Digital Art Zone

Hi I think I have so many questions that it can’t be put on here. I am not a new user, I was just getting started with Daz and learning how to use it, but I have been using Daz 3, now with the new one that came out Daz 4.5, I had some illnesses been offline for awhile. I have a lot of products that I have bought, I am not sure I fully understand can all of the products that I bought work on this new software or do I have to keep both Daz 3 and Daz 4.5 on my computer, because that is a bit too much, I was just learning how to use the other one, and I like it.  I have down loaded this new one, so now I have both on my computer. There is a old saying too many cooks spoil the soup. Too many people have their way of doing things, and in teaching, when you have all these people telling you different things it can get really confusing. Do I need both of these on my computer? Will all the old products work with this new software? If so then I guess I will just delete Daz 3, and download everything on it, and begin to learn all over again. Where can I go for training other than You tube, it is okay, but are not really update everytime there is a change that has been made. Does this also mean that I have to spend a lot more money now becuase this is only for Genesis?

You can have both DS3 and DS4.5 installed—I have both for a few things that I find easier in DS3, such as categorizing content.

DS4.5 can use all the old content—you don’t have to just use Genesis and other new items.

Even if you do use Genesis, you can still use a lot of Gen 4 and earlier content—clothing and textures, for example.

There’s a lot you can do to customize DS4.5 to make it more like the DS3 layout.

Doesn’t this use up a lot of space on your computer, keeping both of them on there. Along with the different content.

They can both use the same content—I highly recommend having DS4.5 read DS3’s content folders.  The application folder itself is pretty small compared to the content—a couple of hundred MB at most for the application folder, a lot of content these days has 50-100MB of textures for one product.

When you first run DS4 it should ask you if you want to “Import Mapped Folders” and if you want to “Migrate the Content Database”.  You can access these options from the Content Library options menu if it doesn’t prompt you automatically.

It should also ask if you want to import metadata.  If you want to put the default content in your own categories, uncheck them—then the default content will all appear in Default > Unassigned.

First “Import Mapped Folders”.  If you then look at the Content Library tab you can click on “DAZ Studio Content Folders” or “Poser Content Folders” and see the folders as they are on disk, equivalent to the Folder view in DS3.

Then “Migrate the Content Database” to import the Content Database used in the Category view in DS3.  After you do this, clicking on “Categories” in the Content Library tab in DS4 will give you the equivalent of the Category view in DS3, plus an extra top-level category “Default” for the DS4 content.  You can now categorize the DS4 content from Default > Unassigned into your own categories.

[Note: Migrating will skip items which have non-English characters, such as diacritical marks.]

Now go to the Content Library options menu, “DB Maintenance > Re-import metadata” to apply the metadata used in the Smart Content tab.  This will add the content to the Default categories, but it will also leave it in your own categories.  If it is now also in the Default categories and you’d prefer it wasn’t, go into Default and right-click on each subcategory to delete it.  The categories will come back when you next start DS, but they will be empty.

You can Add the DS3 Content folder as the Second Daz Studio Format and Poser Format folder in DS4.5 in the prefs. Then all your content will be read by DS4.5. The DS3 content will not have MetaData so it will not show in the Smart Content Tab, you will need to Open the Content Library Tab to access the older content in DS4.5.

AND once again Mike bets me to the punch. Enjoy. Your in good hands with him.

I already have 4.5 installed on my computer, and I really don’t remember if it asked me about the mapped folder, it may have. It did say that I had two studio’s, on my computer I do remember and I did have to do something for the other content.  I remember now. I had to tell it where to put my DS4 content. If I go in and point to these folders now can Ds4 still read, or do I have to down load them all over again. Ds4 is different than Ds3 I looked I can’t seem to find where to point to the content folders.