Is it some "install manual content for dummies" that go step by step in detail how to do it?
So there are a few things you need to understand.
First, there is a "Content Library" pane and a "Smart Content" pane in the DS user interface. Things only appear in "Smart Content" if they have entries in the CMS (Content Management System) - a built-in PostgreSQL database that DS and the Install Manager maintain. So manually-installed content will
not appear in the Smart Content pane. (At least, not without some work.) The "Content Library" pane, however, is a hierarchical display taken right off disk, so that's where you'll need to look for your manually-installed content.
Now, DS can look for content in more than one spot. You can confirm the directory (or directories) it's using by going to Edit > Preferences, clicking on the Content tab, and pressing the Content Directory Manager button at the bottom. Expand the "DAZ Studio Formats" item, and you'll see at least one folder there. If you're on Windows, it's probably something like "C:\Users\Public\Documents\My Daz 3D Library". I'm going to refer to that as "your content directory."
If you browse to your content directory from the operating system, you'll see a bunch of subdirectories - People, Props, Runtime, data, etc., etc. These contain the actual content.
So you've unpacked the manual content you want to install. Different people package up manual content differently, which is where part of the problem comes in - what you need to do is to find the spot within the manual content that has the same directories as what's in your content directory - this might be down a level or two. So if the manual content has something like this structure:
Code:
SomeTopLevelDirectory
YetAnotherDirectory
data
People
Runtime
then what you want to copy into your content directory is not SomeTopLevelDirectory or YetAnotherDirectory, but the data, People and Runtime directories. (I chose those names as examples - the exact list of directories will vary depending on the type of content. But "data" and "Runtime" are very common, as is "People.") If you copy one of the higher-level directories in, the content won't be structured the way DS expects, and Bad Things Will Happen.
If you're on Windows, the easiest way to do this is to
- Open a folder to the PARENT of your content directory. Thus, given the path above, you'd want the folder to be "C:\Users\Public\Documents", so that you can see "My Daz 3D Library" as a subdirectory.
- Drag the actual product folders (i.e. "data", "People", "Runtime") out of YetAnotherDirectory and drop them on top of "My Daz 3D Library"
Doing this will cause Windows to merge the directories into your content area.
Start up Daz Studio, and open the Content pane (not "Smart Content")
If you're on a Mac, the overall procedure is similar, but I'm not 100% sure that directories merge the same way they do on Windows - although I'm a Mac user as well as a PC user, I've never used DS on the Mac, so I haven't run into this need.
Hope that helps.
R - Some files are working in the package, but most of them I just get an error code saying something like "We could not find blablabla"
