The file that broke the customers back. going for a custom library
myotherworld
Posts: 615
Hi
so i have had it with the Daz library structure. it is not helpful for work follow.
Many years ago, back when folks used Poser 5 ( yeas that long ago ) people , Well customers really. moened like female dogs about the Poser file structure., with textures/ matts being in the poser folder as well as having a materials folder among other things. And vendors file structure being overly long or to short with folder names that very little to do with each other. So you would have a folder in the characters folders called , say "big box", with the props folder in the props folder "balls" and then a folder in the pose folders called "square" and remaber that could be textures for it or poses. Ok that may sound a bit extreme. But it was that bad at time and if it was an EXE good luck trying to find out where things went.
then there was the Vendors who would use all sorts of tactics to get there folder to the top of the folder window. like putting One ! or more at the begining of the folder name. it was a real human waste show trying to find anything.
Ok history leason over.
having taken advantage of the sales over christmas I had a good number of items to install. I dont use ISM and after installing products from other sites manually, the smart content thingy didnt pick them up. So i dont use it.
So that leaves me with installing ALL content manually in Daz studio.
Well guess what, the folder structure is jus as bad (dont get me wrong, some vendours are ok)
here are a list of problems I have come across. in no real order, they are all as bad as each other.
store links in almost every folder, every folder really, vendor do you not think I know where I paid for it. Your store links all get binned
Vendor name as the first folder header in what ever category its in. If I buy a female figure named "low high" from the vendor Bob. I will look for her under the name "low high" I will not look for a folder in daz studio>character > gen 8 female>Bob. vendor folder name get binned, along with vendor icons (no I dont want to see your face smiling back at me from daz studio) all binned
Foot pose for clothing items, not in the clothing folder, wher it could quickly and easerly applied. But in the pose folder, so I would have to coule out of the clothing folder after having pllyied them to the figure and try and spend time looking for it in the pose folder. No clotrhing pose folders go into the clothing folder.
same with eyebrows for characters, they get moved from the anatomy folder and into the corresponding characters folder. I am not loading a character, then coming out of that folder, looking in the anatomy folder, loading the eye brows. going back to the character fold to apply makeup.
folders within folder. for example (these are all clicks)
materials>3dlight, iray. why not have two folder, "material 3dlight" and another "materials iray" two folders instead of three. i am binning all the 3dlight material folders where i have both as I dont use 3dlight, so I have one folder called "materials iray"
Buildings. there is a architecture folder in the main menu. So why sell a building and put it in the props folder? What the. it get moved to architecture.
I have alot of pose sets for building/rooms/vehicles. you will find these in there character pose folders. But you will also find them in the corresponding building/rooms/vehicles folder, for which they were made. (best of both)
and lastly folder names. mmm really get me these.
Genesis 8 & 8.1. The majority ( and it is a very high number of vendors) dont put 8.1 in the name of the character if its an 8.1 figure. some thing that are for G8 dont work on G8.1.
dForce again the vast majority of vendors dont put dForce in the name of the clothing item. I add it to the folder name, it save time later on.
Very lastly folder name abbreviations, please for the love of, dont do it. If I buy " A very old castle on the hill" I will look for for a folder in the Daz studio called " A very old castle on the hill"
Not "AVOCOTH" yes it happens , a lot.
thats it, I will step down from the soap box I am done for now.
I am slowly getting a daz studio menu that works for and has speeded up my work flow. I have moved things around, removed folders and added others and so far it works for me.
if I have upset some vendors, just remember I am pay good hard earned money for you services, i have will return item for a refund that I feel are poor quality
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Comments
You can make links (.djl files) and copy/move them anywhere you want. Right-click on one or more files, "Create Link(s) for Asset(s)...".
Holy crap, I never even knew about that, and I've been with Studio since the 2nd version, this changes everything, thanks for the info!
Daz makes software and character framework.
Vendors are separate small businesses that have to build followings and compete with one another, and that necessitates brand recognition beyond just Daz.
Every store you go to, brands are clumped together within their categories. Everything around your house has a logo and offers sponsorships, buys up stadium names, throws ads on every web page, paper page, and TV program you see. You'd think some names in the folder structure would be the least intrusive advertising you're subjected to on a daily basis, especially given that the file structure is invisible if you use smart content correctly.
All the time you spend bickering and micromanaging Daz folders could just as easily be spent editing the metadata of your third-party content so that it, too, shows up in smart content - which your arguments about the excessive advertisement, labirynths, and misspellings in the file structure also apply to, in some cases even worse.
Considering the state that metadata usually is in and that logging in to work with DAZ does wonders - just not the good version - to my workflow, bickering and micromanaging feels the easier way to solve those problems, thank you very much.
Egad... looks like we are dividing up into teams. Shirts v Skins...
