Sharing libraries between Mac and PC

cheard

Hello, DS community!

Suppose that my Daz library is (almost) entirely stored on an external ExFAT formatted drive. Are there any issues that would impede me from using that drive interchangeably on a Mac and a PC? Assume that I own and have exclusive control of both computers; I’m not talking about a shared workstation somewhere.

Alternately, or in addition, is there a way to “package” everything used in a scene and transfer it to the other computer? E.g., build the scene on Mac, package it up, and transfer it to the PC for rendering? Actually, is there any reason to do that? I am more familiar with Mac, but is(n’t) the DS interface basically idential on both platforms?

Gratefully,

Chris

SofaCitizen

This is exactly how I have my Daz environment setup so this can definitely be done. I am primarily an OSX user and so that is my daily-use machine. However, waiting around for it to render complicated scenes is not fun so I have a Windows/nVidia machine for rendering and dForce simulations etc. It works well enough but does throw a few spanners in the works occasionally.

If you do not also share your DIM manifest folders then the other machine will not see any products as installed. This will potentially cause some issues/confusion when you need to run DIM on the other machine to install OS-dependant purchases (plugins or app updates). If you do share the DIM manifest files then this does take care of DIM on the second machine knowing what is installed - however, due to the absolute paths on each machine being different DIM on the second machine will not understand where the products files are actually installed. Not a major issue providing you mainly use one machine to install & update products and don't have any complicated DIM setup.

Unless you share your CMS data path - which I would heavily advise against doing as I think that would just corrupt the database pretty quick - you'll have two versions of "Smart Content". This is fine if you are building a scene on one machine and then just opening it on the second to render. However, if you want to add/modify content on the second machine (that you did not install the products with) then you would have to use the Content Library to locate them.  I do have a half-arsed solution for this that I use myself to populate the second machine with the metadata but it's far from perfect.

I have on VERY rare occasions had an issue with broken assets due to the use of certain characters in path of filenames. Not too sure if this would still happen on a more "normal" setup or not tho.

crosswind

If it is a mobile SSD, I don't think there'll be any issue if you plug it to your Mac or PC for linking the Library to DS, as long as you correctly configure the library path in Content Directory Manger accordingly. But you need to make sure that cms database in Mac / PC has been synchronized with this Daz Libaray, if you use Smart Content.

For for the 2nd question, you may check this product - https://www.daz3d.com/content-gatherer