500 Pages in Content Library - Am I the first to hit this landmark?
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I grabbed much glitchy stuff too cheap but not even halfway to your figure so I dare say your yacht would be nicer
duplicate post. srorry.
Only when I look at the total... but when you consider the fact that I've been buying since 2005 and in all that time I've spent less than $60,000.00 in "real" money on what DAZ says is $380,000.00 worth of product, it's not so bad. That's an average of less than $5,000.00 a year at DAZ, which isn't much more than a lot of people spend on cigarettes and alcohol during the same period. Of course, then there's another couple of thousand a year spent at Rendo and the other stores to account for but, even so...
Yikes, I added 3/4 of a page just today.
Tristan Pro bundle + freebies + additional free Pro bundle plus a few odds and ends = 31 more items for the list. Still only at 32 pages though, I got a lotta catching up to do!
I'm at 74 pages & am about petered out honestly. Judging by what I know that I want but can't afford now from Genesis 8 and what is old but PC+ I can see adding about 25 more pages which is quite a lot of product really.
I'll certainly agree that the six years of glitchy site has gotten tiresome, especially since a lot of that is due to the fact that the DAZ marketing department has become so dependent on over-complex and gimiicky sales rather than actually selling the benefits of the products themselves... And even that wouldn't be as annoying if it wasn't that the inevitable result was being forced to buy a disproportionate number of DAZ original products that you don't really want in order to get the PA products you do. As a result, while I do own over half of all the product currently in the store, I own 4/5s of all the DAZ Originals, and it's getting to the point where most of what I still don't have is texture sets and uinmesh add-ons from the V4 days.
I don't even remember what the unimesh are for? But yeah, I bought them too.
Unimesh Fits. Mostly they helped you use V4 generation clothes on other figures of the same gender... though there were a few towards the end that started coming with other bonuses, but there were instantly obsolete for anyone who switched up to Genesis.
Unlike for others, the sales seemed to be working for me today. I totally loaded up on the $2.99 sale (getting 64 of them for $1.68 each) and added a whopping 3.25 pages to the library! I just hope the rendering will be as fun as the shopping...
Yep. that's how they getcha. :) I've already owned just about every $2.99 and Historical Best seller they've offered since the loyalty sale began, so it's a non-issue for me. On the other hand, the artists who donated freebies are all ringing out at at least 75% off with my loyalty bonus added, so I've got a cart with 64 items in it at the moment and I'm still shopping...
So, the big question is...
Do we represent a group of the most devoted users that DAZ should be listening to, or people who they can ignore because we'll buy stuff no matter what?
Curious- for those of you with those massive libraries of content- how do you all keep it organized? Are you able to find your stuff relatively quickly- is there some secret/tips you have for navigating that much content?
Taoz has a really neat cataloger product, if you own less than 250 it's free. It shows the images and has a great search feature. Here's his post over in my Art Studio thread, the link is in his signature.
I don't use Smart Content at all, I use DIM actually to do my search. If I type in "pool" for example, all the pool things come up, then if you go to the "i" it will go to the product page. I have the Daz Deals plugin so there's a link on that page to the Read Me, which will tell you the files and that lets me know immediately where the item is located. That's my fastest way. It's like click click click and there's the location information.
Also for older stuff that you can't find a Read Me for, look at a new product by that vendor and see where they put something similar. :) Those pesky scenes/props can be all over the place!
For things I use a lot, aka the Iray Uber Base to convert 3DL or make something Iray (like a primitive) I create a category for it.
I have created a monstercustomised set up - I install from zip and put everything (except data and runtime) in my own categories (except for a few items that need the official structure to work); it's more work, but things are organised according to my logic, which helps. I use P3DO Explorer to search.
@Novica-thanks for the link/info. Will definitely check that out.
@Nath That sounds interesting :)
I've always been afraid ot messing with files, due to messing up the file paths. What can you move and what can't you? Sounds like data and runtime stay put? @nath
Data and runtime stay put. Readme's I generally leave where they are, they don't get in the way, and some have links from their item.
Scripts depends - some can be moved, some cannot. Some scripts (like the RSSY clothing converters) expect items to be in their original filepath, so I temporarily rename things if needed.
Props, clothing, characters, animals, environments, shaders, lights, cameras are generally safe. One exception I ran into: the recent UltraTrees need to be in the Environments>Landscapes path. But I consistently move anything that says it's a prop but is a building or an interior set or even a landscape to 'places' (which is where my environments live). Props have been subdivided: for instance, 'food' is its own subfolder (which includes tableware). Vehicles are no longer a top level directory but have been moved under props (though I may change that back again). Under 'People', characters and clothing have been grouped according to generation and gender. Clothing has a subfolder for dforce items. Animals has several subdivision (cats, dogs, horses).
Shaders are split into Iray/3DL. Lights have a subcategory for 3DL.
Within items like clothing or props, I either take the Materials folder and just put the Iray and 3DL folders in the main folder for that item, so item>materials>Iray/3DL becomes either item>Iray/3DL or item/materials/iray mats and a subfolder for 3DL (if there already are Iray/3DL folders in the item folder (like a scene file)).
