Hello-

I'm new to Poser 7. I downloaded a bunch of freebies, bought a few things, and presto- could not find a !@#$! thing.

Clothing was a prop. Unless it was a figure. Or sometimes it was a pose. I haven't seen it trying to be a hand or a light yet but I'm sure it'll happen.

I got frustrated enough with the timewasting (spending more time finding the pants that I knew I had than I did rendering!) that I uninstalled Poser and reinstalled it, just so that I could get things set up correctly from the start. But when I started again, things keep wandering off to random locations again.

So, the question: how do I organize my content?

Biscuits (a wonderful and helpful person!) suggested that I use the free 'empty runtime' file. She even sent me the link to it. Unfortunately the instructions included for it are a bit sketchy for my lack of experience, so I've not yet figured out how or why to use it.

Help!

If I can't figure out how to get this working, there may well be violence, language and/or nudity visited upon my computer.

When clothing is a pose, it's because it's a MAT pose. Something that'll change the material on the cloth, it's not the cloth itself. It's one of the things that is bound to confuse the heck out of new users L (To make it worse, you can stick MAT poses into lights and camera, too. some very old procucts used that because Poser 4 had a limit of 255 folders so to avoid getting over that limit, MAT poses were put whereever you could imagine it. Funny thing is, as long as the extension is right, Poser deals with them in strange places just fine :)

then someone (eFrontier I think) started to put clothes into the props folder, also CONFORMING clothes, which is technically characters...

Many people have separate runtimes based on which character it's for. Make a runtime for Michael 4, one for Victoria 4, one for scenery ect.

The more anal you are at the beginning, the easier it'll get once your runtime grows close to the 100Gb ;)

Some people also sort by theme or genre such as Science Fiction/Fantasy, Western, Egyptian, etcetra...

A runtime folder contains one Libraries folder which, in turn, contains 9 other folders that appear in the Poser Library.  The folders are named in the following fashion:

Camera
Face
Hand
Materials
Props
character
Hair
Light
Pose

This hierarchy is a must, otherwise Poser will not recognize any installed content.  Some folders are obvious, Camera contains camera settings, Face contains facial expressions, Hand contains hand poses, Materials contains material files.  Anything that is rigged or conforming, like clothing or hair, generally inhabit the Character folder.  Props generally will contain non-rigged content.  This is also the place where dynamic clothing will reside.  Dynamic hair would go into the Hair folder, and the Pose folder will contain character poses or MAT Poses which TrekkieGrrrl briefly described. 

So far, are you with me?

hborre, that does help. I find that I am missing the background, and your explanation helps.

OMG!!! My favourite topic!

Never install anything directly to your runtime. Always unzip / install to a folder on your desk top so you can see what is in side and what the folder structure is.

Organization in Poser is very important.  Libraries grow quickly and it soon gets to a point where you can't find anything.

So far as organization goes...

You have 2 options that can help you with organizing and being able to find things:

1.  Create sub folders inside the library folders.

This is the preferred method for many. It uses one single runtime with lots and lots of sub folders within the main library folders, in order to organize the content.  The learning curve is minimal. If you can right click and create a new folder and drag and drop, you can do this.  The learning curve is knowing what folders you can move files around in and what folders not to touch.

You can move around the files inside the library sub folders. 

Don't move, touch or rename files or folders  in the top level of the library folder that carry the name of the merchants, or the "Morph" or the !DAZ  folder because those are morphs and need to stay where they are.

Just work with the standard ones inside the Library folder such as camera, faces, hand, pose, props, hair, lighting, character. 

Leave the files inside the geometries and texture folders alone.

Right now you have a hodge podge of files for various figures in each folder plus props, poses, lights etc.

Open the character folder and create sub folders for each of your figures IE: V3, V4, M3, D3, Aiko, Apollo etc.  Do the same for each of the other library sub folders.  You can also create other folders too, such as "Poses" or "Props" or "Backgrounds" or "Hair" etc.

