Searching For The Presets Library

Electro-Elvis

It is not a question, but an observation I recently made. (I apologize, if this topic has already been discussed earlier)

It has to do with the size of self-made presets libraries. I have read here in this forum, that a preset library can have a maximal size of 2 GB. When it exceeds this limit, all will be lost. Because I have made quite a few libraries of my own, I thought it would be a good idea to check how big they are. I am using windows 7 and that's why I used the search function you can find by clicking the start button. I was surprised, the result did not shown any of my libraries. To be sure, I inserted a new one with the unique name GONGOLYX. But the result was the same, no gongolyx.obp file was found. I was a bit confused.

Next I started to search my whole harddisk. Now I used the search function of the windows explorer and searched for *.obp. After quite a while the missed libraries where listed in the result list. I see! Windows 7 seems to manage them itself and put them here:

C:\Users\Elvis\AppData\Local\VirtualStore\Program Files (x86)\DAZ 3D\Bryce710109\Presets\Objects\User

Afterwards I copied the gongolyx.obp from the library shown above to the library

C:\Program Files (x86)\DAZ 3D\Bryce710109\Presets\Objects\User

It is the place, where I would have expected my odp file.

After this rather harsh procedure, I was not sure, if Bryce would find the gongolyx library again. To my surprise Bryce had no problems at all and showed it neatly in the selection list of my user libraries. I think, it is the windows system, that manage it correctly in the background. This not obvious behaviour of windows 7 and maybe higher, belongs to the security strategy of microsoft, I suppose.With windows XP you are not facing this "problem".

BTW I was lucky, my biggest library has just reached 1.9 GB. But I am not a windows guru, and I am not sure, whether windows is miffed about my manual intervention. That's why my first action is to save my bryce data and further investigations have to be done.

Horo

@electro-elvis - interesting. I don't have such issues because I have Bryce not installed at the default location. I can therefore check the sizes with Explorer (actually, I use Windows Commander). If you have a library nearing the 2 GB limit, I recommend to set it to Read Only so you don't inadvertently add something to it and render it unusable. I also recommend to make a copy of the Presets folder from time to time.

Electro-Elvis

Read-only, that's a good idea, Thanks Horo and to make a copy, too. Now I found the libraries on my system ;-)

sriesch

While I haven't tested this extensively, one time I tried to copy a .mat file from the Bryce installed location when a corresponding file also existed in the virtual store, the copy silently got corrupted. However I was able to copy it from the virtual store location instead without getting the file corrupted. I don't know why, and if it was a one-off error or something everybody has to worry about, but have a way to verify the file is still good if you ever decide to try that.