installation with DIM and manual
Kamarotica
Posts: 60
Is it possible combine DIM with manually installed content? Meaning can I use DIM for some content and manual install other content? The main reason I wan't to use DIM is that I can then delete items I don't use. However, I also like to organize stuff in meaningful ways, so if I install with DIM, can I rearrange the content manually and still delete it later through DIM? or, will that - as I presume - break the links?
Thank you!
Post edited by Kamarotica on
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Comments
Nope.
I do this all of the time – install with DIM those items bought in the DAZ3D store and install manually those items bought elsewhere (usually from Renderosity). DIM creates a manifest file for each content package that it installs. It uses the manifest file to know where each of the content item's files are located. For each DIM installed product, you can right click on it in DIM and select Show Installed Files to see the installed files for the product. DIM uses the same manifest file to uninstall a product. With manually installed content, there is no manifest file so DIM doesn’t know that a manually installed product exists.
Yes, but if one moves the DIM installed files around after installation, DIM no longer knows what to uninstall.
With some frequency, I either move or delete a few DIM installed files. The two most frequent cases are the ReadMe folders from older content and sometimes the files installed to the General folder if the base products don't use/call on them in Daz Studio. Usually, these are video tutorial files; I move such files from the General folder to a tutorial folder on my desktop where I can get to them much more quickly. Moved or deleted files appear in in black, non-hyperlinked format. That’s DIM’s way of saying that the files were installed somewhere but that they are no longer present there.
If I later decide to uninstall a product where I have moved or deleted DIM installed files, DIM “uninstalls” what it can find and reclassifies the product as Uninstalled. No harm done.
Yes, it's possible. I install most of my DAZ stuff with DIM. I install stuff from other stores by hand.
There's no one answer as to how it's best to handle your item collection. The approach that's easiest may depend not only on your ability and willingness to fiddle, but the size of your collection, and the age of the items therein.
Some things it's possible to do:
Which of these turn out to be most useful to you -- which are worth their disadvantages -- may partly depend on the kind of stuff you buy.
I got here about a dozen years ago, and bought a lot of even older Poser stuff, which can be ... a tad confusing. (By 'a tad confusing', I mean 'disarranged, in a fashion calculated to send even the denizens of R'lyeh shrieking in horror at the sheer, utter madness!' Details are in another old post of mine.)
It's easier to find the pieces of products if my libraries are small enough for inspection. So:
I also use DIM itself as a way of searching the entire installation (search in Daz Studio is supposed to be improved in the current beta, but I haven't checked. It didn't used to work very well.) DIM will list what files it expects to install; or what installed files belonging to a particular item it can find. This makes it a handy tool.
If you buy mostly recent Daz Studio content, at least add-ons (including material setters) are likely to be in a subdirectory under the main item directory. But item directories are too likely to be found as subfolders under the artist's name, which mostly isn't too useful to me. And then, there's been inconsistency about what high-level directories to put things in -- do buildings go into Architecture or Environments/Architecture? You'll invariably end up with some in both. Thus the impulse to move products around in the Content Directory structure, or to try to track them with Smart Content.
This all means there's a collection of trade-offs, for any possible scheme of managing and using your content collection. And you probably won't know in advance what's the best approach that works for you, without some experimenting: for which reason I praise the Daz Installation Manager, because it makes top-level rearrangement -- if you discover your first or second approach really doesn't work for you -- a whole lot easier.
I would probably make DIM entries for my items bought elsewhere, so I could install them with DIM too, if I were working in Daz Studio. But I'm exporting everything to Blender. So DIM becomes my searchable installation record of my Daz store purchases. I'm building my Record of All in my folder structure of exported items.
Don't forget that the recent (in beta only at the moment) additons to the search features in the Content Library do depend on the metadata in the Content Management System, so you don't want to break that.
Also bear in mind that adding more content directories slows load times - DS handles the relative paths in presets and scenes by adding them to the base path for each content directory in turn until it finds the file or runs out of directories, so that is potentially a lot of checks for files in directories well down the list (or files that are outright missing or misplaced).
Search has never worked usefully for me, so I set up to allow me to find things without it. Maybe I'd have done something else if search was better at finding lost item pieces. (I am not sure the search problem was ever in the code; possibly no code should be expected to cope with the old chaos in the library.)
Performance: I've never had an impressive computer to run on, but I've never had any marked problem with slow loads. Daz Studio saves are irritatingly slow compared to Blender saves of the same items. Dunno if that has anything to do with my library setup.
I have a 3,500 downloaded DIM-installable package collection, of which 1899 packages are installed today, in 18 Daz Studio and 12 Poser content libraries. The total installed drops nearly every night as I export items to Blender, and uninstall them. I can't say I've noticed a performance increase with fewer items in the libraries.
Eventually I'll have exported most of the items, and I won't need all the libraries. I'll probably end up with one Daz + Poser pair for base figures and assoriated utilities, and 1 Daz + Poser pair for installing new purchases and immediately exporting them. (I doubt I'm going to figure out how I want to export rigged figures right away -- what options do I usually want? What morphs? So I'll be keeping those installed indefinitely.)
I always recommend saving old versions of Daz Studio. You can download the current one from your product library, or copy them and associated files out of DIM's installation files. Daz doesn't make old versions readily available, and every time there's an update, someone's howling because Daz, or often Nvidia, broke something that doesn't always get repaired. And it's easy to accidentally update Studio before you want to, if you're using DIM.
I usually have the Studio beta installed, and the previous version of standard Studio. I mostly work in the beta.
If one moves them (to another drive or path) one should update the drive location (letter) /path in the manifest file then DIM gets smarter and knows what to uninstall or update.
Edit: For a large amount use notepad++ instead of doing them one by one.