I've tried all kinds of ways to organize. When I first installed everything I let the files fall where they landed. What a mess. Total chaos to find anything!!! I then did sub-folders inside my figures folder and poses folder for things like: V3 Clothing, V3 Shoes, V3 Textures, Hair etc. This worked ok. But I found it took forever for my poor little laptop to open poser, so when I did my reformat a month or so ago, I decided to do the multiple external runtimes, and I LOVE it! I use multiple runtimes for several reasons.

Faster launching of Poser;
Better organization IE: runtime for lighting, runtime for hair and nails, runtime for V3 character addons, runtime for V3 clothing, runtime for poses, runtime for bg and environments, runtime for faeries...

It makes organizing so much nicer, and you don't have one huge runtime to wade through. Also if you use cartoon characters like Aiko, or The Girl, you can put each into their own runtime folder and save it on DVD and pull it out when you want to use that particular character, without having to have all of their files in your runtime all of the time.

Plus if you want to delete stuff, it's easier to find things if you have them separated into smaller runtime folders. Smaller runtimes means less files in your object folder or texture folder to sort through.

I know if I'm working with V3, I can make my V3 character addon folder active and have at my finger tips all of the character addons that I have.

I know that once I've picked my character addon, that I can just click to get my hair runtime and all of the hair that I have is there. I find hair is pretty cross character friendly with a few dial turns here and there, so it's a permanent external runtime that I keep on my computer.

Next I can click on the V3 clothing folder and anything clothing for her that I have is all there, and I don't have to wade through everything else for other characters to find it. It's nice to just open the Poses folder and see nothing but V3 clothing in there... organized in subfolders by the name of their outfit IE: Saloon Gal, Kimono, MFD etc.

Plus it makes opening poser much, much, much faster. My faeries runtime is the smallest one I have, so before I exit Poser, I make that folder active. When I start Poser, it opens almost instantly.

Plus the biggest reason.... I have a 40 gig hard drive and I struggle for space. So this way I can keep some runtimes on CD for when I want to use them... IE: Furrette. I love that little figure, but I don't use it all the time, so there is no need to have it's files sitting on my hard drive taking up space unless I'm using Furrette that day.

Message edited on: 04/21/2005 20:14

"It is good to see ourselves as others see us. Try as we may, we are never
able to know ourselves fully as we are, especially the evil side of us.
This we can do only if we are not angry with our critics but will take in good
heart whatever they might have to say." - Ghandi