[Daz] How do you organise your files?

[Volta]

I've been using Daz on a hobby basis for a while now, all the while accruing more and more assets, free and otherwise, not a surprise to anyone that I've had to move my daz folders off of my main C drive and onto it's own dedicated HDD. Since we're all on corona leave and work isn't happening I've taken the time to get organised, the last thing for me to do is organise my daz content library, particularly the main content repository, it gets very messy in there since many content creators use pretty esoteric and disorganised structures making it a pain in my ass to go looking around for a particular thing, or even worse try to find something not directly related to a particular figure when i can't remember the exact name for the product.

So what i'm getting at is that since i use about 50/50 manual and DIM install methods would any of you recommend a particular way of organising files in the main content repository because I've had enough of things like Dreamlight giving themselves their own folder as if they should somehow be held apart from the other content, people leaving typos in their content directories like "general 8 female" rather than genesis 8 and creating another folder for no reason, or people spelling Readme in 12 different ways and filling my screen with junk. I'm tempted to just move files around for a couple of days so that i can find things in there better, perhaps split the clothing folders for G8 into things like subfolders for things like lingerie and swimwear that will make finding an item easier for when i get around to deving my own game.

Should i manually clean all of this, is it worth the time, has anyone else done it and is it not worth the effort, what is your experience of this sort of thing?

 

[PJWhoopie]

It bugs the shit out of me that I have 3 different Listings under "My DAZ 3D Library" For various spellings of "Environments" (Enviroments = I AM LOOKING AT YOU whitemagus and your Realistic_grass_Ultimate)

And that is probably the tip of the iceberg as nobody seems to care about Spelling and word Spacing for Genesis 8 Females, so I have Genesis 8 FemaleS, Genesis 8 Femile (really Kinky Owl?), and Genesis 8 *space space* Female.

I am not OCD about many things, but ONE of them is File Names and File Organization and even looking at the My DAZ 3D Library puts me on edge.

I'd just love to go through there and "fix" it all... and I have asked this question on the DAZ forum proper, but the answers usually comes back as a vague... "just leave that shit alone".

ugghhh....

So that is what I am doing.

But

Where my sanity is restored is in the Custom Category area. There you can rename folders and group things together as you like. You can even collect all your "Boots - Thigh High" from various creators and put them in one folder so when you need... uhhhh... Boots that are thigh high for your G8F you can find them in one place.

Its a lot of work though. But the reward, when done, is your character/scene work flow goes a lot easier and makes more sense to you (cause you built it and know where shit is).

I'm curious though, that there must be something in the .duf file that tells DAZ what files are located where so that when you click on the .png file it activates everything else. I wonder if some of my .log WARNINGS are because Content Creators misspelled folder names and daz is looking in Architecture not Architexture?

If a DAZ guru can comment on my and Volta's frustrations about fucked up naming conventions and if, in fact, you can correct them, I'd LOVE to hear it.

**One of the things that has helped tremendously though is a little program I found here at F95 called Daz Content Manager. It helps grab assets from here and other places like 3d-LOAD.net and getting them, in DAZ with the DIM. Otherwise, hand installed assets will play havoc with your Custom Categories via the Products - Local User Folder (NO! If you don't know about that, don't bother looking, it will only depress you).

 

[Volta]

It bugs the shit out of me that I have 3 different Listings under "My DAZ 3D Library" For various spellings of "Environments" (Enviroments = I AM LOOKING AT YOU whitemagus and your Realistic_grass_Ultimate)

And that is probably the tip of the iceberg as nobody seems to care about Spelling and word Spacing for Genesis 8 Females, so I have Genesis 8 FemaleS, Genesis 8 Femile (really Kinky Owl?), and Genesis 8 *space space* Female.

I am not OCD about many things, but ONE of them is File Names and File Organization and even looking at the My DAZ 3D Library puts me on edge.

I'd just love to go through there and "fix" it all... and I have asked this question on the DAZ forum proper, but the answers usually comes back as a vague... "just leave that shit alone".

ugghhh....

So that is what I am doing.

But

Where my sanity is restored is in the Custom Category area. There you can rename folders and group things together as you like. You can even collect all your "Boots - Thigh High" from various creators and put them in one folder so when you need... uhhhh... Boots that are thigh high for your G8F you can find them in one place.

Its a lot of work though. But the reward, when done, is your character/scene work flow goes a lot easier and makes more sense to you (cause you built it and know where shit is).

I'm curious though, that there must be something in the .duf file that tells DAZ what files are located where so that when you click on the .png file it activates everything else. I wonder if some of my .log WARNINGS are because Content Creators misspelled folder names and daz is looking in Architecture not Architexture?

