Installing content using DIM in alternate locations?
Kaji
Posts: 21
I apologize if this has been asked before, but how does one install Carrara content using DIM in a location that is not inside the Carrara.app folder? I have attempted to do this by changing the content path inside of DIM, but it looks as if this setting is only for Daz Studio content.
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To my knowledge you have to install content into the Carrara program folder
That kind of stinks. I'm getting a new machine with a very small SSD primary drive, I'd rather have the content on an external drive.
You can install Carrara on an external hard drive I have mine on my D: drive
But to truly answer your original question:
In DIM, deselect "Install after Download"
Go to (I have no clue on a Mac) Public Documents > DAZ 3D > install manager > Downloads
Find your file inside the Downloads folder mentioned above and simply open the zip
Now you can put the files anywhere you like.
Thank you, but doesn't this negate the purpose of using DIM? I can install it manually, but since it doesn't know where the files are going, it won't do automatic updates. That's really the only reason I am using DIM at all. Unless there's a better way to know when a product is updated :)
It sounded like you were looking for a way to negate what it would normally do.
But from your last comment, I would suggest something like what Frank was talking about. Make another installation of Carrara - even if you leave it mostly unused. You can now map this location as a second Carrara installation in DIM.
But I fail to see the reasoning in that... just thought I'd throw it out there. When I use DIM for Carrara products, I just let it put the stuff where it wants. So far I've always found it afterwards. But if I couldn't, I'd just right-click on the product in DIM Installed tab to find where everything went to.
Do keep in mind that, if you move stuff around after DIM installs it, it can no longer update or uninstall it properly.
It took a while for me to get used to using the DIM, I remember well. It wasn't nearly as polished then as it is now. But still, it's different.
I noticed that I still have the "Delete after Install" unchecked due to my earlier paranoia. This works well for my undying need to backup everything though. I'll copy all of those zip files off to an external drive before getting rid of them. Silly, huh.
Before DIM came along, I never really knew where the installers were going to put my Carrara-specific products I bought. After not finding them a couple of times, I started a habit of installing them to my desktop and then moving the files into place manually. Since then, however, I just figured out how differently Carrara-specific content is handled than Poser or DS. Well, actually it's the same, just with different names of folders and such. The big difference is that none of the stuff just shows up automatically in Carrara afterwards.
I started a rant on just using the folders given us within Native Content for specific installation of files, but nobody else seems to like the idea. DAZ 3D seemed to love it that I do that. I don't want to make people add a new folder if they want one of my products. However, that only works so far. Clips, for example, have no Native Folders to work with - requiring us to ask customers to Add a Folder in one way or another. And the big thing is that there are a lot of Carrara users that prefer the Add Folder method - as that's been the norm of Carrara's browser for years. So it goes both ways.
Anyways, sorry you seem to be having such a headache with it. Believe me, it all just becomes a wonderfully smooth motion in time.
I have similar
This May or may not help you
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/567178/
Works for me :-)
I have similar
This May or may not help you
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/viewreply/567178/
Works for me :-)Abso-freaking-lutely, Stezza!
I love that tutorial! I didn't have hands to type in a comment when I saw it - so I'll just tell you now... brilliantly done!
I was looking for a way to keep Carrara on the SSD in the /Applications folder, but put the content for it on another drive. My new Mac has one small internal SSD. All other content for Daz/Carrara needs to go on an external drive just for the interest of cost. Daz seems to handle this just fine, I have all of my legacy Poser content on a second hard drive and Daz installed in /Applications. No issue. I just find it odd that a program from the same company has such rigid content placement issues.
I've spent countless hours organizing my old Poser content, down to the point of having to hand edit PZ2 files because creators decided to hard code texture paths to their user folders, or use Windows pathing. I really like the DIM concept that it will get those updates for me instead of having to search if the creator had updated it. I was hoping it would be as seamless a process for Carrara as it is for Daz Studio.
@Stezza, I have no issues with Carrara picking up the Daz Studio/Poser content I've installed. I have a problem with it with native content. On a Mac, all of the content installs into Carrara.app. This is treated as a file by the OS, so when you try to use Add Folder in Carrara, it will not work unless you have made an alias to the internal folder structure and stuck that somewhere else.
Ahhhh.... Gotcha! Makes more sense when I read the whole problem, like you've clearly explained earlier. Sorry about that.
Yeah, so I think you can install another copy of Carrara onto that external drive and then map that installation as your main Carrara 8.5 installation directory, and not use the one on the SSD. That way, DIM will only use the Carrara on the other drive.
The result of that would be as simple as this:
If you've already installed native content to the SSD, uninstall it and have DIM install it to the new location on the other drive.
Go into the copy of Carrara that you actually run - the one on the SSD drive.
