are .ds files still usable?

john_antkowiakjohn_antkowiak Posts: 327
edited August 2020 in Daz Studio Discussion

Hi. I'm thinking about trying some of the older-era items even though I've never used M4-V4 figures. (G3M-G3F were new when I got into this.) Even if the clothes don't convert to G8 very well (some do), the props should still be usable. But the Cheyenne Village, for example, appears to be all .ds files and I don't know how to use them. I can't import them and if I try to load one, I'm told "this action requires an item within the scene to be selected." What does that mean?

* ... oops... this might be the wrong forum for this question; I apologize. I forgot where I was when I created the post lol...

Post edited by john_antkowiak on

Comments

  • LeanaLeana Posts: 10,932
    edited August 2020

    .ds files are presets, usually materials or poses. They should still work but you'll need to load and select the actual items first, which are probably in Poser format.

    Edit: I just checked the readme, apparently Cheyenne Village was converted to .duf format a few years ago, so you may want to get the updated package.

    Post edited by Leana on
  • Thanks! I'll do that  :)

  • .ds files are plain-text script files from DS 1 or 2, DS 3 on (following changes to the basic Qt scripting engine) uses .dsa. Plain presets should work, but if they are modified presets or actual scripts they may fail depending on what was done to them.

  • SpottedKittySpottedKitty Posts: 7,232

    There's a weird hiccup with some of the very old D|S-format materials presets; if you click on them in the content pane, nothing happens and there's no error message. But if you drag the material thumbnail from the content pane onto the object in the Viewport, it applies properly. I'm not sure why this happens or why this particular fix works.

    One small gotcha; the way materials are built has changed a lot from those early days, some old materials might need a bit of tweaking in the Surfaces pane to get them to render properly.

  • Excellent tips; thank you both :)

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