If a DAZ guru can comment on my and Volta's frustrations about fucked up naming conventions and if, in fact, you can correct them, I'd LOVE to hear it.

**One of the things that has helped tremendously though is a little program I found here at F95 called Daz Content Manager. It helps grab assets from here and other places like 3d-LOAD.net and getting them, in DAZ with the DIM. Otherwise, hand installed assets will play havoc with your Custom Categories via the Products - Local User Folder (NO! If you don't know about that, don't bother looking, it will only depress you).

Good to see i'm not the only guy out there getting irked by this, what i can say is that combining all the genesis 8 female folders together hasn't caused anything to suddenly eat it's own elbows or w/e, it still works, same with a lot of the "inert" folders like readme's and a couple of others, a small amount of house cleaning does no harm as far as i am concerned, i only get one error pop when loading and it's "duplicate formula found" or something when loading G8F or a scene subset with a G8F in, i think it's got something to do with the shitonne of morph sliders i've got, probably a pair of them share a name, unfortunately it means each scene load needs a click to finish which i expect will kill any attempts to use batch render tools but this should have nothing to do with my renaming or combining folders.

What i'm thinking is that i could completely remodel the sub-folders for things like G8F's clothes and group them by type or function, say split them into casual, formal, swimwear, nightwear, something like that, but since it's a big ass job i'm loathed to start if others have tried it and it buggered their assets or wasn't worth the time.

 

[PJWhoopie]

I moved to a new machine in February (Hurray for AMD Ryzen 9 3900X!). And I thought that I had followed all the the "transfer to a new system" steps put forth at the DAZ3d Forum, but alas, it didn't work out as intended.

Or, I should say, the thing I really was hoping would transfer... all my custom category stuff, didn't make it.

I'll muddy the water's even further by saying, my old ass eyes have a hellofa time seeing the tiny assed "tip.png" files that are the standard, so I usually replace them with the main asset jpg/png in all its glory from DAZ, Renderocity, Renderotica etc.

I wish I new how much dicking around you can do in the My DAZ 3d Library Folder without messing things up... but my real organization comes in the Custom Category folder. I got turned on to it after watching this set of videos

You must be registered to see the links

Depending on how many assets you have, it can take A WHILE (I am still not finished after the February Move!) and I have just about 7000 assets in my DIM Download folder... with only a handful of hand loaded assets.

 

[Porcus Dev]

If I understood correctly, you couldn't transfer your custom categories to the new computer... I don't know what you did, but it can be transferred without problems like this:
https://f95zone.to/threads/personal-content-library.29889/#post-1884480

 

[PJWhoopie]

Mgomez

Thanks for chiming in!

At the time, I probably had about 5000 Assets. Maybe 15% were added through DIM.

I just know enough to be dangerous... so here is what I think happened to me.

When loaded in Manually, you don't "necessarily" get all the meta data that is included with the asset.
Specifically, it may loose some vendor, asset name, and or store data.

The end result of that was when I created a catogory from the asset in the Daz Library Format area... lets say I was moving all the Curvy G8F assets into my custom category "G8F CURVY". So I moved "Lindy Loo" into the G8F CURVY. And then I wanted to make a copy of that asset to put in the G8F ELVES Folder because Lindy Loo comes with some Elf Morphs.
Now everywhere Lindy Loo was showing up in my category, she would have TWO files/instances. My neatly organized Custom Cats were slowly filling up with duplicate, some times triple instances.

Opening up the PRODUCTS/LOCAL USER folder revealed 60,000 some odd homeless assests. These were ones that didn't get the meta data and ended up being lumped into the LOCAL USER FILE. Every time it was used, DAZ didn't really know what it was so in the custom cats it would create another .png instance.

While there was a way to fix it... staring down 60,000 asset pieces from 4600 different assets was like trying to climb Mt Fuji on roller skates.

At the end of the day, I punted and started from Scratch.

 

[Volta]

I think that through a little backhanded logic we can infer that the data and runtime folders should be left alone completely, readme and scripts are self contained and we can do what we like with them, same with shaders, HDRI's and a few other things.

I'm going to test moving something like a G8F figure from it's proper place to another place containing figures, say where the horror from he deep is, in figures and see if it still works, if it does we can safely infer that these are self contained files which can be moved to a folder like "G8F curvy" which we've made ourselves, if that isn't the case then we can't go changing DIM related installs after the fact, however if we can it suggests not only that we can manually install into places not suggested by the IMO file but that to keep things tidy and organised we possibly should, though it would take a lot of time, hah, as if it doesn't already.

