A question regarding install managed files pointing to the wrong location

minigendo

Greetings,

My apologies if this has been asked before, or should have been asked in a different location. I did some simple searches before hand and nothing turned up.

Coming back to Daz after some years away from active use, I decided to do a fresh install of 4.6, and use the Install manager to download a few items to play around with. Because I run my OS of a small SSD, I changed the paths on everything to point to a larger secondary drive.

Mostly this works just fine, however I am finding that some items appear to have become somehow confused during the install manager process. For example, I told install manager to point to a location x. Daz has a content directory configured which is y. There are items which I have installed using the install manager, so they exist in x. However, when I surf the content directory to them in DAZ and double click, I am told that the files cannot be found. The path of the "missing" file is located in y.

Examples of products which have suffered this behavior are: pwToon, Manga Style shaders

Since this is my first outing in a long time with DAZ, and my first experience with the install manager, I'm uncertain if what I'm seeing is a bug or the result of misconfiguration on my part. Has anyone ever experienced anything similar, or could anyone recommend a solution. Alternatively, is this something I should open a ticket with support about?

My thanks for your time.

SpottedKitty

It's common; very common. The thing is that DIM and DAZ|Studio do not talk to each other about default content locations, and they don't talk to each other about any changes to those locations that you might make. If you're changing the content locations, you must make sure yourself that you've set both DIM and D|S to use the same location. Also, in D|S, you must make sure the same location is defined as both D|S and Poser format.

Note that the DIM has more than one location setting — it stores the downloaded installers (and keeps them unless you tell it not to; watch out for this if your HD space is limited), then it unpacks and installs the content files into the location which D|S has been set to look for content. It also keeps track of other programs which D|S has plugins for, e.g. ZBrush and PhotoShop. If you don't have these programs, you can ignore this.

Jaderail

I use a custom set up for the same reason, a SSD boot drive. I have my DIM set to a standard Download path but I do have mine set so the Files are deleted on Install. This keeps my SSD from filling up with the stored Zip files. I use a different set up to do my Content back ups so this works for the Down loads and installs. I have my Install path set to my Larger Data Drive in DIM, and I have my DAZ Studio configured to read the DIM install path as my Content folder as Both a DAZ Studio Format and a Poser Format content Path folder. All my content works properly. You could set the DIM Download path to a different Drive if you like and not then need to worry over the ZIP files staying in the Download Folder. I just prefer doing my backups differently, so I just have them Delete on Install.

Below is my custom set up, it was very easy to do. The one thing to keep in mind is the proper paths in DAZ Studio itself. And it may be a good idea to do a Full Clean install of all content once the paths are step up properly. In DIM always do Accept for each change you make, and Always close DIM and the Re-open it before you use the new settings. That forces a configuration read on open. Once set up do a Reset of your Database in DAZ Studio and a new Clean Re-Import of Metadata and User Data. That should set everything up properly.

minigendo

Please let me thank you both for your help.
Following Jaderail's suggested steps, I was able to resolve the issues I was experiencing.
I'm still not sure why any of the content functioned, because theoretically it was installed to a directory that Daz wasn't scanning at the time. However, that is a mystery to puzzle over another time.

My thanks again.

Jaderail

If you ever used Scan for Content folders DAZ Studio did it for you. I can not use that feature as I have other folders that hold content for other uses such as modeling, and creating Zip folders, I do not want those work folders to be automatically added to my DAZ Studio as content folders. I avoid doing anything automatic and set everything up by hand. I then am 100% sure everything is set just the way I wanted it.