Go to each tab in the browser and go "Add Folder" and add the entire folder from the other drive:
Scenes Tab > Add Folder > Other Drive: Carrara: Scenes (brief example)
Objects Tab > Add Folder > Other Drive: Carrara: Presets: Objects (In this one, you'll also want to add Presets: Plants)
etc.,
I think that would work really well, and also give you a really nice and clean looking browser tray ;)
You can use the Windows MKLINK command from the cmd prompt to make a virtual folder on another drive (Windows 7 & later)
Create the folder you want on your external drive - e.g. D:\MyContent
Then you can type mklink /J C:\Program Files\Daz\ MyContent D:\MyContent and it will build a link inside the Daz folder to your external drive, so that every time you refer to C:\Program Files\Daz\ MyContent it actually goes to D:\MyContent.
Used to do that all the time with flight sim, which insisted on installing certain add ons inside the app folder.
Word of caution, the "MyContent" folder must not exist on your C drive, so move or rename it before you issue the command.
You can do the saker thing on a Mac OSX, using terminal and the ln command (I haven't tried this myself, so don't know the syntax, but typing "man ln" will get you documentation.)
I love that tutorial! I didn't have hands to type in a comment when I saw it - so I'll just tell you now... brilliantly done!
Thanks mate,
hopefully someone will be helped by it :-)
I was looking for a way to keep Carrara on the SSD in the /Applications folder, but put the content for it on another drive. My new Mac has one small internal SSD. All other content for Daz/Carrara needs to go on an external drive just for the interest of cost. Daz seems to handle this just fine, I have all of my legacy Poser content on a second hard drive and Daz installed in /Applications. No issue. I just find it odd that a program from the same company has such rigid content placement issues.
I've spent countless hours organizing my old Poser content, down to the point of having to hand edit PZ2 files because creators decided to hard code texture paths to their user folders, or use Windows pathing. I really like the DIM concept that it will get those updates for me instead of having to search if the creator had updated it. I was hoping it would be as seamless a process for Carrara as it is for Daz Studio.
@Stezza, I have no issues with Carrara picking up the Daz Studio/Poser content I've installed. I have a problem with it with native content. On a Mac, all of the content installs into Carrara.app. This is treated as a file by the OS, so when you try to use Add Folder in Carrara, it will not work unless you have made an alias to the internal folder structure and stuck that somewhere else.
Carrara wasn't designed by DAZ, which is why there are integration issues. DAZ bought Carrara from Eovia. Its heritage goes back to Raydream Studio. DAZ also bought Hexagon from Eovia and they bought Bryce from someone else. Bryce and Raydream used to be owned by Metacreations which applied the Kai UI style to them.
As to having the Carrara application on the main drive, I wouldn't worry about it. Stick it in on a remote drive and stick an icon for it in the Dock. I have lots of software, including Photoshop, Illustrator and it's other helper programs on a remote drive for space reasons and they work just fine that way. Carrara itself is pretty quick to load, so once that's in RAM, the SSD isn't going to make much of a difference. If the SSD is for speed, and you have the room, the real benefit may be to use that as the scratch disk for Carrara and other programs that generate large files and need to swap data or like a large amount of virtual memory.
@evilproducer DIM isn't that flexible when it comes to installing applications. I can always do it manually, as everybody says.
I don't have DIM. I'm still using C7.2 Pro on a G5, so DIM won't work for me. Even the 32 bit version is Intel Mac only.
You can't tell DIM what drive to install to? Wow. That's limiting.
I don't have DIM. I'm still using C7.2 Pro on a G5, so DIM won't work for me. Even the 32 bit version is Intel Mac only.
You can't tell DIM what drive to install to? Wow. That's limiting.
Yes, you can tell it which drive. It has one directory that it will install 32 and 64 bit applications to. Can't specify a different location for each application unless you use a different bitness.
For those worrying about moving files out of the installed-to directory (using DIM):
After I'd install a bunch of stuff with DIM I'd move the batch of zips to an external then delete them. No problem with updates.
My existing Michael 4 runtime was beautifully organized so I couldn't install with DIM to there, what a mess that would be. But I wanted to be sure I had the latest versions of everything so I installed all my DAZ M4 stuff with DIM into a new DIM-M4 runtime.
I couldn't just wipe out my old M4 runtime because it had ::whisper:: stuff from other places in it too.
So since I don't use the CMS (it doesn't work for me--long story) I decided to organize my DIM-M4 stuff INTO the existing M4 runtime which I spent hours and hours doing. I was able to completely wipe out everything in the DIM-M4 folder.
I wasn't worried because like how many updates do we really expect of M4 products from DAZ at this point?
Lo and Behold an M4 product update came in a couple weeks ago.
Let's see what happens!
