OK I have a ton of things already for P6. Problem is there is no organization to the mess that is a Poser download! I collect the runtime, drop it in the Poser folder and it goes all over the place! I have so many dead ends that I am going to have to uninstall and clear my drive and reinstall poser all over cause there are just too many things that have no mats, or other obvious components needed. I am careful that what I buy or download, has all the specifications. Like hair/Texture/Morphs and Figures/V3,A3 or Sp3 etc. So why do I have so many dead ends? and why is it all over named different names and such? Is this really how P6 is? Isn't there a program to organize this mess that really works? Can I just leave the runtimes on my F drive and go use it as I need it? I guess I am dense but I just have too much stuff! *Did I really say that?! :) Please be patient with my redundent questions, I am trying. Lastly is it JUST ME? Or is this something everyone deals with???? CrimsonMoon

Here's a real simple overview...

First, if the stuff you have is bought from here, or almost anywhere except DAZ, it should install to the correct locations from the zip file if you have "use paths" selected. DAZ stuff is almost always (there are two exceptions that I know of) in self-extracting exe files.

Simply put, OBJ files - the base model for most things - goes in Geometries. Textures go in Textures, generally in a a folder with the author's name or the product name. Figures go in Character although there are a couple of exceptions with Poser 6. Poses - including MATS, MORS, INJS, REMS and actual poses go in Pose. Faces, Hair, Hands, Camera, Lights generally go where you'd expect them to. Props more or less go into Props but you should know that some Hairs go in there and so do most - but not all - dynamic clothes.

If you want to organize your stuff, good luck. I spent the best part of 2 years getting my Runtimes how I like them and now it's just a simple matter of dragging the folders into the subfolders I want them to show up in.

You're not - absolutely not - dense. Everyone who uses Poser faces this sooner or later. At the moment I have 2 Runtimes; my primary P6 Runtime is about 15 GB, with only P6 specific stuff in there. My secondary - but most used - Runtime is 39 GB and everything else is in that one, categorised to my preference.

If you need help with the specifics sorting your Poser content, feel free to drop me a line, either through IM or email at king_dice@yahoo.com. I'll do me level best to help you out.

Message edited on: 02/16/2006 01:05

I understand your situation as I just about managed to get out of the same chaos myself. Many vendors want their folders to be on top, resulting in lots of !, !! and!!!!!!!. They also use folders with names that bear no resemblance to the article you bought. And amongst them, there is no system, no unity. What's more, one regularly finds empty folders, even complete runtimes in them. Then there are the readme', readme's, readmes, etc folders, extras that are placed the dog knows where etc... The only method I found was to start from scratch. And this takes time and a kind of stubborness. 1/ Create a folder for every item you bought and give it a clear name. My names start with, for example, ReXXX, where Re stands for Renderosity XXX is a number from 001 to (probably never reached) 999. 2/ In that folder, I place the zips or Daz exe (folders starting with D), evt templates, tutorials, IMAGES of the items I downloaded (or created) etc. 3/ When this is ready, I saved this to high quality, non-closed DVD's and or CD's and to an external HDD. 4/ I then created two copies of the folders. In one I kept only the zip or exe, and in the other one templates, images etc... This latter one I also save as one big directory called Purchases Extras. 5/ Then, in the other copy, I replaced the zips/exe's with their unzipped/executed content. Inside this folder of course. 6/ Next comes the organising in themes. Like Fashion, Props, Architecture, Creatures, Humans, Poses,... I placed the folders created in 5 inside these Themes folders and renamed every folder that isn't named like it should. I also used subfolders for, for example, MFD, SF... Not too many though as it is not meant to be an archive but something practical to use. 7/ Then I deleted all webcontent folders from DAZ and placed everything that didn't fit in the runtimes (like readme's etc in the Purchases Extras directory.) That's about it. As said: a lot of work, but before you can harvest, you have to plow, sow etc. On the negative side: I have to restart learning Poser as I was so fixed on the organising that I didn't have the time to play...

