All of my custom characters are gone (solved)
IceDragonArt
Posts: 12,748
20-30 custom characters missing completely. Saved a character preset before I left work. Double checked to make sure it would load again. Worked fine. Came home went to load it to work on a scene and it, along with all of the others are gone. Nowhere to be found in any of the files in Daz Studio. They no longer exist in the character presets file. I haven't been in any of the files and have only open and closed Daz Studio today. I can't remake any of these characters as they were created with the randomizer. To say that I am upset is an understatement. How is this even possible?
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Have you used Windows or a third party app to search for one of the file names. The duf files can't have vanished into thin air. Even if they have been deleted a file recovery tool should find them.
Finally tracked them down and they are now showing. However, every time I try and load one, Studio crashes. I made a new character, saved it as a character preset and it loads fine. Its in the exact same file location, same file ending name etc etc. Any idea how to fix this?
Try opening the folder they are in (with Win Explorer) and dragging the duf file into a new DS scene. If that works OK, resave it.
Didn't work. It says its reading the asset, the bottom bar goes all the way to 100% then it freezes and I get a daz studio not responding message
I think I am going to restart my computer and work on this some more tomorrow. At least I know where the files are so I am sure there must be a solution. But I have to work tomorrow so need to go to bed before the crack of dawn tonight lol.
OK. That worked for me when I deleted my scene/sub scene folders while reorganizing my runtimes then emptied Recycle Bin.
Have to wait for a techie to ride in to the rescue.
I appreciate the help! I restarted my laptop and it seems to be working now when I do as you suggested. So I will just go through and pull each one into the scene and resave. Thank you!! I was completley horrified to find them gone.
And yes, its now wayyy past bedtime lol. I couldn't sleep til I at least tried the restart.
Know the feeling :-(
After I recovered the files I lost and restored them to the right folders I couldn't see them from DS. Tried every thing I could think of and dragging and dropping then resaving was all I could find that got them loading and showing in Smart content.
There has got to be a better way, it's probably real simple. Please someone: what is it?
Don't forget, the Smart Content view (also the Products and Categories views in the Content Library) are not views of your content. They're filtered and sorted views of the entries in a database, each entry pointing to a link to your content. If you manage to delete a content file so that the matching database entry is also deleted, restoring the content file will not automatically restore the database entry, so that entry won't reappear in Smart Content unless you make it.
The Smart Content tab is only as good as the database; this means that the Smart Content sometimes isn't.
Only the D|S Format and Poser Format views in the Content Library tab show you the actual arrangement of the content files as they're stored on your computer, and since they don't depend on the content database, they show you everything.
Cheers SpottedKitty.
Right and I couldn't find then in Content Library because I was looking under Poser formats, but duf files are DS formats even if the content they are for are Poser files.
So I need to reload and save each one to restore the database entry or is there a less time consuming method?
Not that it maters to me, I've been doing that as and when I need them from a desktop folder but who knows when it would be useful info to have :-)
More infor is ALWAYS useful lol.
I'll have to defer to someone who knows what they're talking about on that question — 4.9 has got some new options for adding/manipulating Smart Content entries, and I haven't updated to 4.9 yet.
If you just "Scan Known Directories for Content" that should add them to Default > Scan Results, and you can then categorize them from there.
OK, cheers Fixmypcmike.
That was easy and now I've got access to Treasures of Egypt through Smart Content as a bonus :-)
Although I mostly use Smart Content as a shortcut to jump around runtimes in Content Library.
I'm still using 4.7 (and 4.9 beta to play with Iray occasionally)