Why can't artists be bothered to use the right categories? :/

ShelLuser

Hi gang!

So the thing is...  I can't help wonder about a few things. This evening I bought a Daz Originals bundle; I take value in "D.O." because.. yah. I bought a figure based on Genesis 8 and yet lo and behold: the product category chosen was: "Creatures". The authors didn't even bother to differentiate between Air, Land or Sea...  and my creature had 2 legs. Seriously: how long has it been since the smarts contents pane and its categories became a thing? Even G8 authors still can't seem to be bothered to pick the appropriate category and thus leave us users stranded? And Daz still doesn't apply some kind of quality control?

Considering the price of the bundle...   I'm a ZBrush fanboy, I know how much time and effort goes into these things but IMO that is no excuse for being lazy and/or sloppy like that. Yes, I am well aware that I can customize everything (to be honest that is the one thing that got me hooked on Daz Studio in the first place!) but it's IMO still no excuse to "just" ignore the polishing.

And you see this all over the place. Take morphs..  plenty of artists apply their morphs onto a base model vs. limiting this to the character they provide. This is both a bonus and a bane: the bonus should be obvious: I now get morphs which I can apply to a multitude of figures and that can sometimes be really useful.

The flip side on the other hand: morphs that were intended to be used with the figure itself now often get burried in a sea of crapola (within context!) and that makes it a lot harder to use the figure as intended.

Making me wonder... where's the Q&A?

Surely a "Daz original" product should be aware of the fact that it's impossible to find its entry when it gets located on a root category (within a decently filled library)? Daz 3D themselves added "land, sea and air" as sub-categories and for very good reasons too I might add. But nope!

My experience isn't bad enough to warrant a refund request (I'm tempted though...) but I'm getting a little bummed about the apparent lack of quality control.

At the very least.. put a figure with 2 (or 4?) feet into the land subcategory... that I can deal with but... don't be lazy!

Richard Haseltine

PAs do not, in general, do the categorisation.

kyoto kid

...I've been asking this for the last 15 years I've been involved here.  It was even worse in the old Poser runtime days as Daz materials were in the Poses instead of Materials folder for some odd reason and sometimes did not use the same parent folder name usually beginning with "MAT_" or just "MAT". . After a few years of dealing with this I decided to build my own categorised runtime/library structure and parent materials folders to the item (similar tothe Daz 4+ Library) .  As long as the texture files remain in Runtime/Textures and meshes in Runtime/Geometries (or in Daz 4+,"Data") folders, everything should load fine. 

I even rename "vanity" folders in the Runtime/Library or Daz/Libraryto the actual witems and they load with no issue

Yes, it is a lot of work at hte outset but it pays itself back  a thousand times over, as I rarely use Smart Content and I dont have to worry about the database breaking down or becoming corrupted.

Silent Winter

^Vanity folders are now required by Daz (putting 2 of my products in a different folder from their related products). It's not always something PAs have control over.

 

The metadata is all done by Daz. No PA input here.

takezo_3001

At least DS is not stuck with poser's ignorant libraries where clothes, hair, and characters gets thrown into the “character” sub menu… and good luck trying to find ANYTHING in that wretched cacophony of crap buried within nothing BUT vanity folders!

Thank F for DS, as you can customise every -single- aspect of the program, and I hope to F that DS5 doesn't get dumbed-down for the masses!