G'Day!

Firstly, I am new to Poser / Daz, currently running Poser 7 and just downloaded DAZ 1.8.
Secondly I am running a Intel Core2 2.8ghz with 2gig DDR2 ram and NVIDIA G-Force 8600GT 512 meg Video Card with three hard drives 2 x 250 gig internal and 1 x 500gig external.

My question's involve the most effecient method in managing the model files, I have just recently started to "install" models into poser with terrible results, this being folders everywhere. So I have come for some expert advice.

1)Daz models are self-installing, should I place them in folders other than the poser or daz directories, as I have found that after a while both programs become very large and bloated.

2)Do I make runtime folders for each and every model? (Victoria three all files need to create the model would go into Folder V3, Michael 3 into Folder M3 ect) or should I place the main charcaters in poser and daz permanently?

3)Zip files - there is a lot of free models in Zip files do I make individual runtime folders for them too?

4)Do you only bring them (the models) into poser / daz as you need them, I mean say you want to make a city scene, with cars and people and animals would you only bring those items into poser as you use them for that project and once it is finished (the project), remove them from the content folder?

Thank you in advance for your help.

Delta1

Okay,

To answer your questions (and before anyone says "I wouldn't do it that way", there are an infinite number of answers here!!).

Firstly some comments:
I will talk about Poser. It all pertains to D|S as well but Poser came along first (I am pretty sure) and it is hard work saying "Poser or D|S" all the time.

Runtimes are a mess. A complete pigs ear. This is a consequence of the development of Poser particularly. As each new version of Poser has come along the Runtime system has been tinkered with, bits added but nothing taken away. This is a (mostly successful) attempt not to break earlier content with new versions of Poser. Add to this that content providers put parts of their content (textures and the like) in random places. This is due to the above development of Poser and to the fact that there have never been any proper guidelines (well, there may have been but in mergers, aquisitions and development, they have "got lost" and there is nothing to enforce them.

Take ReadMe's (sic - should be ReadMes). These have no proper naming convention or location. Some put them in the runtimereadme's folder, some put them in the readme's folder at the same level as runtime itself, some put them in subfolders. Daz installers make HTML/text hybrid readmes. Its HORRIBLE!

Soo... rant over. What to do?

"1)Daz models are self-installing, should I place them in folders other than the poser or daz directories, as I have found that after a while both programs become very large and bloated."

Probably, yes. You need to decide how you are going to use this 3D program of yours. Are you going to major on one character? Are you going to use lots of characters? Will you be a BIG user, aquiring lots of content or will you stick to a more limited range of content and use it to its fullest extent?

When you have decided, then you can make the decision of how many runtimes you need.

I use only Victoria 4. I do have a lot of content for her though so I have several runtimes, one for each different type of content. I have one for clothes. one for shoes, one for poses (yes, one specially for poses to separate them from MAT poses associated with clothes/shoes etc), I have one runtime for V4 hair. Next one for non character specific props, one for botanicals and one for various animals (I dont have a lot of animals).

All this makes finding stuff somewhat easier but it is still a bit of a memory feat sometimes.

You might have runtimes for A3-Clothes, V4-Clothes, A3-shoes, V4-shoes and so on ad infinitum. Trouble is maky items come with stuff for multiple characters and where do you install it now? The answer is install it all twice in both (for example) V4-Clothes and A3-Clothes and go through and delete the V4-clothes out of the A3-Clothes folders and so on.

"2)Do I make runtime folders for each and every model? (Victoria three all files need to create the model would go into Folder V3, Michael 3 into Folder M3 ect) or should I place the main charcaters in poser and daz permanently?"

Your questions 1 and 2 are really the same and I think I have answered Q2 already

"3)Zip files - there is a lot of free models in Zip files do I make individual runtime folders for them too?"

Its up to you. If you think you might want to delete the content after trying it then make a runtime just for it and install it, test it. If you like it then install it somewhere permanent... say in V4-clothes (assuming it was clothes!!).

4)Do you only bring them (the models) into poser / daz as you need them, I mean say you want to make a city scene, with cars and people and animals would you only bring those items into poser as you use them for that project and once it is finished (the project), remove them from the content folder?

Some people make a runtime for each progect. A project being from one to a series of images using the smae characters and props. When they are complete you have a decision to make. "Am I ever going to want to resurrect this scene and chage it - or not?" If you might then you can either leave the project runtime on disk or burn it to a cd (along with the Poser or D|S scene files) and delete the scene files and the runtime from disk. This is a nice solution if you are at all organised. It is a bit of a pain making the runtime for each project. Again it depends on the kind of 3D artist you are - are you a prolific creator of loads of inconsequential scenes  or are you a careful crafter of a few very lovingly created scenes? If the former, then this system is not for you, keep all your runtimes on disk forever (just make sure you have a good system for finding stuff).