As stated above, everybody faces this problem. Start as soon as possible to create "external" runtimes, they are external even when they are placed inside of your Poser istallation. Name them according to your needs, e.g. women, men, teens, buildings, vehicles or V3, Miki, V2 .... To start with, move all the related items like characters, poses, hands, ... into that runtimes and leave the textures and objects in the "main" runtime. If you download something new, install it into the downloads runtime and test it. If it works and you think it's good enough for having it directly available, move the files into the respective runtime. Move all the files into this runtime, means also the textures and geometries. With tools like P3dO or advanced library you have easyly access to the files. They work better than the file system of Poser. Happy sorting

I just looked through your previous posts CrimsonMoon to see if I could see exactly what you were asking "that was asked before", but quickly and rapidly got totally and completely confused by your penchant for asking one question, then when someone asks for clarification or supplies an answer and asks if that is what you meant, your asking 5 MORE questions. So, i'm gonna try and pin you down a little here. "there are just too many things that have no mats, or other obvious components needed" -Do you mean things that come incomplete by design, like a "lite" version, or are apparently broken? "So why do I have so many dead ends?" -I don't know, because i have no idea what you mean by Dead Ends; could you describe it in a different way, please? "and why is it all over named different names and such?" -are you refering to the merchants using the # and ! symbols Gongyla refered to? or something else? I put the stuff I make in pose:MediaPhiles or prop:Mediaphiles, for instance, because I assume that by the time someone has bought or downloaded something of mine, they must have already gotten a BUNCH of stuff; if they saw something of mine they liked, how else are they going to find it unless I name it distinctively? "is it JUST ME? Or is this something everyone deals with?" -I have 4 runtimes; i have poser 5+ specific stuff in one, architectural stuff in another, V3/M3/S3 in another, V1/V2/S1/Milkids in another, and lastly a catch-all runtime for stuff i'm not sure what category it goes in. however, i'm not sure if this is the sort of solution you are looking for, because i'm not sure from what you have written what exactly your problem is.

I just extract zips to a folder, then drag n drop the nested folders into the relevant folders in P6 Runtime. As for Daz exes, I have created a separate folder to extract them to, then do the same drag n drop procedure.

You are not the only one, far from it! And Poser 6 complicates things a little bit more for us: In Poser 6, you can have your objects in the libraries with the cr2/crz files. I'll tell you how I manage my Poser stuff and if it helps you, good! That's all I can do. ;o) I have a folder on my c: drive named DOWNLOADS (NOT inside Poser folder). Whenever I download Poser stuff this is where it goes. I unzip or install all files in that folder, in their respective folders, ie. DOWNLOADSSoAndSo for V3files. I then clean them up: - Convert all RSR to PNG (P6 doesn't need RSR and uses PNG) - Remove all RSR after conversion, remove *.mtl, *.bak, thumbs.db, .DS Store, icon, *.jbf (all files we don't need). - If there are any, decode RTE files and do what have to be done with PCF files. Once this is done, I remove the RTE-PCF files. - Open all Poser files (cr2, pz2, pp2, etc.) in WordPad and check location of referred files (textures, reflection maps, geometries) and rewrite the pathnames to read :Runtime:Geometries:GeometryFolder:files and for textures, bumpmaps, reflection maps and transmaps it is ":Runtime:textures:TextureFolder:files" - Check if the texture files are reasonable: sometimes, there is a *.tif file or a *.bmp file that is 2-12MB for a model that is so small it requires only a small texture! If that is the case, I convert the files to high quality JPGs and reduce their size a lot. When all this is done, I rezip the folder and move the new zipfiles to my storage drive. Then I move all the files to the appropriate Runtime. I have 14 external Runtimes: clothes, people, scenes, cuties, etc. This method works great for me. I wish I had started doing it like that at the beginning. As I started doing this only last year, I am still cleaning up my runtimes! loll France

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=9060&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0 hi crimson. i had the same problem and arcadia gave me an url to a tutorial that worked for me. i now have about twenty runtimes outside poser and this way i can load up the few that i need. and delte from poser those i dont need at the end of each session. some like hair and poses i leave in all the time. unlike some that pout all daz characters together and group everything the same i dont , lol i have a different runtime for each character. which has the stuff specific to the character in them. i also have multi person runtimes for clothes hair etc. i also have an unistalled poser file which i down load to, from there i load into my runtimes and then move the zip or app to a corrosponding file with the same name in my runtime zips folder. hopefully the url at the top will help you as much as it helped me. billy

ThanX to Everyone! I at last understand what needs to be done! Sam, I definitely will contact you! To Gongyla, Jules, BarrowLass, Francime, Billy (*ThanX for the link I did bookmark it)!!! Thank You All!!! I am going to get my reorganization started. Thank goodness that I was correct in my intuition of how this was not really comming together correctly. Sam, I will get the basics started, and when it comes time to get my runtimes on DVD, and then inserting, I will e-mail you! Mine is DGD_GrphX@msn.com contact me anytime or add me to IM. RealDeal,ThanX for your input, for what it was worth. CrimsonMoon