Yet Another Carrara + DIM Question

nDelphinDelphi Posts: 1,862
edited December 1969 in Carrara Discussion

OK, I decide to take the plunge and use DIM for DAZ Studio and Carrara.

Here's the thing though. I can actually tell DIM to install DAZ Studio content to any Runtime I want. Yet, for Carrara it is only allowing content installation, like Starry Sky and Destroyer HMS August into the C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\Carrara8.5 folder.

Is there no way to assign content into a separate Carrara content folder? Like it was before under the C:\Users\[User]\Documents\DAZ 3D folder?

I am actually installing content on an external drive so that I can keep my C: drive free for other applications, etc.

Comments

  • frank0314frank0314 Posts: 14,122
    edited December 1969

    If I'm not mistaking the content needs to be installed wherever the program is installed to so content would need to be in the program directory. I could be wrong though. I'm sure DAZ_Spooky will see this and be in since he's browsing the forums atm.

  • DAZ_SpookyDAZ_Spooky Posts: 3,100
    edited December 1969

    nDelphi said:
    OK, I decide to take the plunge and use DIM for DAZ Studio and Carrara.

    Here's the thing though. I can actually tell DIM to install DAZ Studio content to any Runtime I want. Yet, for Carrara it is only allowing content installation, like Starry Sky and Destroyer HMS August into the C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\Carrara8.5 folder.

    Is there no way to assign content into a separate Carrara content folder? Like it was before under the C:\Users\[User]\Documents\DAZ 3D folder?

    I am actually installing content on an external drive so that I can keep my C: drive free for other applications, etc.

    There is a major bit of work we need to do to allow Carrara content to be outside the Carrara program folder and still work correctly. We know it, but we haven't gotten to it. Other things have had higher priority.

    You can lie to Install Manager but I wouldn't recommend it. Basically if you install Carrara Native content elsewhere relative addressing does not work, which means you will be asked for things all the time, and the "new scene" wizard will not work. You can always install Carrara to your other drive.

  • nDelphinDelphi Posts: 1,862
    edited December 1969

    There is a major bit of work we need to do to allow Carrara content to be outside the Carrara program folder and still work correctly. We know it, but we haven't gotten to it. Other things have had higher priority.

    OK, thanks guys. At least I know I am doing things right. I have more DAZ Studio content by far, so I guess the largest amount of content will go to the external drive.

  • nDelphinDelphi Posts: 1,862
    edited December 1969

    One more question. What if I already have the zip file downloaded, how to I tell DIM to install a zip from my hard drive instead of re-downloading it?

  • de3ande3an Posts: 915
    edited December 1969

    There is a major bit of work we need to do to allow Carrara content to be outside the Carrara program folder and still work correctly. We know it, but we haven't gotten to it. Other things have had higher priority.

    You can lie to Install Manager but I wouldn't recommend it. Basically if you install Carrara Native content elsewhere relative addressing does not work, which means you will be asked for things all the time, and the "new scene" wizard will not work. You can always install Carrara to your other drive.

    Are you aware that the DIM seems to be incapable of installing the Carrara Native Content correctly in the Mac OS version?
    By default it is installing it in the same directory as the Windows version, when instead it needs to be installed into the Carrara.app application bundle.
    As far as I can tell, you can not reconfigure the install path in the DIM because the DIM does not recognize the application bundle as a valid directory.
    Any new Carrara user will never be able to get the native content to work unless they ask someone who knows the secret of where to manually move the files.
    I hope something is being done to correct this problem.

  • StezzaStezza Posts: 8,119
    edited December 1969

    nDelphi said:
    One more question. What if I already have the zip file downloaded, how to I tell DIM to install a zip from my hard drive instead of re-downloading it?

    I would also like to know this one :coolhmm:

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,624
    edited December 1969

    Stezza said:
    nDelphi said:
    One more question. What if I already have the zip file downloaded, how to I tell DIM to install a zip from my hard drive instead of re-downloading it?

    I would also like to know this one :coolhmm:Go into Public Documents > DAZ 3D > Install manager > Downloads
    - That folder
    - Get your downloaded zip (which must begin with the suffix: IM) file into that folder
    - Now launch DIM and that file will show up as a file ready to install.

