Question on OBJ Files and Products

shg0816_13461e8196

Not sure where this really belongs, so thought I would start here.  About 2 weeks ago, I bought a new computer becuase my HD on my old machine failed. Fortunately, I had all my 3D content on an external hard drive. I also ended up buying a product where I could recover all my documents and such from old harddrives and look to see what they were. I had since wiped the drives, so I could take them to get shredded.

The odd thing was I was able to open most of the old V4 characters I created without any major problems. I know if an object file or data file is missing, that objects becomes a block. However, in almost all the cases, the clothing and hair for those characters opened normaly, just without the textures (which I would expect).  My questions are:

1/ How is this even possible? I thought without an obj or data file a product would appear blocky.
2/ Is there a way in DAZ to see the source data files, to see what that article of clothing is pointing to?
3/ If 2 is possible, I can try to find who the creator was and potentially what website I got the item off of.

Any help would be appreciated
 

Richard Haseltine

If you had your old data, and told DS where it was, then it should work. Am I missing that one of these conditions was not met?

shg0816_13461e8196

Richard Haseltine said:

If you had your old data, and told DS where it was, then it should work. Am I missing that one of these conditions was not met?

The old data was on a different hard drive that was removed from a laptop. I never ported those files over. For example on the old laptop let's say I loaded building X into daz, and saved the file as Corner building.  I moved the saved file over but none of the underlying data files (building x.obj or building x textures). 

shg0816_13461e8196

Here are some examples. I have Alanis Hair and the sstc corset (I believe these were for V4)  I know these products were on one of my old hard drives. However, I never moved the source files over to my external harddrive; however, when I moved the user file over, they opened without any issue

Leana

If you use a poser-format file in a DS scene, DS resaves the geometry in DS-format in the "data" file once you save the scene. So to reopen the scene file you would need the files from the "data" folder and the textures, but not the original obj and morphs which have been resaved in the "data" folder.

Bejaymac

To add to what Leana said, DS has never used Poser content as is, it's always imported and converted the data into a format DS can use, it then holds it in RAM while you use it, but once you save your scene/subset, that data is then saved out into the data folder in DS native formats.

Upto and including DS4.0 that was DSO files for the mesh, DSD files for morphs and DSV files for the UV mapping. Lose those files in DS1 to early DS3 and you had a nightmare trying to repopulate the data folder as the scene files wouldn't load, middle of DS3's life they changed that so the scene files would load, just with blocks for all of the missing assets. Late in DS3's life they added pathways to the scene files that pointed to the location of the original Poser content, that way if you lost the data folder files then DS3.1 could rebuilt them from the original Poser files and then load the scene file, and that feature is still in DS4.

Since DS4.5 we haven't been able to create DSO/DSD/DSV files, so now for every scene/subset you create DSF files are saved into the data/auto-adapted folder.