Anyway,
Kudos to all of you with outstanding memories, that when you are creating/outfitting your characters, you think, "Oh, those shoes By Fkkit would look great", and then go to your Fkkit vendor folder to find the shoes named "Bright Sunday", because, you know it all makes perfect sense.
Personally, I take a rather more mundane approach where I get the character built, get to the shoes, have an idea for flip flops, and then go look at all my flip flop options to see what fits my creation the best.
So, to me, and I am sure I am alone here, I would just go to People/Genesis 8 Female/Clothing/Modern/Footwear/Flip Flops -n-Sandals folder, not People/Genesis 8 Female/Clothing/Fkkit/Bright Sunday...
But, for those commiserating with the OP...
G9 has made things MUCH worse. Cause now they have seen it in their infinite wisdom to create another layer... the Daz Original folder. Now I know you, who don't comisserate with the OP and have read on regardless are thinking, "This is awesome! Another layer of obfuscation!" but for the OCD file logic-eratti, this is a night mare.
Also, G9 gives us POSE folders that include Base, Masculine, Feminine... I guess since saying "Male and Female" are not PC anymore.
The only positive is, these are user facing files, and we can organize them as we wish... Lets not even talk about how screwed up the Morph folders are, and we can't do anything about those....
I hate the vanity folders for "user facing files" - The reason is that I do not remember or care, who has made the products I have bought, but I probably remember their name = Easy to find if they are not hidden behind cryptic vanity folders.
Vanity folders also have the same effect as having multiple Content Libraries... Was it in this library... No, how about this one...?
When looking for suitable clothing for example, for G8F, I go to DAZ Studio Formats->[name of my content library]->People->Clothing->[my own grouping] and start going down the list with the down arrow and when I get to some folder, I weant to see the thumbnails for the clothes in that folder - If that folder is a vanity folder, I must select the right-arrow to expand the view to access the subfolders and afterwards I need to get back to the vanity folder to hide the subfolders (keeping the folder view tidy), before I can continue down the list = Causes a break in browsing and takes unnecessary time.
Unfortunately, it seems that the vanity folders appear to have become the DAZ standard recently, ie. DAZ is adding them even when the PA didn't.
There isn't anything TOS compliant that I could say about the 'Smart' content...
For PAs outside of DAZ I would agree with this, but not for the ones selling at DAZ. DAZ controls the store and the content and DAZ takes care of the PAs store marketing and customer service.
I get annoyed at preview icons that do not show how the product looks on a character, but instead have a super closup of some detail. For example, there is a hat which has a preview closeup of the material. There is no way to know what the hat would look like on a head. I would show you but the forum won't let me attach a file. ::: Error message (pic file name) Failed to write file to disk. :::
That has gotten better though... Back in the day with V4, G1 and G2 that was more or less the standard, with G3 one got a full view for most of the items and it was pretty good until they started showing the clothes rendered without colors... [sigh]...
I for one think that the product names themselves are more problematic than what foler they are in, whether they're for smart content or done manually. Everything goes alphabetically, unless it features dforce for example, in which case dforce is the first word in the product name. You have products A-C, dforce products A-Z, then products E-Z. Double so for outfits that have break-out products, when the outfit itself is named "dforce product for G*F," and all the cponents are called "product for G*F," and they're scattered among categories.
Other than that, it's natural that file management would become easier than it was in the beginning, then increasingly more complex as the program and its libraries expand. Comparing how it is now to how it was back in the day when single-digit gigabytes was considered a massive hard drive and people were clinging tenaciously to Windows 2000 rather than stoop to XP, and available content was considerably less than it is now, doesn't do the subject justice.
I once made a ticket about a product not using the baseline file structure - in that case: putting textures for a product in a directory with the products name, but in the base textures directory and got the answer, that my complain would be forwarded to the Artist, but DAZ couldn't do anything about it themselves, as it was the artist's choice where to put his stuff...
I guess using whatever customer facing nomenclature is also left to the artist's choice...
That's the main reason I manually download files. I can control the file structure in the library. For example, if I buy a clothing set from a vendor here then buy a texture add-on, I put the texture add-on within the main clothing folder. For example "Vendor's cool T-shirt > summer textures for cool T-shirt". As long as I don't change the structure of the data files or texture files, you'll be fine.
Sure, I know it's not efficient, but at least I can find my stuff.
As a generator of manually installed freebie content I will comply with any structure that is officially defined.
Trouble is, I don't know of any official definition of the structure. I think it would be a really good idea to produce a recommended way of doing it and then encourage every PA & freebie creator to follow the suggestions.
Until such a suggestion is made officially I will continue to put most of my stuff in an appropriate 'ChestnutP' directory inside the normal overarching folders (eg People/Genesis 8 Female/Accessories or Props etc), not because I'm trying to sell anything or that I want you to find it first, but because I have no idea what your organisational system is, and as evidenced above there is more than one used. I feel it simply gathers the stuff in a place you can find, so you can move it to a better place later. I totally agree that store links are infuriating, and I regularly delete them myself. I don't, as yet, delete 3DL files, though I have never knowingly used 3Delight as the rendering engine since returning to DS in 2019. The time it was taking 3DL to render was the reason I gave up on DS in 2007, my PC was a touch slow and 26 hours was how long one render took.
