Tips for organizing textures/materials with wardrobe?

mavantemavante Posts: 734
edited April 2020 in The Commons

The amazing RSSY conversion products, such as RSSY Clothing Converter from Victoria 4 to Genesis 8 Female, have opened up vast vistas of wardrobe options and the salvaging of many older products—and even putting them into Smart Content. For me, at least, this is proving to be a mixed blessing.

For products originally made for Poser, which includes a lot of the V4 items, all the materials/textures for the wardrobe items remain in the often arcanely named maze-room folders of the Poser Runtime directory. There seems to be little-to-no consistency in the names of folders in which such textures/materials were installed, especially with third-party textures/materials created for a certain wardrobe item.

How do you veterans deal with this? Is there any way to get these textures/materials—whether originally supplied with the product or third-party—associated in any logical way with their intended wardrobe products, so they are easy to find and use?

Post edited by mavante on

Comments

  • nemesis10nemesis10 Posts: 3,876

    Could you just assign metadata to the materials i.e https://youtu.be/r-sdHEBNCB4

  • mavantemavante Posts: 734
    nemesis10 said:

    Could you just assign metadata to the materials i.e https://youtu.be/r-sdHEBNCB4

    Thanks very much for the link to the video. It's very informative. If I thought I had about 30 more years of life left, I might even try this approach. smiley

    I noticed with a wry smile what the first comment at that video says, made years ago: "It's about time DAZ made this much simpler : /"

    I wholeheartedly agree.

  • ArtAngelArtAngel Posts: 2,030
    mavante said:

    The amazing RSSY conversion products, such as RSSY Clothing Converter from Victoria 4 to Genesis 8 Female, have opened up vast vistas of wardrobe options and the salvaging of many older products—and even putting them into Smart Content. For me, at least, this is proving to be a mixed blessing.

    For products originally made for Poser, which includes a lot of the V4 items, all the materials/textures for the wardrobe items remain in the often arcanely named maze-room folders of the Poser Runtime directory. There seems to be little-to-no consistency in the names of folders in which such textures/materials were installed, especially with third-party textures/materials created for a certain wardrobe item.

    How do you veterans deal with this? Is there any way to get these textures/materials—whether originally supplied with the product or third-party—associated in any logical way with their intended wardrobe products, so they are easy to find and use?

    I am not a Daz Veteran, for me it's only been 3 years, but I feel like one after manually downloading 1.52 TB of Daz and creating 25K custom folders which hold almos 5ook files. I too own that RSSY product. But because software changes and I have more control over my external drives, I tend to create a product folder and if I buy a texture or addon for it, I name another folder the same name, with a hyphen and extend the name to include what the PA decided to name it. If I need to find something I use my folder structure and naming structure to pick and choose. For example, I have a folder called footwear. Within that folder I have subfolders called Flats, Heels, Platforms etc. I also have cross references in a folder called ! In Other Folders. for footwear included with outfits. If I need to find some runners or dress shoes I can. I treat my inventory like a super store and the subfolders are akin to departments eg footwear, with aisles for types of footwear. Once upon a time I did programming and built websites, and learned the benefit of sections and naming concepts. My structure is much more than I am posting here, because I don't have time to write a novella, but finding a filing format & naming structure that works for you, will work best.

  • 3Diva3Diva Posts: 12,000

    I use DIM to find the product and the product's mats, then just copy and paste the mats folder into the base product's folder. It's a pain in the tushy, but it's the only way I've found to deal with the headache of trying to track down the mats files for the different Poser products.

  • mavantemavante Posts: 734
    ArtAngel said:
    mavante said:

    The amazing RSSY conversion products, such as RSSY Clothing Converter from Victoria 4 to Genesis 8 Female, have opened up vast vistas of wardrobe options and the salvaging of many older products—and even putting them into Smart Content. For me, at least, this is proving to be a mixed blessing.

    For products originally made for Poser, which includes a lot of the V4 items, all the materials/textures for the wardrobe items remain in the often arcanely named maze-room folders of the Poser Runtime directory. There seems to be little-to-no consistency in the names of folders in which such textures/materials were installed, especially with third-party textures/materials created for a certain wardrobe item.

    How do you veterans deal with this? Is there any way to get these textures/materials—whether originally supplied with the product or third-party—associated in any logical way with their intended wardrobe products, so they are easy to find and use?

    I am not a Daz Veteran, for me it's only been 3 years, but I feel like one after manually downloading 1.52 TB of Daz and creating 25K custom folders which hold almos 5ook files. I too own that RSSY product. But because software changes and I have more control over my external drives, I tend to create a product folder and if I buy a texture or addon for it, I name another folder the same name, with a hyphen and extend the name to include what the PA decided to name it. If I need to find something I use my folder structure and naming structure to pick and choose. For example, I have a folder called footwear. Within that folder I have subfolders called Flats, Heels, Platforms etc. I also have cross references in a folder called ! In Other Folders. for footwear included with outfits. If I need to find some runners or dress shoes I can. I treat my inventory like a super store and the subfolders are akin to departments eg footwear, with aisles for types of footwear. Once upon a time I did programming and built websites, and learned the benefit of sections and naming concepts. My structure is much more than I am posting here, because I don't have time to write a novella, but finding a filing format & naming structure that works for you, will work best.

    I've read this three times, @ArtAngel, and I'm going to be reading it again, because it's sort of like being shown the Copernican heliocentrism model for the first time and being told that the universe does not, in fact, rotate around the My Daz 3D Library folder.

    I'm more than a little bit stunned. I've been operating under the idée fixe that I had to leave its structure just as Daz and DIM set it up. That things installed into "data" had to stay in "data," and things iinstalled into "People" had better stay right where they were put inside "People," and when it comes to "Runtime"—well, don't even think about touching or messing about with "Runtime," into which both Daz Studio AND Poser items are dumped installed with a precision that would make NASA engineers feel faint.

    And here you just— Good land! You just take control and set things up how you want them, in ways that you can find them?!?!

    I'm not exaggerating to say I'm stunned. I'm going to have to unlearn a heck of a lot before I set forth on a journey to learn what you seem to know. Where did you get the knowledge about what you can—and cannot—do in setting up your own filing/folders system? Right now, with the number of projects I have in progress, I'd be scared silly to attempt to restructure things, absent a very sound re-education in this topic.

    Anything you can tell me, or any tutorial/documentation sources you can share, would be invaluable. Thanks for opening my eyes!

  • mavantemavante Posts: 734

    I use DIM to find the product and the product's mats, then just copy and paste the mats folder into the base product's folder. It's a pain in the tushy, but it's the only way I've found to deal with the headache of trying to track down the mats files for the different Poser products.

    Are you talking about only products that DIM installed? If not, how do you use DIM to do that with products installed long before DIM existed, and/or non-DAZ-brand content?

  • fastbike1fastbike1 Posts: 4,081

    For non DIM installed products, just use you OS file manager to move / copy them into your Library content where you have the conversions. Studio will see them the next time you open it. 

    mavante said:

    I use DIM to find the product and the product's mats, then just copy and paste the mats folder into the base product's folder. It's a pain in the tushy, but it's the only way I've found to deal with the headache of trying to track down the mats files for the different Poser products.

    Are you talking about only products that DIM installed? If not, how do you use DIM to do that with products installed long before DIM existed, and/or non-DAZ-brand content?

     

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