 

[TheShadowJacker]

I've been using Daz on a hobby basis for a while now, all the while accruing more and more assets, free and otherwise, not a surprise to anyone that I've had to move my daz folders off of my main C drive and onto it's own dedicated HDD. Since we're all on corona leave and work isn't happening I've taken the time to get organised, the last thing for me to do is organise my daz content library, particularly the main content repository, it gets very messy in there since many content creators use pretty esoteric and disorganised structures making it a pain in my ass to go looking around for a particular thing, or even worse try to find something not directly related to a particular figure when i can't remember the exact name for the product.

So what i'm getting at is that since i use about 50/50 manual and DIM install methods would any of you recommend a particular way of organising files in the main content repository because I've had enough of things like Dreamlight giving themselves their own folder as if they should somehow be held apart from the other content, people leaving typos in their content directories like "general 8 female" rather than genesis 8 and creating another folder for no reason, or people spelling Readme in 12 different ways and filling my screen with junk. I'm tempted to just move files around for a couple of days so that i can find things in there better, perhaps split the clothing folders for G8 into things like subfolders for things like lingerie and swimwear that will make finding an item easier for when i get around to deving my own game.

Should i manually clean all of this, is it worth the time, has anyone else done it and is it not worth the effort, what is your experience of this sort of thing?

I honestly use only free stuff and pirate downloads. I don't have the money to pay for the models currently, but I'm not using them comercially, only to learn as a student. If I use them comercially one day and get money, I plan on buying everything I use on Daz3d, now having said that.

I add them to my library manually (copy paste the folders needed).
Then I locate the folders in my content folder system.
Then I add them to my category system.
Also, I write a couple of words on models and poses who are only names "H05" and "S23" so that I can search for them later.

In hindsight... I would recommend to just download what you currently need for the project you are developing, and let the zip files be on a external drive with clear names what they are (for later search). I agree, the folder/content system in Daz3d is a nightmare.

 

[Volta]

I honestly use only free stuff and pirate downloads. I don't have the money to pay for the models currently, but I'm not using them comercially, only to learn as a student. If I use them comercially one day and get money, I plan on buying everything I use on Daz3d, now having said that.

I add them to my library manually (copy paste the folders needed).
Then I locate the folders in my content folder system.
Then I add them to my category system.
Also, I write a couple of words on models and poses who are only names "H05" and "S23" so that I can search for them later.

In hindsight... I would recommend to just download what you currently need for the project you are developing, and let the zip files be on a external drive with clear names what they are (for later search). I agree, the folder/content system in Daz3d is a nightmare.

Interesting, i can honestly say i've bought a few things from the respective stores, mainly DAZ's own, quite a lot of free stuff and one or two less legal sources, perhaps, it's not like i've got upwards of 20K points stored on zoneGFX for a rainy day, honest.

It's nice to see that someone has gone down the road of all custom install and it works, i do agree though in terms of things getting out of hand pretty fast and that minimal installs are a boon, i've removed most of my G3 era content and compressed and stored them away in the arse end of my Daz HDD just in case.

I'm currently experimenting a little, i'll get back to you all later once i've got a better idea of what can and can't be moved.

 

[Volta]

So this is the process I used:

First I opened daz as I normally would, then I navigated to People/ Genesis 8 Female/Characters then I selected a nominal model, in this case Agrippina, mainly because she was high in the alphabet and therefore readily available.

Notes on Agrippina,

She was installed via DIM using IM00064079-01_AgrippinaHDForBabina8 (I own Babina 8 also installed via DIM)

I loaded Agrippina to check she was working, she was in full working order as expected

Her author is listed as isourcetextures in daz

Next I backed up the folder out of the reach of Daz on another HDD, basically I tucked away in my documents to be safe.

Then I cut and pasted the Agrippina folder over to figures in my main content folder

I did not exit daz, which should be very helpful if we were to reorganise while inside Daz so as to sanity check it all.

I hit refresh in the Daz content library (right click – Refresh)

Agrippina was still visible under characters in G8F, so I checked and I needed to move the files that mention Agrippina but that are outside of her folder, in this case Aprippina’s DSON file, her .duf and her .tip files, I backed them up as before, moved them to figures so that the hierarchy is the same as before, the three files exist in the folder in which the Agrippina folder is located, in this case “figures”

Agrippina is now visible in figures, so far so good

Attempted to load Agrippina using her .duf file from figures, it took some time to load but no more than before, she loaded in with all of what I expected dialled in and the skin material loaded, as far as I could tell she was as intended.