Some useful stuff. I have a program for sale here which would help if you regularly install content (who doesnt heh!) Particularly if you decide to go for the Runtime per project" scheme. 
Here is the link: http://market.renderosity.com/mod/bcs/index.php?ViewProduct=61876

Waldo Tim of dA has a great article on how he maintains his runtimes. He does it the permanent way and manually edits them - I wish I had his patience!
Link: http://www.yodelingyak.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20&Itemid=1

Finally there is a GREAT program for layering any one of a number of schemes on top of one or a multitude of runtimes. It also loads content into Poser too. It is worth much more than he charges for it - which is $0 (or £0 where I come from). Use the latest beta.
Link: http://www.neocron.lunarpages.com/library/

Thank you for your very in-depth reply, I now have to think about what method I will employ, this will be time consuming as I have been collecting various models for sometime now and I will no doubt refer to your advice as I attempt to make order out of my kaois.

Thank you once again.

I would suggest to any new Poser or D|S user (forgive my presumption that you are a relatively new user) to keep to a small number of basic models to start with - 1 is a good number which springs to mind. Choose V4 (realism) or A3 (slight stylization) which are very popular and go with it. V3 is also very popular. 

Also don't fill your runtime with tons and tons of stuff. Keep it simple again and use what you have to make art that you really love, not sausage machine quantity.

A few other quick recommendations, generally when I install things that I purchase or downloadI go through my runtime immediatly thereafter and rename the folders.  Many artists have a really annoying habit of putting things in "vanity" folders, a folder with there name one them.   Hey, I'm all for giving an artist a bit of credit for there work, don't get me wrong, but folders named

!!! Insert Artist Name Here

Really don't tell you much about what the content of that folder might be.  It's not so bad right after you first install something, but it gets pretty bad 6-8 months down the road if you haven't used it in a while, your going back through your runtimes trying to remember where it is and you can't find it to save your life.  Your stuck trolling through all the vanity folders trying to figure out what is what.  So my advice is to always check what you just installed and rename the folders to something intuitive, something you'll recognize a year or two from now.

Also when it comes to clothing and hair in particular a lot of times the artist will name the folder in figures or hair one thing, and the folder for mat files something completely different, making things a real bear to find later on, so I always give the folders in the figures/hair/props directories the exact same names as the one in the poses directory, so I can find my mat files for those items fast and easy even if it's something I haven't used in ages.

Next tip, when your renaming directories get rid of all those ! type symbols that so many artists just seem to love sticking at the front of there directory names so that they'll appear at the top of the directory listing.  It's a whole ton easier to find things if there in alphabetical order, especially again if it's something you don't use often or haven't used in a while.  Also get rid of all the silliness in front of the name like "MAT XXXX" - of course it's a mat file, it's in the pose directory after all.  If by chance the item has both mats and poses in different directories, I generally either combine them into a single directory (if it's going to still be small enough to navigate easily) or make two new subdirectories under the directory with the items name - one for Mats, the other for poses.  Again it's a big time saver because everything in the main directory will have a descriptive name and be in alphabetical order.

Final tip, I made a special runtime called "install" that allows me to install things into the runtime folders and peruse them in poser (or you could use another aftermarket program like p3do explorer I suppose) so I can see where everything goes when it's first loaded.  I rename the directories in the install directory to my liking, then I move them to the actual runtime into which the item will be installed.

This makes thing much easier to install overall, because after I move the subfolders under the install directory it's blank again, and ready to be used for the next item.  That way I'm not struggling to find the new install and all it's directories in a larger runtime since odds are good it will be poorly described and or out of alphabetical order when it's first installed.

This also allows me to easily spot things like readme files or pz3 scenes and the like that are often installed with the program, the ones I feel I might need again at some point I can copy into a special directory I have under my main poser programs directory for "valuable" read mes.  The rest just get deleted, not much point in letting them take up drive space if they don't contain valuable tips or usage information I might need again.  The pz3 scenes get similar treatment, they are moved to a folder under the main poser program directory and sorted into subdirectories by type of scene, making them all very easy to find later when I need them.

Hope that helps, as ahudson mentioned when it comes to runtimes everybody has there own individual methodology, but aside from those tips I have only one other suggestion, keep your main poser runtime as uncluttered as possible, in fact don't install anything into it that you dont' absolutely have too.   The more that is installed in posers default runtime, the more memory the program uses and the longer it takes to load.   Not entirely sure why, I think it might be building some sort of index for "fast file" searching with it's default runtime and storing it in memory, but for whatever reason the bigger that default runtime gets the more memory poser takes up and the less you have for important things like rendering.

So pretty much everything I have is in an external runtime, when I get around to getting V4.1 I'll install that in the main runtime since it's required for V4.1 to get some of her special features to work properly, but the only thing in my default poser runtime is the stuff poser installs there by default when it's installed.  Other than that it's clean as a whistle.

Hope that helps!

Stepdad

All very good advice especially the dratted !!!s and the last point you made about the internal runtimes. V4.1 is the only character I have come across so far that HAS to be in the main runtime. Pyton scripts and stuff need to be in there too of course.

I think e frontier/smith micro should create a complete new runtime system for Poser 8. They could leave the old system still operational for old content but they should create a system for installation of new content that worked from within Poser that prescribes the locations of content files and enforces a better structure. An automatic mechanism for exporting content in the new format would be good too. Finally they really NEED to come up with a mechanism for preventing unauthorised file sharing - something like a centralised certificate server to check the validity of embedded certificates. So much file sharing goes on.. It just means prices are high and that just encourages more sharing.