Then go through your files in each of the library subfolders and move them into the appropriate folder for the figure they belong.

Things like lights, and poses and hair and props are universal items really, and can be used across figure, so I like to have those separated instead of filed by "figure" because I often use V3 poses on Aiko and hair for Posette on V3 etc.

You will run into a problem for items that are for more than one figure. Like where do you file those?  For exxample an outfit that is for V3 and M3 and Aiko and SP3: where do you file them? If you put them in the V3 folder, then you forget that they can be used for M3 and Aiko and SP3 too. It was this complication that prompted me to move onto using external runtimes (described below).

I did it this way at one time and it worked well enough,well except for items that could be used on a few figures like I described above.   I decided I wanted even more organization, and I didn't like having one huge runtime because it was impossible to really burn it to a CD/DVD without having to break it into bits and pieces.  Plus it took Poser forever to load because the runtime was so big.  So I tried option 2 below.

**2. Multiple External Runtimes
**

This is my choice for organizing my installed content.  I did the first method first and it worked for awhile, but as my content grew, it became cumbersome, so I switched to multiple external runtimes, which works out great.

It's really pretty easy.  The problem is that most people over think it.  

Just remember that an external runtime is exactly the same as the runtime in your Poser folder, only it's just sitting in a different location.  

It functions exactly the same way. 

And files are installed / added to them in exactly the same way. 

And they have the same folders in them as the main runtime does. Well almost the same folders.  Scripts for example have to be installed into the main Poser runtime and won't work from an external runtime.

Here is a sample of an external runtime.  Simply download it and unzip it. You will have a folder called "Runtime_Sample"

www.divshare.com/download/8531562-1f6

Find a place on your hard drive that you want to have your external runtimes living. For me it's on my partitioned drive D.

Make a folder called "Poser Runtimes"

s263.photobucket.com/albums/ii124/Acadia_ca/

Then simply copy that sample runtime you unzipped into that "Poser Runtimes" folder and make as many copies of it as you want to.  Change "Runtime_Sample" to whatever name you want.  Here is what I named some of mine:

s263.photobucket.com/albums/ii124/Acadia_ca/

Then all you do is simply install your content into whichever runtime you feel it fits best into.

Once you have finished installing your content look in the Runtimes where you have Daz characters such as V3 or V4 etc.  Go into the Library folder and look for the !DAZ folder.  Make a COPY of that folder and place the COPY in exactly the same place in the main Poser Runtime. 

Poser looks there first so by placing a copy of them in there, you are helping Poser out.  Don't delete the !DAZ folder from your other runtimes though. That defeats the purpose of having external runtimes, which is not only to allow Poser to work faster, organize your content better, but also to not lose your installed runtime content in the even of a crash because hopefully you have also saved your external runtimes to a couple other places for easy access in case of the need to reinstall.

Hope that helps.  If you have more questions, just ask.

Oh yeah, never install anything directly to your runtime. Always unzip / install to a folder on your desk top so you can see what is in side and what the folder structure is.

So far as organization inside the runtimes, continuity of naming goes a long long way.

Let's say for example that LaurieA gave me a beautiful clothing package for V4.  The package consisted of the following:

Dress
Shoes
Purse
Hair
Poses

When I get that file I will unzip it into a folder on my desk top in order to see what is inside.  Here is what I find

Dress inside a folder in the character folder aptly named "superstar dress"

Shoes inside a folder named "LaurieA" inside is another  folder named "V4" inside is another  folder named "props" inside are 2 more folders: 1  called "V4 Flats" and finally inside that folder are the shoe files, the other called "V4 Purse" with the purse file inside.

I find the hair  in the hair library, deep inside several folders as I did the props

And finally the poses for the figure are found in a folder in the Pose Library called "Gotta Have Fun" and another folder that simply said "dress textures"

Now if I were to install all of that into my runtime I wouldn't have a clue later on when I went to look for stuff to use from that one package, of what went with what!

