Lightroom with DAZ3d

MW_HNL

I collected lots of stuff from the DAZ website.  But inside DAZ in spite of lots of effort and reading I was having trouble organizing it.  That is being able to know what all I had and all the ways it could be cross referenced and sorted and keyworded and color coded.  Made lots of progress on creating my own directory structures under content directories and also crashed DAZ several times and had to restart from download ap and reinstall, now download all the purchased stuff and unzip and install it.  But finally got that all sorted out (the secret seems to not be drag and drop but copy and paste)  But still there was the problem of knowing what I had and figuring out how best to organize my own folders and how to consider this a "creator" and that a "shader" and find all the nice shaders that would do 3 Delight etc.

Then I had a problem with my small but super fast solid state system drive filing up and had to move all my directories to another high speed external disk.  Star cuiser crash crash crash crash...  Many new word were invented and I became very familiar with all the ways you can mess up a DAZ install until I finally got everyone to agree that they knew where the directories were, where the new cache work directories were, and installer could find its files and was also off the system drive.  Did not want to do that another five or six times. Deleting orphaned references stacked three deep is amusing for only a short time.

Then I had a flash.  Lightroom I have used for ages is a supreme program for doing this with images.  I could screen capture stuff.  Then I discovered the DAZ product website is extremely nice about letting you right click and download high res images from all the product web pages.  Lots of stuff often stashed and notated in the images by the developers and often worked hard on showing off what it would do, little notes on this and that, all very helpful.

Now the bad news.  I had to start on page one of my product library and bring them up and screen capture the product image and descriptions area and then click on it and go to the product website page and right click and download image to download folder.  But Many cups of coffee later the deed was done.  Not much worse than the previous attempts and capturing text listings and reformatting them and importing in CVS into Excel etc. and even getting all UNIX on the text files etc.

Now the good news.  I can make folders like crazy, keyword an insane amount even nested keywords and color coding and stars.  I can start finding every pair of shoes for Genesis 2 and all of the stuff that should be together for a given type of jeans and the several add ons for them.  All the POSES!! and what models they work for.  After working with keywording and organizing this way and figuring out how to best get it to work for me I have been able to make content directories that make sense to me and have had a big improvement in my DAZ work.  All that working also let me understand exactly how certain products relate to each other and the images provided by the developers often contained insights into best suggested ways to use the product etc.  After all they were trying to sell them to us. 

May not work for anyone else but I found the effort involved has paid back where it counts.  When I want to make a new scene or build a new room or swap out a bed or finally get all my poses intelligently organized! and get all the various materials sorted so I do not keep mixing up various shader types as I move things from one package to another.  Often there are multiple materials for different shader types and multiple versions of pose files for different generations, often looking identical!  You fortunately can often figure this out by hovering the mouse over it and examining the directory structure to see if this is the genesis version or the genesis 2 version. And split those out into subdirectories in some intelligent way.

For me the key was doing all the attempts at organizing in LightRoom until I wrapped my head around how to best make a master directory of content labeled the way that made sense to me.  Without doing it inside DAZ where one slip fo the finger could crash DAZ and send you back to square one.  

I asked an art history professor once how does one manage to learn all the names and dates etc.  And he simply said "you have to work with the data".

This exercise now is easy to maintain.  When I have a failure of control and buy something new I just do the image captures for the few new things and add them to the right folders in light room with the right initial keywords. When I decide I finally need to sort out all my general purpose shaders I can work out how to do that best in Lightroom and then dump some images to a folder to use as notes and then carefully build some new content directory structure just for organized shaders all of type 3 Delight or whatever.

Then I started putting all my non total junk renders minus the icons into the same Lightroom Gallery.  Then I started making screen captures to not what render settings were working for me and what the list of morph settings I had used to make a modified Genesis 2 female I liked that seemed to still be able to wear clothes!  And screen captures of my various DAZ order confirmations.  Anything that is in an image format Lightroom was build to organize in multiple dimensions.  Even a folder of screen captures of the components of each bundle which has proven very useful during the aniversary season.

And especially handy for anyone who gets involved with something like West Park and all its great manifestations and its friends.  It has proven very useful with "creators" packages designed to quickly make things since I keep finding props I really like, such as a particular folding chair and a gas cylinder etc and want to make a folder of neat stuff I love to use from all over the product directory.  But you need to first start finding out all the places shoes for Genesis 2 are hiding or some such.  Or everything you consider to be Goth clothes.

Just one way to work through the problem of "What have I really purchased?  What can I do with it?  Where is this hidding?  How should I catalog all this so I can find it?!

Worked for me. The nice thing is the more you work with your Lightroom directory the more you find out about what you have in your copy of DAZ and what you can do with it and how they all relate to each other and how you can find more and more stuff quickly.  Like every pose hiding anywhere that works for Victoria 4 etc. And exactly which dreses are supported for which figures.  And how to dissect out the tricky stuff like ones that have versions for both V4 and for Genesis 2 female all tossed in the same directory with identical looking icons. Or identical looking shaders for different shader systems (they are putting icons on lots of them now so you can tell them apart better - excellent idea!)

 

Cris Palomino

Only Lightroom I know of is the Adobe one.  Is that the one you mean?  I admit, I couldn't get through your post.  It ws difficult for me to understand what the gist of the problem was and the solution because I think you were writing kind of stream of consciousness; hence the very long post.  But it's really just me because I find very long posts hard to stay with.  At the very least, thanks for breaking it up into paragraphs, which some don't doing.