In all I think it worked so i can honestly say that you can at least move characters around from place to place inside the main content library without much of a worry even if they were not manually installed, it seems that things like morphs and such go into runtime or data, two folders i would currently advise people not to go moving or fooling with too much.

I may continue to experiment, i'll keep this thread posted as i don't see why everyone else can't be annoyed by/benefit from my prodding around.

 

[Volta]

I know i'm spamming my own thread which is a bit weird but for the time being this seems like the best place to put things, using a little excel-fu i've found that as a proportion of my overall content folder size the data folder takes up 34% of the space and that the runtime folder takes up 56%, together this comes to a little over 90% from just these two folders which supports my initial thoughts that most of the important stuff is in these two folders and they should be left alone by anyone not wanting to play with fire.

On the other hand it also makes me more optimistic about reordering the surrounding folders, yesterday i streamlined all of the G8F stuff that should have shared a folder into one proper G8F folder, no more "general 8 female" or "Genesis 8 female" and it's all working so far.

Since i'm basically shouting at air at this point i may wait till i've finished experimenting and then write up a little guide of what you can and can't touch and post up here, Daz organisation has been a pain in my ass for the better part of a year and i'm kicking myself for not cleaning house sooner.

 

[PJWhoopie]

You know what... ?

It is your thread, so I say post away. I am too chicken to mess around like that... yet, anyway, so I like reading what shenanigans you are up to.

So keep posting... especially if there are any stability changes.

 

[Volta]

You know what... ?

It is your thread, so I say post away. I am too chicken to mess around like that... yet, anyway, so I like reading what shenanigans you are up to.

So keep posting... especially if there are any stability changes.

Very good point about stability, if things start to get janky then it may be a bad call but i'm 100% certain that folders like documentation and readme's are all inert, move them and combine them at will i think. What i'm worried about is if things become disconnected somehow, dependencies like Victoria 8 or the base G8F being moved causing a cascade of shart all over tonnes of other characters would be a nightmare, not surprising that those are the next things to try moving.

 

[PJWhoopie]

I am curios to crack open one of the .duf files to see what it says. There has to be a link between the duf, the .png icon and the Data/Runtime info as they have to know where to look for each other.

In my exploring of the issue, I found that some of my questionable assets were/are actually older Daz/Pozer assets...

To tidy up my file system, I just went ahead and uninstalled all the obviously older stuff. The other strike against me is that I am a hoarder, so its hard for me to let anything go. One of these days I am going to get around to fixing that old lamp in my garage... probably the same time I am going to convert Gen 2 assets to Gen 8....

 

[Volta]

I agree, i had a load of G2 freebies hanging around cluttering up the place, when i was forced to move all of Daz onto a new HDD i took the time to unpick it all, compress it and tuck it away, takes bloody ages though.

 

[Volta]

Now after a little more experimenting i've found that moving both G8F base and Victoria 8 both have no effect no their ability to be used, either on their own of as dependencies for other figures, presumably because runtime and data contain the really important info that can't be buggered around with, which would mean that the core data is held there and accessed from there by the figures that are dependant on them. Also worth noting is that no matter what GF8 figure you load the morphs available are always present and the same, these morphs are contained within data and runtime and i can guarantee that because i had to go looking for an individual morph dial in these folders because it was stuck at 100% as default.

So in short i was having problems with by G8F base looking odd, not very base you could say, turns out there was a face dialled in as standard that shouldn't have been, cut to an hour or two of forum searching later and it turns out that the best way to deal with this is to go into the morph's .dson file with something like notepad++ and change the default value from 1 to 0.
I found the morph by searching for it in (this is my file structure inside the data folder so it should be the same for everyone looking for a broken/unruly morph) Main repository/data/daz 3d/genesis 8/female/morphs and then searching a relevant term, in my case "demona", which finds me the FBM and FHM Demona Dson files, which is what i needed, in this case the FHM since that contains the "demona head" label, simply open any of the files you think are potential suspects and search for the name of the morph with ctrl F, easy, then see if the "value" line is not set to the same value as the "min" line, then you can simply change the value on the "value" line to equal the min rather than the max and this will set the morph slider default to 0% rather than 100%, takes some work to find and i wouldn't advise messing around in there too much but if you're only editing one value that you understand then go for it, remember to save before leaving, also backing up the file may be prudent, just in case.

