Reinstall Victoria 4 (V4) on Daz Studio 4.X

NylonGirl

Hello,

I don’t know whether to do the long story or the short story. As of the time of this message, I have the most recent version of DAZ Studio. It says 4.10.0.123 Pro Edition (64-bit). I have been using Victoria 4 until probably some time in 2016, skipping over Genesis Evolution and Genesis 2. After getting ticked off at DAZ and going strictly with Renderosity and Poser, I got the impression that the pendulum was swinging back toward DAZ Studio on the strength of IRAY and Genesis 3. So I came back.

Things were going fine. I had my V4 characters in the same scenes as my G3 characters. I even went back and got some G1 and G2 characters. I had pose converters in place. And I even decided to get G8 just to keep up with the times.

I can see that this is turning into the long version of the story. So then I started thinking about the raw amount of space the files were taking up. And thinking about mistakes from the past that might have contributed to the size of the file library. I had items purchased that I thought would be good and later realized were not so good. I had items that were good years ago but not so good now. I had items that were good until I found items that were even better. And between the built-in DAZ content manager, the DAZ Install manager, and manual installs from DAZ and other sources, I surely had lots of duplicate files scattered about.

So I had this big plan to just start over. I kept backup copies of two folders where I saved personal files. And then I uninstalled everything and deleted the entire library. For what it’s worth, it takes quite some time to delete 745,000 files. And I would only reinstall the files that I wanted to use, or were required to support the files I wanted to use.

This worked great with G3. I used those personal files I backed up. All of my characters were saved as “Scene Subsets”. I clicked on my favorite character, which is based on Jazmine HD for G3. DAZ informed me that I needed to install Jazmine HD and Kara Hair. I did. Then when I launched the character a second time, it said some files were missing that I determined were part of a set from Renderosity. I unzipped the files in the DAZ folder, clicked on the character a third time, and had success.

Then I tried the same with a V4 character, and that is where things went wrong. First I tried clicking on the file I saved as a scene subset. A .duf file. It says some assets were missing and these files could not be found:

data/auto_adapted/legacy_blmilwom_v4b_68498/geometry_0bd93b59_46af_120f_93bf_8a1b08cbeb0b/legacy_geometry.dsf

data/auto_adapted/spicehairv4_57803/geometry_7c8adba4_5795_0dde_3e1b_58dd81664579/geometry.dsf

I ended up with a blocky figure with no texture or resemblance to the V4 character.

I also tried clicking on the original .daz file that I still had around. This one tells me some files are not found and to make sure my directories are properly specified. It results in a completely invisible figure that shows up in the “Scene” pane with all of the body parts or “bones” or whatever listed. Here’s a snippet of the log file:

2017-12-10 00:22:26.935 Unable to find file for storable: data/3_0/blMilWom_v4b_68498/lEye/modifiers/morphs/PBMCC_06_0.dsd

2017-12-10 00:22:26.935 Unable to find file for storable: data/3_0/blMilWom_v4b_68498/lEye/modifiers/morphs/PBMCC_07_0.dsd

2017-12-10 00:22:26.935 Unable to find file for storable: data/3_0/blMilWom_v4b_68498/lEye/modifiers/morphs/PBMCC_08_0.dsd

Finally I tried manually clicking on a new V4, which works. And I clicked on my old character preset, a .dsa file. This seems to have applied the correct texture to the default V4 but she’s looking kind of anorexic. None of the Morphs++ stuff seems to be there. I looked in the folder where you can manually inject morphs++ features and only some of them are there, certainly not the full body injections.

My DAZPeople folder only has 7 files and 1 folder. I have been using strictly the DAZ Install Manager to install things, except for that one Renderosity product I unzipped. It seems like I don’t have the millennium woman files, or at least don’t have them where DAZ Studio is looking. And it seems like I don’t have Morphs++ installed. DAZ Install Manager was used to install the following:

DAZ Studio

Victoria 4.2 Base

Victoria 4.2 Base StudioCF

Morphs++

Morphs++ PowerLoader

Morphs++ Studio CF

Morphs++Developer Kit.

This has definitely become the long version of the story. I really want my Victoria 4 characters back. Is there a solution?

Richard Haseltine

The .dso files for the .daz file are fiels that DS 3 (and early versions of DS 4) geenrated when they saved a scene with imported content (including Poser-format content). They would have been in the Data folder of the content diectory that the scene was saved to, or in the Data folder of the first DS Format content directory. Unless you still have an older version of DS theer is no way now to regenerate them (the trick was to load the figure and morphs into a nwe scene and save that). I think the AutoAdapted files are probably what DS 4.5+ did after opening an old .daz scene file and saving as .duf.

You may well be able to rebuild the scene by installing the original content, then copying settings from the invisible or blocky figure to the newly loaded figure.

NylonGirl

Well for some reason, the next time I tried to load the default V4, the power loader actually showed Morphs++ as an option. So when I applied my old .daz character preset, I had a bald and slightly out of date version of my character with the correct texture and the correct shape from Morphs++. When I added the hair, it was pretty close to the most recent version. And I did follow the suggestion and tried to copy settings from the blocky figure. I clicked on "Currently Used" and took note of all the parameters that were not in the older version of the character. After applying them and saving a new Scene Subset, my favorite V4 character is back. So it looks like I'll be able to recreate all of the V4 characters I still want around. And my scenes that have V4 characters seem to load, with blocky versions of the V4 characters and suggestions to install elements for G3 characters and other objects for other missing items. So it looks like I'll just have to replace the blocky people with the recreated characters after I copy the poses from the blocky characters and everything will be back. This may take me a long time, but it looks like all is well.

Richard Haseltine

There are copy and paste options in the DS Edit menu, though I'm not sure which of the paste options will work with V4 (which doesn't, as I recall, have its properties split by type the way Genesis and later do).