  • DAZ_SpookyDAZ_Spooky Posts: 3,100
    edited December 1969

    de3an said:
    There is a major bit of work we need to do to allow Carrara content to be outside the Carrara program folder and still work correctly. We know it, but we haven't gotten to it. Other things have had higher priority.

    You can lie to Install Manager but I wouldn't recommend it. Basically if you install Carrara Native content elsewhere relative addressing does not work, which means you will be asked for things all the time, and the "new scene" wizard will not work. You can always install Carrara to your other drive.

    Are you aware that the DIM seems to be incapable of installing the Carrara Native Content correctly in the Mac OS version?
    By default it is installing it in the same directory as the Windows version, when instead it needs to be installed into the Carrara.app application bundle.
    As far as I can tell, you can not reconfigure the install path in the DIM because the DIM does not recognize the application bundle as a valid directory.
    Any new Carrara user will never be able to get the native content to work unless they ask someone who knows the secret of where to manually move the files.
    I hope something is being done to correct this problem.Thanks. Somehow we missed that one. It was reported this morning, and we are on it.

  • CarltonMartinCarltonMartin Posts: 147
    edited December 1969

    That's really, really strange to me. That's *always* been the case with MacOS and Carrara. How can you suddenly not be aware of this? Never mind. It's just really odd.

  • HeadwaxHeadwax Posts: 10,005
    edited December 1969

    nDelphi said:
    OK, I decide to take the plunge and use DIM for DAZ Studio and Carrara.

    Here's the thing though. I can actually tell DIM to install DAZ Studio content to any Runtime I want. Yet, for Carrara it is only allowing content installation, like Starry Sky and Destroyer HMS August into the C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\Carrara8.5 folder.

    Is there no way to assign content into a separate Carrara content folder? Like it was before under the C:\Users\[User]\Documents\DAZ 3D folder?

    I am actually installing content on an external drive so that I can keep my C: drive free for other applications, etc.

    There is a major bit of work we need to do to allow Carrara content to be outside the Carrara program folder and still work correctly. We know it, but we haven't gotten to it. Other things have had higher priority.

    You can lie to Install Manager but I wouldn't recommend it. Basically if you install Carrara Native content elsewhere relative addressing does not work, which means you will be asked for things all the time, and the "new scene" wizard will not work. You can always install Carrara to your other drive.

    Hi Daz_Spooky,

    Firstly thanks for haunting the forum and answering everybody's question.
    You seem to be everywhere at the same time and then some.

    As for the install directories, I guess you know that a lot of us are working with small ssd drives as our C drives.
    Of course this is where we'd like to put Carrara, but having the Carrara content directories on the same drive makes this impractical in a lot of cases.

    just food for thought

  • DartanbeckDartanbeck Posts: 21,624
    edited December 1969

    When can I get a 2 TB ssd for a reasonable price?
    Okay... you know I'm being a nut, right?
    So do you think that my SATA 1.5TB 6GB/sec hard drive makes a bottleneck, knowing that the only time it ever needs to access another drive is simply to swap files?

    I think of texture storage, which I read somewhere needs to be readily handy during animated render sequences - a problem some folks ran into using farms - not a Carrara-specific article... but 3d rendering in general.

    I also read that Windows enjoys having a lot of unused space on its drive. While it may not 'require' all that space, it runs faster and smoother with it.

    My primary drive is actually a specially designed Seagate Barracuda that runs 6GB/sec but at a lower rpm - only 5900. I am impressed.
    SSD may be the way of the future, and I'm likely missing a bigger picture by not having one yet. Time will tell. But my Zambezi 8 is one kickin' cpu that doesn't seem to starve due to HDD lag, like it does when I connect a usb external drive, which makes a huge, noticeable difference, and will never use that as my actual system setup again. Someone once told me to keep all of my runtimes external - so I did. No way - not any more. Local wouldn't work for a small ssd, but I'd at least go internal and hook up to the latest SATA technology. But wouldn't that slow the whole works down to not go any faster than what I'm running now?

    Just curious.
    I put gobs of thought, planning, research into building this system - and it seems to really rock!.
    Certainly the fastest computer I've ever worked on - and it fit into a budget of under a thousand dollars - Including Windows 7 and Sony Movie HD!

