Digital Art Zone

If I relocate where everything is put in my runtime, does that break the smart content? How about if I rename things?

I’m in the process of doing both because I want to have the base runtime organized differently and I don’t want things named 01_SSkull_LH+RH_BFH.png etc…

Renaming pp2/cr2/etc should work…if nothing else calls them.  Renaming the icon files that go with them…absolutely necessary to match the name of the png to the name of the associated file (so My_item.cr2 must have a png icon named My_item, not My Item).

Renaming textures, obj, folders they are in and stuff like that…yeah, breaks things.  PP2s/cr2s with included geometry…moving probably will be fine, but if they call something else, all bets are off.

Also, depending on how the path information is written, within the files, matters.  If everything is completely relative, then things can be moved..but any ‘hard’ paths and no, no moving allowed.  I’ve found that it’s best to set up a separate partition/drive for content and install it all there and do any organising within DS, by using Categories/whatever and not try to actually rearrange the files themselves.  Sort of ‘soft organise’ them…

And…yeah, Smart Content itself isn’t all that smart.  If you start moving/renaming stuff, especially outside of DS, it will break.  If you move it within DS, maybe you can get away with it…rename, probably not without actually loading/resaving.

Thank you for your feedback mjc. However, I don’t have a problem with organizing the files/folders so they show up without breaking in the ‘Library’ tab. That’s not what I’m asking. What I am trying to ascertain is whether doing this breaks the ‘Smart Content’ specifically.

Gedd - 22 October 2012 11:51 AM

Thank you for your feedback mjc. However, I don’t have a problem with organizing the files/folders so they show up without breaking in the ‘Library’ tab. That’s not what I’m asking. What I am trying to ascertain is whether doing this breaks the ‘Smart Content’ specifically.

It can…but then again…it should be rebuildable.  One hard, fast rule, smart content or otherwise, names need to match.  Other than that, I’m not entirely sure to what degree physically moving things around will be allowed before ‘breakage’ occurs.  A lot of it has to do with exactly how the item was originally saved/metadata written/phase of the moon…

Basically, I guess I’m saying there’s no sure way to know whether or not any specific item will break or not by moving it around.  I know that wholesale, move EVERYTHING works, but other than that it’s best to work with categories/associations/‘soft moves’ instead of the actual files/names.  I’ve given up on actually moving the files to locations I want them…it’s just to hard to predict what the results will be.

I’m trying to organise the things I make, into something that I think is a logical manner…but I’m sure others won’t and I’m hoping I’m saving them in such a way that’s forgiving enough to tolerate moving.  I haven’t started including much in the way of metadat, so I’m not sure how successful I’m being…then again, I haven’t really packaged up and DS4.x/Genesis specific items for uploading, yet.  But the way they are now, on my system, gets them included in Smart Content, so when I do package them I think it should carry over…I hope.

There are a few ways to move files without breaking Smart Content:
1) If you move them inside the Content Library pane (rather than outside of DS) the Smart Content will adjust automatically
2) You can edit the plain-text metadata file when you move the content to give the new paths
3) You can edit the paths inside DS to pint to the new location

Thank you

It will have to be 2 or 3 as my workflow doesn’t accommodate 1.

Sounds like in a worse case scenario I might be forced to write some code to automate some text editing.