stringent system for PAs naming their items
cherpenbeck
Posts: 1,412
It drives me mad that I can't find things easily in DAZStudio. DAZ should urgently tell the PAs to use a stringent system.
Like:
Generation/male or female/Iray 3DL/ kind of item / item / texture
or
tool / Iray 2DL /description
Example:
G2F 3DL outfit Dark_passion texture a bit boho
shaders 3DL Iray hand-knits-shader-presets merchant-resource
Would make life easier for aöll of us.
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Comments
Materials should have a tag, RSL for 3Delight or MDL for Iray, and be categorised or in a folder named for the render engine.
Content will usually be in the /People/Genesis whichever folder, and if using categories it will usually be tagged for its compatible figure and should be filtered in Smart Content.
I've always renamed my own content, as it's easier than trying to force someone to do it.
When I used Poser, any poses or material files, I renamed:
- MAT x Hair
- MAT x Hair_Toxic
- MAT V4 Jeans_Awesomesauceness
- M4 Character x
- V4 Characer x
You get the general idea. But I always rename them prior to loading in poser, so I don't have to find them
It would certainly make it easier to find the object you're looking for if the items were named in a consistent and logical way. Agreeing on a particular system would be quite a challenge.
Alternatively a more effective search engine in DS would certainly help. For example, yesterday I wasted a lot of time looking for a Rose prop that I knew I had. I searched for "Rose" in the DS search engine. It found many textures with "rose" as part of the name but it could not find the rose. The item was GothicRose and the file name is "08_rose....", the object appears in DS as "Rose_1". Apparently the prefix "08_" makes the word "rose" invisible to the search engine. I have come across this type of problem literally hundreds of times.
In which pane were you searching - Smart Content or Content Library?
Content Library.
I find it frustrating when I cannot figure out which figure a dress or outfit is for, especially for pre-Genesis stuff.
The Content Library search is more limited than that in Smart Content, you may want to try that (with Filter by Context off, perhaps).
I use my own custom file nomenclature & manual install.
Even more than naming, I'd like to see some kind of standards enforced for folder structure. My content directories are just a soup of random stuff. For example the top-level folder listing looks like:
Several of these odd out-of-place directories contain only a single item; some are empty. And further down in the directory tree, it's a similar mess -- folders named after products, folders named after vendors. Quite aside from the fact that this chaos offends my obsessive-compulsive soul, half my life is spent vainly rummaging through folders trying to remember where I last saw something I want to use.
When I am the Benevolent Dictator of the World, this kind of thing will no longer be tolerated, and PAs who refuse to clean up their act will be sent to the pixel mines to reflect on the error of their ways. In the meantime, perhaps DAZ could do something to tame the problem. Pretty please?
Categories?
By more limited, I assume you are refering to the ability to search through metadata, tags and such like. If that is so, then it still does not explain why the search engine cannot find the word "rose" in a file name.
Further, is it true to say that when you search in Smart Content, you only search through folders in the DAZ primary content folder, typically My DAZ Library? Doesn't searching in Smart Content ignore all other Runtime Folders, such as old Poser folders?
Smart Content should find any content that is in the CMS (as long as Filter by Context is off, of course).
CMS?
Ah I see. Does the CMS include all the non-DAZ runtimes?
It includes anything that comes with Daz metadata (that has been imported), or which you have categorised.
So does that mean that I was right, searching from within the Smart Content tab only searches through DAZ content and possibly 3rd party content that has been specifically added to the CMS? Does that last step involve manually adding DAZ metadata?
Yes, it will miss items that are not categorised. Some content from other sites comes with metadata for categorisation, some even comes set-up for DIM (thanks to Contnt Package Assistant), and you can categorise yourself of course.
OK, so I can understand why searching from within Smart Content or Content Library may miss items based on metadata being absent. I can even understand that the devs decided not to include searching of folder names; I don't like it but hey, it's their party. However, I still do not understand why the search engine (especially from within Content Library) frequently misses items where the search term is within the file name. Surely, a "search within a string" function is present in even the most basic of search engines. If you have to remember the exact file name to find that file, it's not particularly useful.
You could always feature request partial word matching (which is what it doesn't do, I think - it won't find "roses.duf" if you enter rose, but it shoudl find "rose bush.duf").
Whilst I am amazed that this is not already part of the search algorithm (it seems so basic), I will forward this to the Help Desk. I'll let you know what response I get.
Sorry, no post on this subject. it was removed by moderator.
I find Content Library easier to handle than Smart Content, but I do have a very good memory for where many products illogically end up. Quick examples are I have two environments which bizarrely appear in the Props folder, and one set of props which even more bizarrely appears under Environments > Architecture when they're clearly just props. But what surprises me most is that only a very few animals I have appear under Animals, quite a few vehicles don't appear under Vehicles, then these latter two categories and quite a few other products can only be found under Products and nowhere else. I'm slowly creating my own content library under Categories, but I wish it was possible to create an entirely new pane so I could create my own filing system (no Daz folders involved as in Categories) without losing links to the original downloads.
The DAZ content management system, all in all, is quite a mess. You have Smart Content, which ignores anythng that doesn't have DAZ metadata or imported metadata, or isn't categorized by the user. Then you have the folder herirarchy of the Library, which is a haphazard soup of names that's thrown together however the Artists want to throw it together. Then you have two different search features -- one for Smart Content, one for the Folder heirarchy, which are completely indepdendent of one another and don't work together. Then you have the limitations of the search feature in the Library (as discussed above) and the lack of any kind of "Favorites" folder or bookmarks feature. Then you have the lack of the ability to "rate" content based on how often you use it (like you can "rate" footage in a video editing app; this is a common feature in some programs). Then you have the way that content is frrequently organized not by what it is, but by who created it -- i.e., the artist's name, which is completely unhelpful when it comes to finding what you need. All in all, like I said, a mess. DAZ needs to do something about this, but I doubt they will. I've submitted feature requests, but so far, nada.
You could create a favourites group http://docs.daz3d.com/doku.php/public/software/dazstudio/4/referenceguide/interface/panes/smart_content/results_view/start#group