    Nonetheless, I'm going to want SSD eventually - but only if they get bigger, which they seem to be, Now I want to build another, like this one, as a render node ;)

  • nDelphinDelphi Posts: 1,862
    edited December 1969

    ... like it does when I connect a usb external drive, which makes a huge, noticeable difference, and will never use that as my actual system setup again. Someone once told me to keep all of my runtimes external - so I did. No way - not any more. Local wouldn't work for a small ssd, but I'd at least go internal and hook up to the latest SATA technology. But wouldn't that slow the whole works down to not go any faster than what I'm running now?

    My external hard drive runs on eSATA. Pretty fast, just like the internal SATA drive.

  • DAZ_SpookyDAZ_Spooky Posts: 3,100
    edited December 1969

    head wax said:
    nDelphi said:
    OK, I decide to take the plunge and use DIM for DAZ Studio and Carrara.

    Here's the thing though. I can actually tell DIM to install DAZ Studio content to any Runtime I want. Yet, for Carrara it is only allowing content installation, like Starry Sky and Destroyer HMS August into the C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\Carrara8.5 folder.

    Is there no way to assign content into a separate Carrara content folder? Like it was before under the C:\Users\[User]\Documents\DAZ 3D folder?

    I am actually installing content on an external drive so that I can keep my C: drive free for other applications, etc.

    There is a major bit of work we need to do to allow Carrara content to be outside the Carrara program folder and still work correctly. We know it, but we haven't gotten to it. Other things have had higher priority.

    You can lie to Install Manager but I wouldn't recommend it. Basically if you install Carrara Native content elsewhere relative addressing does not work, which means you will be asked for things all the time, and the "new scene" wizard will not work. You can always install Carrara to your other drive.

    Hi Daz_Spooky,

    Firstly thanks for haunting the forum and answering everybody's question.
    You seem to be everywhere at the same time and then some.

    As for the install directories, I guess you know that a lot of us are working with small ssd drives as our C drives.
    Of course this is where we'd like to put Carrara, but having the Carrara content directories on the same drive makes this impractical in a lot of cases.

    just food for thought

    As I said, It is something we are aware of and something we know needs to change. My primary work computer has an SSD Drive, funny thing though is I use it for the Temp and texture spooling drive, not as my OS drive. When I did that it greatly increased render speed. :)

  • DAZ_SpookyDAZ_Spooky Posts: 3,100
    edited December 1969

    When can I get a 2 TB ssd for a reasonable price?
    Okay... you know I'm being a nut, right?
    So do you think that my SATA 1.5TB 6GB/sec hard drive makes a bottleneck, knowing that the only time it ever needs to access another drive is simply to swap files?

    I think of texture storage, which I read somewhere needs to be readily handy during animated render sequences - a problem some folks ran into using farms - not a Carrara-specific article... but 3d rendering in general.

    I also read that Windows enjoys having a lot of unused space on its drive. While it may not 'require' all that space, it runs faster and smoother with it.

    My primary drive is actually a specially designed Seagate Barracuda that runs 6GB/sec but at a lower rpm - only 5900. I am impressed.
    SSD may be the way of the future, and I'm likely missing a bigger picture by not having one yet. Time will tell. But my Zambezi 8 is one kickin' cpu that doesn't seem to starve due to HDD lag, like it does when I connect a usb external drive, which makes a huge, noticeable difference, and will never use that as my actual system setup again. Someone once told me to keep all of my runtimes external - so I did. No way - not any more. Local wouldn't work for a small ssd, but I'd at least go internal and hook up to the latest SATA technology. But wouldn't that slow the whole works down to not go any faster than what I'm running now?

    Just curious.
    I put gobs of thought, planning, research into building this system - and it seems to really rock!.
    Certainly the fastest computer I've ever worked on - and it fit into a budget of under a thousand dollars - Including Windows 7 and Sony Movie HD!