I told it to install into DIM-M4, I could tell it was hunting for the files to uninstall and it took a bit. If it found the textures and geometries in the other M4 runtime no problem. It would never find the library files. That will be my responsibility.
Then it installed the updated product into DIM-M4.
I went in and took the files and did the update myself into my other runtime.
It all went swimmingly well.
In fact, moving the files out of the installed-to directory and organizing them into a different runtime is possibly the better way to go than organizing them within the installed-to directory itself. I'd just be sure the DIM installed-to directory is higher than the organized runtime on the list of libraries in Studio. (In case you install an update and don't get around to 'fixing' it until later. But who would do that? ::cough cough::)
HTH
(I'm peeking in this thread because I'm considering putting all my DAZ content on an external since I'm out of space and was wondering how well that works.)
I
Cool. Yeah, after seeing it in action, myself, I think the DIM uses your store account to determine what you own when updates are concerned... so it doesn't matter. Then updating should be as simple as just dragging everything from the Install-to folder into the permanent home.
After you install something, DIM uses its own record of what was installed to check for updates. If a product hasn't been installed, it looks in the downloads folder to see if the most recent version is there. So once you install something you can delete the zips or move them to an archive location.
Anyways,
How the heck do you know so much? And what can you tell us about the development of Carrara? ;)
Anyways,
How the heck do you know so much? And what can you tell us about the development of Carrara? ;)
It may operate in a similar way to other software updaters. It could keep a database or history of what it has done or downloaded with the version or modification date, then the next time it checks in with DAZ's servers it would cross check its database with DAZ's files and download any modified files.
It may operate in a similar way to other software updaters. It could keep a database or history of what it has done or downloaded with the version or modification date, then the next time it checks in with DAZ's servers it would cross check its database with DAZ's files and download any modified files.
This. Kinda.
When DIM downloads a product it downloads two files - the zip and a .dsx. The .dsx is the customer manifest; it includes your order number and order date, the tags that apply to the zip, and a file hash of the zip. When you connect to the store it is these file hashes that are compared. The zip file also contains a .dsx file - this is the product manifest and it includes the file hash and the list of elements in the zip (the file list).
When you install a product DIM combines the two manifests, adds the install date and time and the path the product was installed to and writes the new manifest to (Windows 7 path) C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\DAZ 3D\InstallManager\ManifestFiles. These manifests are used to compare against the store if you delete the installers after installation.
And for those of you with SSD drives - I have 4,022 files installed and the installation manifests are eating a whopping 67 MB - not enough to worry about.
It may operate in a similar way to other software updaters. It could keep a database or history of what it has done or downloaded with the version or modification date, then the next time it checks in with DAZ's servers it would cross check its database with DAZ's files and download any modified files.
This. Kinda.
When DIM downloads a product it downloads two files - the zip and a .dsx. The .dsx is the customer manifest; it includes your order number and order date, the tags that apply to the zip, and a file hash of the zip. When you connect to the store it is these file hashes that are compared. The zip file also contains a .dsx file - this is the product manifest and it includes the file hash and the list of elements in the zip (the file list).
When you install a product DIM combines the two manifests, adds the install date and time and the path the product was installed to and writes the new manifest to (Windows 7 path) C:\Users\Public\Public Documents\DAZ 3D\InstallManager\ManifestFiles. These manifests are used to compare against the store if you delete the installers after installation.
And for those of you with SSD drives - I have 4,022 files installed and the installation manifests are eating a whopping 67 MB - not enough to worry about.
Yeah, what namffuak said. And I agree, it's neat that you can delete the files after DIM installs a product, and DIM won't mind that the files aren't there anymore.
As for Carrara development, my deep inside knowledge tells me that there's probably programming involved.
I'm glad I don't have to do that. I developed something in Carrara today, and it was a lot more fun than programming. Well, for me at least. Perhaps I'd like programming more if I knew how to do it?
namffuak,
Thanks for that. Cool stuff to know.
I had put in a ticket two weeks ago to ask support the same question, I finally got a straight answer:
"Carrara content must be installed to the app file on a MAC.
The QA department has stated that if you are using the Install Manager, it will automatically install to this app location. If it will not, then it is a permissions issue on your machine."
@Dartanbeck Programming is like solving puzzles. If you don't like that, you will never like programming. I do it for a living, so I guess I must :)
Yes and no. The things like plants and leaves must be installed there. The Wizard items must also be installed there. Paint brushes, extensions, etc. must all be installed there.
Included shaders and objects can be placed anywhere. You will just need to add the folders for the Browser manually. For instance, when I moved from C5 to C7.2 Pro, I moved some of the folders that contained objects included with the native content out of the app package and put them in my Documents folder just so I didn't over-write any files I might have wanted.