On the whole, this works for me, in combination with the search ability from P3DO (which has a free version for anyone who wants to give it a go). It takes a bit more time to install things, but I get that back when I look for stuff later on.
I originally started this to get rid of vender vanity folders. Ironically, under places, I've since created some subfolders for specific vendors.
Ha, I'm slacking. I only have 272.
I have a 'paltry' 412 pages.
With regards to moving and finding things, Nath pretty much covered it but I will say that I only have 2, maybe 3, products that cannot be moved. Apart from data and Runtime (although I do know enough to move folders in the Textures folder and repath to it) I move everything. I come from a Poser background in 2006 and organising Runtimes/Libraries is second nature. I often wonder how people find content when it is installed under so many different folders and vendor named folders. If I'm looking for a character called AAA how would I know to look under a folder beginning XXX because that's the vendors name? If I'm looking for a script that converts clothing why would I not have a folder called 'Clothing Converters'?
The picture attached shows my Library. Everything gets put under these main folders, but rest assured pretty much all the sub folders are non standard ;)
I have become really adept at hand editing duf, dsf and json files and if something needs repathing it takes me seconds in Notepad++. A small price to pay to find things where I'm looking for them. If I ever find a way to hand edit paths in dsa files I'll be all set.
Well, at the other end, I have only 30 pages of content and I do this hobby since august 2001. I guess I'm tightfisted.
Okay, I don't make sci-fi, fantasy, medieval, creatures, dinosaurs, dragons, vehicules, weapons and most of the time I use my own photos as background.
Of course, the fact that I live in Canada and pay all products in U.S. dollars might help to spend money reasonably, too.
Of course, any effort to try figuring out order numbers went FUBAR when DAZ did that major reorganization several years back. I just wish there was a way to chase down the topics in the discussion threads--there were a LOT of great tutorials that got lost with the revamping of the site.
I do it the blunt force way by categorizing everything via the content library into categories that make sense to me, which makes it reasonably easy to find most of the time but things still get lost due to volume. Unfortunately while the results are generally good, the process of doing it is a huge chore. when I started it was easier, because a lot of basic products consisted of an object and a handful of textures for it and it would only take a minute to do (maybe I chose to put the fish in objects>animals>fish>angelfish, the materials go in a folder called materials, done). But now you have clothing sets that I might split up into their component items since I mix and match them, and it might have a zillion things like shoes/pants/top/hat/cloak/hood/belt/weapon/bracers/shinguards/ribbons, and options to fit multiple generations of figures, and a combination of 3DL and iray and poser materials for each part, and a bonus material set for some other product, and transparency options, and shoe fit poses for the feet, and the next thing you know you spend most of your days organizing it so you can find it instead of actually doing art. :-P
You also made me look. I bow to you. I thought I had a lot and I only have 215 pages
I've seriously considered hiring someone to produce some kind of advanced Poser/DAZ asset tracking system that could then be sold as a commercial product. Taosoft's programs are a good step in the right direction, but the fact that they're based on DAZ and Rendo store data makes them vulnerable to the whims of the store web designers and they don't handle all the other content providers, many of whose stores are now defunct, let alone freebies, Rendo BOGOs, or customer character builds, is a serious limitation, and I'd really want to have some of the functionality of P3DO Pro, so that less-used products could be seen and inventoried, but kept uninstalled unless actually needed.
Or maybe I should just hire a couple of college kids to manaully re-organize my entire collection for me. It would probably only take a few weeks...
215 IS a lot.
40 x 500 = 20,000 entries
Actually the store gets 33,515 items available, it's "only" 60%.
The last registrered SKU number in the Product Index is 65 947, it seems you didn't reach the half yet.
I use Apple's Photos program to put a picture of everything I have in different categories, e.g. buildings, Characters, Vehicles, etc. And each category has sup categories. So if I need a kimono: I would go to the Clothes> Female> Ethnic> Asian folder to see what I have. I also have a hundred Key-words, so I can search for my needed item, e.g. Male, Hair, Clown wigs, etc. I even use a keyword for each vendor that I got the content from. This way, if I locate something in my catalog that I want to use, I can go to the vendor's site and see what the restrictions are for that item.
While browsing through my catalog, I am occasionally coming across content that I completely forgot that I bought. So if a new item catches my eye, before blindly purchasing it - I check my catalog to see if I haven’t already purchased something similar. This has saved me a lot of money.
Sku numbers are not a good way of counting, a lot of them haven't been used. and some products have had different sku numbers during their life,
I'm very happy to say I haven't reached 500 quite yet. I've slowed down buying in recent months. However, my Product Library is sitting at 455 pages.
Actually, the unimesh fits always came with an additional texture set, so they weren't a dead loss, even if you didn't use Aiko 4 or the Girl 4 who they were designed to be fits for. Stephanie 4 may have been added to the fits once she came out, but she was quite late in gen4, so maybe not.
But then, the unimesh fits were usally for PC items so it's not like they were what anyone could call expensive.