In the case of clothing, I do tend to remember vendors/suppliers I like (eg Arryn, Rhiannon, Lilflame), but other people I'm less likely to remember I collect their stuff into collections like 'Tops', 'Dresses', 'Trousers' etc. As for characters, I almost always collect into vendor groups (eg Mousso, MostDigitalCreations), but I do not move the eyebrows into the matching character folder because I might forget them.
So... Get a DAZ endorced agreement on where stuff should go, and I'dd follow it. Until then, I'll use my judgement over positioning the files to try to create the least irritation overall.
Regards,
Richard
I'd go a step further and say that if there came to be a unified file structure, it would really only be applied to products after that. Right now there are over 88,500 SKUed products, quite a few legacy ones no longer with Daz to make those changes themselves. Furthermore, if such a massive restructure were to occur, it would mean downloading updates for your entire library for every single user Daz has. Hundreds of megabytes for some. Terabytes for others. So how it is now is how the products released up to now always will be.
Hmmm, I have no problem with the folder structure as it is.
Mind you, I am not using Smart Content as I can never find anything in there.
What I really would love to change is, when the Testers would flag a product when the folder names are misspelled like * Prop * instead of * Props * ..... I often have to copy and paste content into the correct folder and then delete the * wrong * one.
DAZ actually does make changes to the file structure periodically. It's pretty evident if you do a complete reinstallation of all your content. They did the first major change when DAZ Studio 4 was released, which was when the original Genesis figure was released, then they changed things some for Genesis 2, and now they've made more changes with the release of Genesis 9.
Edited to add: I'm not sure what the difference is between an Accessory and a Prop in the context of a given character generation, so I don't know whether that's a good thing or a bad one.
my own observation is that accessories tend to be things worn on characters (glasses, necklaces, rings) while props are either things that stand alone like a wine bottle or are used by characters such as a sword.
That sort of makes sense, and seems to match my own observations, to be honest.
I identify assets with vendors, so I like vendor folders in my library. It makes my library a little more compact, too.
If the installation application would give options on where to install user facing files, based on the 'rules' the user selects - That would serve those who do not want vanity folders as well as those who do.
I wouldn't mind those artist folders if they were actually used intelligently. For example those PAs who make hairs, I would love for PAs to have a folder like "base textures" inside their named folder that would contain all their most commonly used textures like albedo, bump etc. and hair specific textures like ribbon etc, in the hair texture folder. I wouldn't even mind if all their textures where in that base textures folder in case they some day use that ribbon for other hair..I'm sure this is not a problem for most users, but for me I usually have several character with different hairs from the same PA on scene, and now they all basically have same textures but since they are in different folders they all eat up GPU memory. If those textures were in the same folder, those would only be loaded once, and we ( the users ) would save GPU memory and HD space.
Of course this same principle goes with props, environment and whatever. Why to have 10 same wood, paint, leather or stone textures in different products if they are basically using the same textures. I'm always close my GPU memory limits when I'm creating my scenes, so I do fix those manually, but it would be a nice quality of life improvement in my opinion.
I agree about texture re-use where possible.I have included the same wood texture in three totally different freebies, and will use it again as necessary. I've used the same asphalt texture in 3 or is it 4 different freebies and not always with it looking like asphalt through other parts of the shader settings. Once the texture is in my content library it stays in the same place so as to never get duplicated.
Regards,
Richard
I download manually, remove vanity folders and organize folders containing facing files as I want. Then I use R code to create metadata that includes custom categories, and also create product packages with R to be installed by DIM. I use smart content because I can see the promos for each product, but I’ve removed all the compatibility information so it just works as a great showcase.
So it can be included old products, other stores products and freebies to the organization.
Woe betide you if you need to refer to a help file. Where was it again? Docs, Documents, Documentation, readme, ReadMes or Readme's?
And vendors who create texture sets for other products... instead of placing the material files in the product folder they relate to, they put them in, for example, Clothing > VendorName > Some Arbitrary Folder Name That Isn't Related to the Actual Product.
Manual installation is the only way to ensure consistency.
Most add-on materials for native Daz Studio content seem to go in a subfolderof the main materials, at least in experience.
I have been manually organizing my library for a very long time. Best recommendation is to do it product by product and zip up the product with your modified layout so you dont have to do it a second time.
This. Especially for third-party content like Rendo that will break an 8 kilobyte file into five zips (hyperbole, but still).
Rendo say they have a 200Mb limit, but I suspect 60Mb max is preferred from how few files exceed that. Can't say I have got close to 200Mb with any of mine, the biggest was 60Mb for a little geometry light, image heavy arched bridge.
Regards,
Richard