Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL


Subject: How do you keep your content straight?

Syrel opened this issue on Mar 17, 2006 ยท 26 posts


j_g posted Fri, 17 March 2006 at 4:00 PM

Attached Link: http://www.borg.com/~jglatt/poser/poserins.zip

This is a loaded question. What if someone is doing gay art? How would he "keep his content straight", and would he even need to do that? Oh wait. You mean organization. Nevermind. When Poser was originally written, the programmers obviously never thought much about a user having to manage a large, varied assortment of characters, each with his own, perhaps incompatible props (clothes), poses, faces, etc. If they did, they would have come up with a standardized way for content providers to ship content, and a standardized way for users to install, organize, and uninstall that content from within Poser itself. They didn't. I think that content should be organized mostly by character. This means either: 1). Creating multiple Runtimes, where each runtime contains all the stuff for a particular character. So, inside of your Poser install directory (ie, C:Program FilesCurious LabsPoser 6), you'd have to create a folder for each character, and then add that folder to Poser's library. And in order to get to a character's stuff, you'd have to navigate Poser's library up to the topmost level, where you'd have the "Poser 6" and "Downloads" folders, and then a folder for each character. 2). Create a sub-folder within each one of Poser's library tabs (ie, Figures, Poses, Faces, etc) for each character. In other words, for Mike3, you'd have a Mike3 sub-folder under Figures, and also a Mike3 sub-folder under Poses, etc. For Veronica3, you'd also have a Veronica3 sub-folder under Figures, a Veronica3 sub-folder under Poses, etc. Because this is such a hassle, and because content providers often ship stuff in a ZIP file that isn't organized this way (so you can't just unzip it to your poser install dir -- you have do some manual copying), and because content providers even sometimes zip up CR2, PZ2 and other files that reference other poser files in a dir that doesn't even exist on your system, I developed a utility to install poser content. It's free, and you can get it at the URL above. It strips out a ZIP's internal organization, and lets you instead decide where you want the content to go. Then it installs the content and modifies files so that they correctly reference where you've decided to install the files. (It even keeps a record of what is installed, so you can use the utility to easily uninstall content too). By default, the utility assumes #2 organization above. You tell the utility what name you want to use for your folder. For example, say you've got a ZIP file containing a character named "Joe". You run my utility and tell it you want to use a folder named Joe. The utility will create a Joe folder under "Figures" and put all Joe's figure content in that folder. It will create a Joe folder under Poses, and put all Joe's poses there. It will create a Joe folder under Faces and put all Joe's faces under there. Etc. Of course, if there aren't any faces for the character, no Joe folder will be created under Faces. And so on. But you can alternately use the utility to organize with method #1. Before you install Joe, manually create a Joe folder in your Poser install directory. Then use my utility's "Preferences -> Set Poser Runtime Folder" menu item to select that folder. Now the content will be installed there. You can then add this Joe folder to Poser's library (via the Library "+" button in Poser). As an added bonus, the utility can also install content in Poser 6's compressed format to save disk space, if you want that. Try it. Should be simple to use, and may be helpful.