Ok, thought I’d post a follow-up on my learning experience, and still in DAZ4.0.
A huge factor in trying to find something in the Search function is to DELETE Genesis first. The program is automatically looking for Genesis related stuff as it is auto created when opening and autohighlighted.
Sheesh! Then ANIMALs and other things will appear as option in the Smart Window list (after categorizing). But, I was looking for Ursus Arctos or “bear” which is what it is. Darn program will only find it as “grizzly”. Isn’t that annoying! This was a recent purchase so presumeably the download had been updated already. Or not. Sigh.
Typing a space in the search term box before my text, for example “[space]owl” or “[space]hair sometimes works and sometimes does not. I could not find any mention of the use of the space bar in DAZ or in other searches. It may be well known in certain programs that I am not familiar with. After exiting again from DAZ4.0, and re-opening, 3 times, the space bar does help filter away “bowl” from “owl” initially. But it seems like the search thing gets tired and stops working after a while. I used the “hair” example, I realize there are other ways to find hair, but I wanted to find non-DAZ products in my other runtime. The problem with that is I have the Carnival poses loaded, so every instance of a pose with a chair is listed under the “hair” search, as well as chairs no matter how I had the filter boxes checked. The space bar sometimes works, sometimes doesnt.
I went ahead and installed some metadata for recent purchases, such as the pelicans. A very odd thing happened. It seemed like the “Smart Content” could not find the pelicans product but it could find the owls. I read somewhere the metadata is queued up for a while? what triggers that?
I also did some manual Categories for some old animals such as the Hippocampus and the Sea Turtle. They don’t show up in Smart Content, but now I can find them as Figures through the Category tree which weeds out the other file formats. Yes, I also made one Real World, and the other Fantasy, but that was incidental.
And that brings up 2 more interesting things. I had asked earlier if there was a way to just see Text and not Icons in the Content Library panel. Doh! Yes. The third part of the Content Library window pane has 2 icons for veiw as list as well as view as thumbnails. That makes it easier to visually scan for a .cr2. I grab it and Categorize it, and then the program seems ‘smarter’ and finds it better when I search again. Also the categorized item shows up obviously in the Categories tree.
No where could I find an option to search on a file format as a filter. I did find, as I mentioned before, the Edit/Preferences “show file extensions”. in the Content Library window pane, either in thumbnail or in list mode.
In looking through most of the documentations links that were thoughtfully provided, I did not find any actual instructions or tips for Searching within the search box. No space bar, no file extension option, no other hints like boolean searches or using upper case letters, etc. or don’t search over 3 times per item. Notthing about it where I looked. Of course, if I know the name of the product, it usually finds it, but what if I only know it is an animal I bought a while ago? Some of those installations just had PS numbers.
That brings up Smart Content, which still is odd. Some animals have loaded, others have not. When it comes to clothes, it did a neat thing. I found a pair of gloves in an icon. Right clicked and chose show in Content Library—the associated garments and props showed up in the Content Libarary pane! (Buck—-skin, doncha see?) That was useful indeed! Just the models, not the materials. I havent tried it under “surfaces tab” yet. I’m fatigued!
I figured learning with the animal models gave me an advantage towards finding them. Clothes come in all kinds of names, and abbreviations so a cow or a turtle…or a bear could not be too many different things, right? Mammoth is spelled “Mammuth”.... I’m taking a break!
