Making related items appear for Lost and Found content

SnowSultan

Thanks to Richard for answering my last question about getting Connect content to show up in the Content Library. I have another partially-related question that I hope he or someone else might answer.

Normally when you select a figure in your scene that has properly linked Smart content, the MATs, poses, and other items will appear in the Smart Content panel (when the Filter by Content box is checked). However, figures that ended up in the "Lost and Found" category do not have their associated items appear when selected. Is there a way to manually fix this? For example, the Lo-Rez Horse by Predatron does not display any of the many MATs and poses when it is selected. Adding it to the category Animals/Real-Word/Land has no effect either.

Thanks in advance for any advice.

Richard Haseltine

Without metadata there's no link between the items. You can create one by dragging the presets into the right Smart Content category while the base figure is loaded and selected.

SnowSultan

Could you tell me where they are dragged from? I'm looking at them in the Smart Content panel now (they're already being shown there, just not when I select the primary figure (horse in this case).

Richard Haseltine

Drag them from the Content Library - this was a new feature to make Smart Content easier to set up introduced in 4.7, or maybe 4.8.

SnowSultan

They're actually not in the Content Library, I installed them with Connect and they only appear in the Smart Content panel. That's why this is confusing.  :)

Richard Haseltine

Not in the categories list in Content Library? Or products?

SnowSultan

OK, I'll start over with a clean installation of this horse so I can follow your directions carefully.

- LoRez Horse installed. The horse itself shows up in the Content Library's Categories under Animals -> Land.

- I load the horse into the scene. Selected him, checked the "Filter By Content" box in the Smart Content panel, and chose "All". A lot of random items (all of which I assume are Lost and Found items) are displayed. The horse is not listed in the Animals section of the Smart Content panel until "Filter by Context" is unchecked, but all of his MATs and poses are still not displayed.

- Clicking on the Lost and Found section of the Smart Content panel does display all of the horse's accessories. What I want to do is to set those accessories to be displayed under All and Filter by Content when the horse is selected. As an example, Valandar's Herdbeast does it correctly; when it is loaded into the scene, selected, and All/Filter by Content is checked, his MATs and poses are displayed.

edit: all of the horse's accessories can also be found in the Content Library's Lost and Found category under LowREZ Horse. Oddly enough, the Herdbeast MATs are also shown in Lost and Found, even though those are listed properly in Smart Content when the Herdbeast itself is selected.

 

I hope that makes sense!

SnowSultan

I also need to confirm something with you that could be very important to know for those sorting their own content. I installed the Silverkey Donkey (through Connect) and did the following 'customizations': I added "mule" to its tags, put some text in the Notes section, and added a shortcut (by dragging a link to the Content Library like you mentioned before). I then uninstalled the donkey, closed Studio, restarted Studio, and reinstalled the donkey (through Connect).

 

* The "mule" tag and the text in the Note section were retained when the donkey was reinstalled. However, the shortcut was not retained afterwards. I thought that when Connect was installing to those seemingly randomly numbered folders, it would be the same number for a specific product. Is it using a random number each time and that's why the shortcut cannot find the donkey now?

* If so, this is something people need to know before they start carefully organizing their content with the dragging and dropping like we talked about yesterday. Upgrading Studio or changing your content directories may completely destroy any user-sorted customization and organization if the shortcuts themselves are broken.

Lindsey

What I've noticed is the Lost and Found Category on the Smart Content tab are items that don't have a category.  When found, they are assigned a category of Lost and Found> (product name).  To get them out of there, 1.  Remove the Lost and Found category by unchecking that assignment, and 2. Assign each a new category of your choosing. 

I'm in the process of starting over and am installing with DAZ Connect if it's available and if not, install with Install Manager.  I then create (drag from the Smart Content tab) shortcuts to the Content Library>DAZ Studio Formats Tab to a location of my choosing.  Since they are short cuts, moving them around causes no issues. The first non-DAZ Connect product I ran into was Michael 4 base, and installed it via Install Manager into the Poser Format Library, but what I like is the ability to create the short cuts for the Michael 4 Base product into the DAZ Studio Format Library and pattern the folders to mimic the Genesis folders...Michael 4> characters, clothing, poses, hair, etc...   Eliminating the need to ever look into the Poser Formats library again.

So far I like how it works.  My normal workflow is to load from the Content Library tab and use Smart Content Tab to display relatable products, such as materials and the like.

SnowSultan

I need to make a couple of corrections to things I asked about.

- the Herdbeast files left in Lost and Found were Poser materials that Studio couldn't place. I just removed those references, since I won't need them.

- Apparently just right-clicking on a broken link and choosing "Remove orphaned reference" (or whatever the exact command is) will update a broken link with a new one if found. I thought it would only remove it, but doing so updated it properly with the reinstalled donkey.

 

I still do not understand how to get the relatable content to show in the Smart Content panel when it was originally installed to the Lost and Found, so any additional help with that would be appreciated.

fixmypcmike

Load the LoRez Horse in the scene and make sure it's selected.

In the Content Library pane go to Categories > Default > Lost and Found > LoRez Horse (or whatever the exact product name is).

Select the material presets in the Content Library pane category and drag them to the Smart Content pane > Default > Materials.  Now they'll show up as Material presets in Smart Content when the LoRez Donkey is loaded.

(I'm afraid I don't know what happens when Daz updates the metadata -- I would expect that if the official metadata has a different category assigned than the one you chose both would be retained, but the content type (Material Preset) that you gave takes precedence,)

SnowSultan

I cannot even find the horse material presets in the Content Library now. The "LoRez Horse" sub-category in the Lost and Found is empty.

Now I remember why I gave up on Smart Content when it first came out. Just looking at the way poses are sorted in Smart Content is laughable...we can't even get PAs to put useful tags on their products, do they really think pose creators are going to tag individual poses with Partial Body/body part keywords? 

I may take advantage of keywords to add ones that make sense (like "male" on male clothing for example), but if this keeps up, I'm going back to organizing stuff myself.

 

edit: Sorry, that wasn't directed at you Mike. It's just turning out to be a lot of trouble when so many products have useless metadata or fill up the Lost and Found with Poser files and such. Dragging and dropping shortcuts from the Products tab of the Smart Content panel is just proving to be easier than *hoping* that the files you want get listed when relying on Smart Content.