    Nonetheless, I'm going to want SSD eventually - but only if they get bigger, which they seem to be, Now I want to build another, like this one, as a render node ;)

    You can get an SSH they start at 750GB and range as high as 1.5TB at reasonable prices and are a good compromise between a high speed traditional HD and an SSD.
  • DAZ_SpookyDAZ_Spooky Posts: 3,100
    edited December 1969

    That's really, really strange to me. That's *always* been the case with MacOS and Carrara. How can you suddenly not be aware of this? Never mind. It's just really odd.
    Not unaware of where it is supposed to write, nobody noticed Install Manager writing to the wrong place on the Mac.
  • psimediapsimedia Posts: 22
    edited December 1969

    de3an said:
    There is a major bit of work we need to do to allow Carrara content to be outside the Carrara program folder and still work correctly. We know it, but we haven't gotten to it. Other things have had higher priority.

    You can lie to Install Manager but I wouldn't recommend it. Basically if you install Carrara Native content elsewhere relative addressing does not work, which means you will be asked for things all the time, and the "new scene" wizard will not work. You can always install Carrara to your other drive.

    Are you aware that the DIM seems to be incapable of installing the Carrara Native Content correctly in the Mac OS version?
    By default it is installing it in the same directory as the Windows version, when instead it needs to be installed into the Carrara.app application bundle.
    As far as I can tell, you can not reconfigure the install path in the DIM because the DIM does not recognize the application bundle as a valid directory.
    Any new Carrara user will never be able to get the native content to work unless they ask someone who knows the secret of where to manually move the files.
    I hope something is being done to correct this problem.

    Yup! Newbie Mac Carrara 8.5 "Pro" user here as of yesterday. You'd think a properly working installer would be pretty hight on the list of things to fix during the beta process, so my Carrara experience is definitely off to a very poor start. I called the tech 1-800 number this morning and the "overflow" receptionist said it would be two days before I could get a call back. 2 days. Since Monday is a holiday here in the USA, that means Tuesday at the earliest. I'm not impressed.

    The big up side is that I found this forum!!! It looks pretty active group; and peer-to-peer support is often better than tech support with many software products. Thanks for the 411 about dropping the content manually into the app itself. I never would have thought to do that.

    And thanks for letting me vent my frustration. ;-)

    Jerry

  • Subtropic PixelSubtropic Pixel Posts: 2,388
    edited December 1969

    head wax said:
    ...a lot of us are working with small ssd drives as our C drives.
    Of course this is where we'd like to put Carrara, but having the Carrara content directories on the same drive makes this impractical in a lot of cases...

    My situation is a different flavor of the same food. I have three SSDs, and I don't put any applications on my C drive, except those whose installers do it without consulting me or offering me an alternative. I always put my applications on a different drive partition so that system disk backup/recovery can be as fast as possible. Right now, my app partition is on a spinning disk. But I separate by partition precisely so that I can rehost it on a different physical drive anytime I like.

    And like HW says, I should be able to choose a different location for content. Much like VST plugin libraries for music making, which can consist of monstrously huge sample libraries. Being mostly read-only, they are excellent candidates for SSD.

    I don't have Carrara (as of this writing), but in general I want as much flexibility as possible for all product installations.

  • frank0314frank0314 Posts: 14,122
    edited December 1969

    It has been said that DAZ is aware of the inconvenience and they will look at possible fixing it for future releases. It was also said it is a complicated process to get it changed because of how Carrara reads files. I will try to find the post that explained it better just in case I'm mistaken about something.

  • frank0314frank0314 Posts: 14,122
    edited December 1969

    nDelphi said:
    OK, I decide to take the plunge and use DIM for DAZ Studio and Carrara.

    Here's the thing though. I can actually tell DIM to install DAZ Studio content to any Runtime I want. Yet, for Carrara it is only allowing content installation, like Starry Sky and Destroyer HMS August into the C:\Program Files\DAZ 3D\Carrara8.5 folder.

    Is there no way to assign content into a separate Carrara content folder? Like it was before under the C:\Users\[User]\Documents\DAZ 3D folder?

    I am actually installing content on an external drive so that I can keep my C: drive free for other applications, etc.

    There is a major bit of work we need to do to allow Carrara content to be outside the Carrara program folder and still work correctly. We know it, but we haven't gotten to it. Other things have had higher priority.

    You can lie to Install Manager but I wouldn't recommend it. Basically if you install Carrara Native content elsewhere relative addressing does not work, which means you will be asked for things all the time, and the "new scene" wizard will not work. You can always install Carrara to your other drive.

    Oh that was easy it was this thread

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