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That sounds like something I would like to do. What you said about getting to know your library also resonates with me.
I'm only afraid for something like what @marble mentioned to happen and loose all the categorization work.
I make sure I am not in the Beta when I categorize, what you do in Beta does not save. And save your work. I didn't do it at first and when DAZ Studio was on my iMac, it crashed three times in one summer, which meant new re-installs. I moved to a custom built Win10 desktop after that, added a Win10 gaming laptop. Both have their own libraries. Check out this thread. https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/175136/backup-custom-categories
The one thing I offer from learning from those crashes, is save. Save in multiple backups.
And if you loose stuff, make lemonade. Re-think those categories. Did they work for you? Would others work better?
Daz is a continuing learning process.
Collective3d Contemporary Home 1 may be an option for you
The beta certaianly should be usable for caegorisation, and I'm pretty sure I have used it (indeed, used it to set a couple of products from Renderosity up as product in the database).
You might check out "Truform's" Store at Renderosity.( I'm Not allowed to post a direct link to other stores here I'm sorry ) But they do have tons of contemporary homes just like what your looking for., some are made fo rposer some are made for daz iray, lots of options. when they are not on sale IMO I think they are a little high in price . But they have 50% off sales all the time so that's why I suggest you take a look at their store to see if they have what your looking for
The OP actually mentioned owning three products by Tesla in the first post, which is probably why no one really mentioned them, and while I do own almost all of them, I find them hard to recommend as they often have props and set elements that are inexplicably merged together, and material zones that put conpletely disimilar items in the same texture zone. T3D has a really annoying habit of making ceiling and wall lights part of the ceiling/wall textures rather than seperate props, and in the recent Swedish Aprtment, the entire toilet is actually just an extrusion of the wall behind it. Of course, these are problems that often plagues the lower priced tier of set builders who sell at DAZ...
Iray Section planes are definitely a better way to do things when they are applicable, as you can knock a huge set down to workable parameters within jsut a few seconds, completely non-destructively, by dropping in a section plane or two. SnowSultan put up a great tutorial on YouTube a few years ago and topped it off iwth links to several useful prebuilt plane configurations that are siple enough for even a neophyte to use. 100% agree that anyone who's seriously into kitbashing needs to learn the Geometry Editor though... if for no other reason than breaking paired set of shoes apart.
TruForm's stuff is great, though they've oddly become a bit less DAZ friendly in recent years and are setting their stuff up and doing their promos mainly in Poser now, so there's more material tweaking required for their newer products than was necessary for their older ones. On the other hand, TruForm also has a seperate store where they sell as InLiteStudio and that site has a HUGE number of useful freebies, including a number of great full sets including a department store, a lecture hall and several aparments.
I have found some interesting houses or pieces of houses as free obj. but I am not completly sure how to map all their material maps.
I have looked on this forum and the internet, found also this but it is not completely clear to me what to do with all the maps.
What I have and not sure how to map are:
Ambient occlusion maps (from what I read no equivalent in Daz, I won't be able to use them/don't need to?)
Metallic maps - no clue here.
Roughness maps - for this there are 2 options in my mind and it's not clear which one fits Diffuse Roughness or Glossy Roughness.
Edit: re-read your post, so my advice won't help you so much here. Others can comment on this. Nothing to see here, move along!
It sounds like you're looking for something for a long-term project rather than a 1-off picture. It might be worth the time to model what you want yourself. Depending on how realistic you want your story to look, you might not want to worry about a lot of little details that will get missed by a reader. Also, if you're not looking to use the full model, you can avoid work on parts that won't get seen - I've been increasingly doing this with warehouses and office buildings where all I'm going to see are the fronts; I don't bother detailing the sides and back.
The biggest advantage is you get exactly what you want. You can lay out the room how you want - Because I'm more concerned with space for the camera/space for the characters to act, I'll make rooms unrealistically big. Usually 25x25 or 30x30 with 10' ceilings. Since you set the material zones yourself, you can define where you set different textures instead of having to deal with a prop that had everything lumped under one or two zones.
Additionally, doing it yourself saves money. If you're looking to make money off your project, it makes little sense to spend that money before your story every goes up for sale. It's like prose authors who claim they sold a lot of books on a promotion when they actually lost money because of the cost of the promotion. But it goes further because if you create a model that's good enough, you can look into selling it and make money off the assets as well as from your story. If you do that, then the complaint of how much money your time is worth goes out the window. Keep in mind however that if you incorporate kitbashed pieces, as I do sometimes, then you can't sell the project without replacing those borrowed pieces.
