How to use content found on the net in Daz3D

[LicoriceLover]

Greetings and good Evening everyone,

I've combed through a lot of sites on the Internet to find a answer to my question, but for now with no luck. The thing is, I downloaded a ton of content for Daz3D and got some from my brother as well. He's more the buying type of guy and i'm more the searching and get it for free kind of guy.

The problem with this, I can't get the content to work with the newest Daz 3D 4.10. I install it through the DAZ Install Manager and everything works fine, but when I open DAZ, there are only questionmarks no pictures of the content. Only the essentials are shown correct but everything else I added is broken. When I doubleclick it, it tells me error blabla files not found. That's in the Smart Content Tab. In the Content Library, there is the folder structure but all folders are empty.

Is there a special routine I have to follow that it shows/works correctly? 

I would really appreciate if someone could help me with that.

Thanks in advance.

[CCCC]

almost all the time this happens it's because you are installing content in the wrong folders. The causes for this are numerous. Check you content management settings in DAZ and see where DAZ thinks the files are. Then make sure that's where you're Install Manager is installing them. Also, Install Manager has it's own install settings and it those got changed, then IM is installing content into the wrong folders. DAZ almost always is looking for content in C:\Users\Public\Documents\My DAZ 3D Library\ . That's the default. If that got changed, then you have to point DAZ to the new folder in CMS or you have to move all your content over to C:\Users\Public\Documents\My DAZ 3D Library.

Manually install a package without using IM and see if DAZ finds it. If it doesn't, the problem is most likely DAZ's CMS needs to be changed. If it does, look at IM and see what it's configured to install to.

[Morlock]

I don't use content manager, and I have no idea how to make it work. I install everything by hand, because I've seen enough content to know that half the artists who package it are idiots (and package it accordingly), and I doubt Daz QA people are any better. And because I don't trust the installer software. I always inspect what I install so I know where the content (not "data" or "runtime" etc.) is going to wind up.

Install 7-zip or Bandizip (my new favorite) or WinRar and set it up with "extract here" as an option in the context menu. Familiarize yourself with how the different products are sorted; if they're recent, they will probably be at least generally correct (it's the particulars that bother me). It won't be long before you know where everything is supposed to go (Daz default setup is light years ahead of Poser's stupid setup). Then you can install everything by hand.

IIRC, I made a thread here about how to sort content, and it's a sticky. That'll tell you more.

Edit: I see you're talking about "smart content." I don't use that shit, either. All of Daz' content management doodads are a fucking waste of time, IMO. They all break eventually. The straight-up content library is all I need. They can keep their databases and dumb content and the rest.

If the folders show up as empty, you may be looking through the wrong "lens." DS sorts content folders by the app they were designed for. If it's Poser content, you need to add it as a Poser directory, and if it's Daz, you need to add it as Daz. Completely stupidly, the "wrong" kind of content won't show up in the library view; if you are looking at a DS library, Poser content will be invisible, and vice-versa (whoever had this stupid idea should be shot).

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Edit2: to check to see if you're looking through the "wrong lens," right-click on an empty content folder that should have stuff in it, and click "open folder location," or whatever it is. This will take you to the actual Windows directory so you'll know for sure. Products don't come with empty directories except by mistake.

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Edit3: install QTTabBar (it takes a couple of clicks to get the toolbar to show up in Windows 10 but after that you're good to go) and you can put frequently-used folders on the toolbar in Windows Explorer. I keep the directory that my Content folder is in on the toolbar. When I extract a product, I make sure the top-level folder is named "Content," so when it's ready to go in I can just right-click-drag that "Content" folder onto the folder containing all my content and then select "move" when the little selection window pops up. Makes it much easier when I'm installing tons of stuff at once. QTTabBar also gives you tabs in Explorer, which is a huge help.

[noobg]

Use the content manager. It makes life a thousand times easier when you want to uninstall items to keep your content folder from ballooning to ridiculous proportions and leaving orphan files everywhere. With content manager you can do a full reinstall of everything in a matter of minutes (with an SSD drive) whereas you're looking at days and days if you try and do it by hand. I usually direct the content folder outside of the C:\ drive, especially outside of program files, as then you dont have to worry about administrator privileges.

The content manager has like three options, just make sure you've got up the folders set up correctly like cccc said.

[Morlock]

Noobg, it all depends on user needs. My Content Library is like 1.5tb now. I don't even wanna know how much an SSD big enough to hold that much data would cost.

And I still have PLENTY of old content to sort through and see what I'd like to have installed, though on second thought, old content is way smaller than content these days. But there's always a new stream of stuff being released and I install a lot of it, so my Library is constantly growing. That SSD may serve new users for a while, but eventually it'll be too small for the job.

I suppose it depends on philosophy, too. I don't uninstall stuff. I suppose if I did, I might use the CM, or I might just as well use some 3rd party uninstaller app like ZSoft to keep track when I install stuff. I just don't trust Daz' content manager stuff, their database stuff, etc. That stuff always winds up losing my data, or just being crap to begin with (like their "categories" that didn't keep up with content when you moved it; you had to update the categories by hand; like I have time for that crap.

I keep my content library on my E drive, an internal SATA drive dedicated just to 3d stuff. I never trust anything I don't want to lose to my OS partition.

You do have me curious about CM now though. Truth is I never tried it, because it came out after I stopped trusting Daz' doodads. Don't even know how it works.

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I think before I started uninstalling content, I'd start modifying it to take up less space. I don't need all my character textures at 4k by 4k, I can get by with 2048 by 2048 without noticing the difference, and that's like...what? 1/4th the size on disk?

[noobg]

In the interest of full disclosure, I haven't used the content manager in quite some time (at least a couple of years) since I lost all of my old DAZ3D content. I am not nearly as familiar with the old way of doing it, and it's definitely has its warts (or at least used to). While the internal content manager is really nice when it works in daz, when the stuff isn't set up properly it's a right proper pain to wade through XML files to fix it. And when I was using it at least 75% of the items had misleading or completely incorrect metadata attached to it, so it's utility was always a little suspect.

That said, I'm a containerized kinda guy, so I do like being able to add and subtract stuff with minimal cruft building up afterward. And the program definitely ran faster if I got rid of a bunch of stuff and only loaded the items that I was interested in working with on that project. But, again, my knowledge is a couple of years old and perhaps things have changed. I only got back into Daz3d because someone asked me for some old files and I didn't have them anymore, and now I have a spiffy new dedicated server to play on!