I know, why is this relevant here, well fixing this issue lead me to find that all morph sliders seem to be held within the data folder, not in any of the folders we would normally pick a figure from, rather the dependencies seem to be held in data and runtime to prevent casually foolery from doing harm, also since it's pretty much the only common element i've seen across all of the non DIM installs i've done is the solid use of these two folders, add to that these folders are both invisible when using daz, unlike the other folders like figures and such i can assume tentatively that they are the parts to be left alone but perhaps everything else is up to us which would be pretty nice.

Not a whole lot of info on this out there so i'll keep digging, perhaps i should try some other types of content, scenes, clothes, hair and such should in theory work no different to figures but we won't know till we try, presets for cameras and such may be a different story, we'll see.

 

[PJWhoopie]

Volta
1) Out of curiosity, about how many assets do you have?
2) if you delete your log file USUALLY IN C:\Users\*USER NAME*\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4
then open Daz and Load a G8F.....

You get many warnings or missing files?

 

[Volta]

Volta
1) Out of curiosity, about how many assets do you have?
2) if you delete your log file USUALLY IN C:\Users\*USER NAME*\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\Studio4
then open Daz and Load a G8F.....

You get many warnings or missing files?

How many products is difficult to measure to be honest, a lot is the easy answer, in the thousands now, approaching 1TB of files in the main content repository alone, a little over 4K installed via DIM so somewhere between 8K and 10K products since so many of the little freebies i horde are manual install only, so probably a little over half of my products are done that way, perhaps more but not less than half that's for sure.

As for errors and such loading G8F i only pop one error which is duplicate formulae, presumably duplicate morphs, it would be easy to get two sliders with the same name with the number of morph packs i have installed, i'm a sucker for custom slider character creation, probably what i enjoy most in Daz most of the time. However there are quite a few warnings in the log file about not finding the target property for certain morphs, Zev0's expression pack and the ultimate breast morphs by Xameva and Meipe are the major culprits, these morphs appear to work as intended in my experience but they do pop quite a lot of junk in the log.

I have had missing file errors before on G3F, but that is no longer an issue since my fresh install, i suppose i'm better organised now.
I remember when i got all exited about starting with Daz and bought the Micheal and Arabella pro bundles(g3 era) and pretty much went on to screw the unpacking and installing so badly micheal was a set of textureless boxes to start with, i didn't even think about using DIM i went for direct download, i mucked it up so badly i suppose i learned the hard way to get organised.

I Daz therefore i hoard.

 

[Volta]

After nearly a week i'm done sorting my scenes, environments, landscapes and such into a unified folder i'm calling "Environments" which i then have subdivided into "Landscape", "Sci-fi", "Fantasy and Historic" and "Contemporary", Contemporary is then split into "interior" and "exterior" with "interior" further divided by room type, bedroom, shop and such.

This helps a bunch for finding things and does away with one of the worst culprits in terms of making mess and bad naming practises, everything in one place and the HDRI's filtered out and placed in a dedicated folder together seperate from environments entirely, which should mean now when i want a skydome i can get one without trawling through irrelevant stuff in umpteen places.

Next task is daunting though, time to work out what to do with characters, hair and clothes, how to split them up, what sub folders to use if any and such. I think clothes will be easiest, split by full outfits or partial+single items to begin with then, then split singles and partials but type, so shoes, trousers, shirts, dresses ect., full outfits will be harder since there is no hard and fast classification to go with, i'll come up with something though.

The hard part is hair and characters though, do i split hair by length?, some hair is dforce some not, many are morphing and have multiple length options, perhaps group by style and put ponytails together, same for updo's and such, i have no idea, or to be more specific i have too many ideas and don't know which has more value. Then there is the real tough one, characters, do i group by skin colour, build, should i separate the HD models out, is it even worth it since i mainly dial my own morphs in then find a skin for them.

Perhaps i should leave well enough alone for characters if not hair, it's just the folder size is overwhelming right now and it can get tough to differentiate models, it's at this point i can see the value of a tagging system, that way i can file a model under multiple tags but that won't work for folders.

Any help or experince people have to offer welcome as always.

 

[khumak]

Maybe I have a touch of OCD or something but I feel compelled to have EVERYTHING in a DIM package. If I get an asset that's not packaged that way then I create my own.

A side benefit of this for me is that since I check each one within Daz after I install the package, I know everything works for whenever I decide to use it. I also know that it's set up so that it's easy to install/uninstall/reinstall and I won't ever have to fix broken directory structures/etc after having created and tested the package the first time.

I've run into quite a few assets that I see a few screen shots of and then decide I don't like it once I actually try rendering a few scenes with that asset so I want a nice clean way to completely uninstall it.