Which is why it's important to open things onto your desktop and look through it and rename some of the folders that the vendor created.

The example of above is a very real nightmare that for some reason many vendors seem to do.  Another nightmare is using there real names as names for the folders instead of their vendor name.  That only adds to the confusion.

Here is how I would sort out the mess above while it was still on my desktop.

LaurieA - Superstar Dress
LaurieA - Superstar Dress
LaurieA - Superstar Dress
LaurieA - Superstar Dress
LaurieA - Superstar Dress

Yes, each folder in each libary is now called the same thing.  BUT I now have no doubt that when I do to use the superstar dress, that I will know what I'm looking at when I open up each library.

You can get even more organized.

For example under Poses, if you have found 5 new textures for that dress by 5 different artists, you can keep them all in one place. For example:

Artist 1 - (superstar dress) - sequins
Artist 2 - (superstar dress)  - dragon textures
Artist 3 - (superstar dress) - metalics
etc. etc. etc.

Just plunk those extra textures you found, as named above, inside the LaurieA - Superstar Dress  folder in the Pose Library.  Now when you want to use the superstar dress you have all of the textures at hand in one place.

Heh. I'm not as patient as Acadia, to rename a bunch of folders. But I do have a lot of content, and I'm pretty careful to keep them in separate runtimes.

I also download my zip files in the same way, i.e. to something like My Documents/3D/new content/ then subdivided similarly to my runtimes - I have separate runtimes for major figures (V4, M4, Antonia) or categories of figures (minor figures, children), and for other items (scenes-buildings, props-animals, hair-hats etc). Once I install my zips, I move them to - you guess it - an "installed content" folder. Once again, divided as above.

Then, if I'm having a hard time finding something from Poser's library, I can easily go back to the zip and take a quick peek at how the vendor did naming conventions etc.

Buying from DAZ is a bit bigger problem, because they use installers instead of zip files, which can be a bit of a PITA. On the other hand, usually their naming conventions are reasonably standardized, so it's not as bad as it could be.

< --------------  61 Runtimes and counting

This is how I organize my content.  You can actually download the same folder structure that I'm using. Using External Runtimes

I use multiple runtimes stored on my external hard drive.

I have a similar setup to acadia I think and I only have 51 runtimes. I use external runtimes based on model but I don't sort the items by who made it but by what it is. I have a dresses folder, a shirts folder, a pants folder etc because I don't remember who made what  and I often need to browse what I have to find just what I'm looking for. The exception is the materials and matposes whith are sorted by item. I also have several theme runtimes like outdoors, buildings, holdiays, and of course miscellaneous. I also have a temp runtime for excracting stuff that isn't in zip files like daz.

see here for a more detailed explaination and pictures

Agree with all the above.  in addition, once you have a lot of content, you might want to try one of the coqntent management solutions.  i have several, and use p3do explorer most when i can't find something i know i have (somewhere).  there's a free version, but the pro version has the really good tools.

Klebnor

One Runtime, lots of subfolders.  

Have used that with no problems for years. 

I use P3DO Explorer to quickly browse runtime libraries.  I used to use it to sort and categorize content--like I'd put all the figures in a "People" folder, but a specific characters clothing into a separate folder like M4 clothing.  The problem with this is that if you use Daz Studio it often has problems finding content that's been reorganized, then you  have to play "Go Fish" to try and find it--so I've given up on that--while Poser seems to have little difficulty linking up files, it's still not worth it if you end up getting "cannot find file" error messages.  Use the search features in Poser and Daz Studio to find things based on key words, it works remarkably well.  When you get a lot of content in one library start another one.  I  have a runtime for Daz gen 1 &2 figures, one for Daz 3rd generations, and Daz 4th generation content as well 3rd party library for stuff that does not tie into Daz products.  It does get confusing and complicated.

There are some applications that make it possible to categorize stuff without actually moving their physical location, you might want to try one of these.