/textures are a pose needs to have a couple of sessions with a professional...). Then there's the 'out of structure' stuff...the bits and pieces that don't really fit in a place in the original structure or that Materials folder (it's for mc files...ones generated in the Materials Room, in Poser). In other words, a total mess...but, at the file level, unless one wants to edit just about every load file (cr2, pp2, pz2, etc) and point them to alternate locations, (which may not work in Poser, but would in DS), then don't mess with actual files.
You use categories, like has been mentioned.
Thank you. That's exactly what I needed. That will make it a lot easier to organize my runtime without breaking it. =)
Guess I know what I'll be doing today :P
It wasn't the Poser developers that did that - the problem was that Poser 4 and 5 didn't have any way of saving materials for a figure or prop apart from a model, so as said above the use of a settings file was a hack that had to be accommodated in the existing library structure. Pose was the least obviously illogical location. Even when Poser 6 introduced the material collection it had to be accessed through the Material Room, rather than in the general Pose room, so people continued to offer .pz2 materials at least as an alternative to the mc6 files.
In Poser I solved the problem by adding a subfolder in my Pose directory. Called it Mats -- short for Material Poses, which is what these really are, and all "poses" that are for colors/textures go there. Poser has no trouble finding it and neither do I. Should work for Studio, too.
Just make sure that you save your data often, so that it wont be lost if anything happens to the Database.
If you go to the drop-down menu in the Content Library pane, you will see an option for Content DB Maintenance, then select Export User Data from there. If you ever need to, you can re-import the User data from the same menu by using Re-import Metadata.
Thanks what I tried to do but I must have done something wrong, I really like the idea of categories, I just finished the Characters folder. I'll tackle the poses for the mats mats tomorrow. I'll see if I can just match up the mats with their items when available. That's going to be a bigger chore than the figures folder.
Is there a way to edit the meta data too? Like add keywords
The safe way to move files is from Studio's Content Library tab as that will only show the files a user has a need to see. Of course if you use DIM to install content moving the files DIM won't be to find and remove files when there is an update to the content.
I do have a few different runtimes, one which is my content and another for the things I received but havent bought yet. that are on my list. I Will buy them, I just need the money, which will be next payday. :P It's just for my own personal renders so my bunny boy isnt starkers. But I promise that I will buy the 2 products that I exempted from my purge of illegal content.