I'm not really saying this to put anyone down (it almost comes across to me that that's what it sounds like), but rather to suggest an alternative to looking for a prop you might feel you have to "settle" with. I'm posting a few examples to give you an idea.
The first is a bar I needed for a project. It was inspired by Trendy City Bar which I have, but the set has no exterior. I created something from scratch and used the props from the set for the interior. On the building itself, the only pieces that aren't mine are the two lights above the door, and the trim between each floor. And as with every set, the textures are collected from other sources. I think the wood texture came from the city bar and the brick was borrowed from I13 sets. You might recognize the bus stop. I modified the ground to create a much longer sidewalk. Since all I needed from this set was a series of shots focused on the entrance, I didn't bother putting windows or doors on the sides and back. The walls around the building are only meant to provide a backdrop for those shots that are angled a little too far to the right or left.
The second is a house I constructed for another project. The front door, the garage doors and the shutters were kitbashed, but the rest of the model is mine. The roof has some minor flaws, but it didn't come into play for the projcet, so I didn't have to worry about it.
The third is a 60s-inspired office building. I think everything about this is mine except for, again, the textures.
A couple warehouses. Because I only needed them as backdrops, there is no interior, and it's implied the doors are on the sides of the first building, but I didn't need to put them in. And the idea for the second one is that it has been or it is being converted into apartments. It's been compared to, and I saw it myself, a school, but it served its purpose.
A modern office building. Everything about this is mine, except for the bollard lights in the front plaza. There is an interior environment, and admittedly there are flaws with the railing on the interior staircases, but I worked around them with some careful camera angles.
The last is another house, not as sophisticated as the first, but it served its purpose - it was supposed to be part of a working-class neighborhood, so it wasn't supposed to be big or fancy - and it's become one I've reused because I love the layout inside. I don't think any of the furniture is my creation, and the door is the same one from the first house, but everything else I did make.
If you get the hang of Hexagon, it's not really that hard, it just takes a little time.
Thank you for your detailed comment.
Your buildings look really nice.
I am already familiar with Blender so I could probably model there whatever I wanted.
My concern at this point is that I am spending a lot of time learning Daz already and getting right a lot of the details. (I am closing in on a month to finish the main characters as I am really picky)
If I spend a lot of time for each of the components of my story I am afraid it will take me too long to get my VN off the ground. That is why I would prefer to use something already existing.
If I already knew exactly what I wanted and had the arhitectural plan for it and all I needed to do was model it, it wouldn't be too bad but unfortunately that is not the case. It's easier to recognize something I like than model it from the ground. I will already have to customize and model some parts of the interior as some rooms that I want don't really exist on the market.
Right now I am trying to reshader a very nice free house I found and model a few tweak and see where it gets me and afterwards I think I will replace some of the room interiors with some from the Daz houses I already have as they are very nice.
(whole lotta stuff nipped for time and space)
No, it's not that hard, but it takes time. A lot of time if you want to do it well, which is why Stonemason doesn't release a new product every Tuesday. People in threads like this are always espousing the virtues of building their own, but for a lot of us it's simply a matter of what we consider our time to be worth. After all, if we can make more money in a single hour than the cost of a DAZ 3D asset, it makes very little sense to spend multiple hours building something from scratch when there's a ton of extremely high quality product already available to choose from. Not unless you just really like that aspect of making stuff. Otherwise, by the same logic, artists should grind their own pignments to make their own paints, and people should also grow all their own food, sew their own clothes from cloth they spun themselves, build their own cars from raw metal and learn to fly so they never have to buy another airline ticket. In other words, ignore all the advantages that civilization gives us by allowing people to specialize and do one thing very well.
On the other hand, being able to make your own stuff frees you from waiting months (or years, or eternally) for someone else to make some exact product to your exact specifications.
If you specifications are more general, then sure, theres little point making lots of heavily catered to general items (unless you want it to be unique somehow). But if they're not, you're going to waste a bunch of time pointlessly searching and waiting.
Civilization (also known as the DAZ/etc stores) does give advantages in supporting general needs. But those advantages don't necessarily cater to every single possible wish evenly or thoroughly. When they don't you'll either make it yourself or find someone who will.
I use my own custom libraries; all told, I have over 30.
Stuff Im using regularly (at any given time) I copy to a specific folder. Just the files that load the particular items. They go in a library that DIM can't access (I completely avoid smart content.).