Quote - Really with metadata you can take it or leave it. Its up to you if you prefer trawling through folders looking for content or sorting each product into your own system, thats your prerogative.

Where metadata work well is when you select for example an item of clothing. You will see in the smart content tab all associated/compatible content. So when you have a clothing pack and an expansion pack for that product both will show in the smart content tab on the selection of an item. You can go into either the main product or the expansion and quickly change a material or add other items from a set.

I find the that a lot of poser content can be found in numerous different locations so can be painful to find, in Daz Studio at least. So other than sorting all content on installation I find Smart content adequately solves this problem by removing the location as relevant and creating associations between items.

But as I said maybe its not for everyone. But I find it increases my productivity and reduces time scratching my head trying to remember where the vendor had placed those extra Mat poses for a specific item.

Anyone want to tell me the correct place for material poses in a runtime? (It seems they can be in a lot of varying places depending on the vendors preference.)

 

The point is you move them where you want them.  I have all the poses for clothes (the MATS) as subfolders of the geometry folders, and if there are accessories, I make a props subfodler under that clothing item.  So everything connected with a particular outift is under figures/!clothing/!V4/outfitname instead of spread all over the place.

Another little thing is that you can have the same item in multiple places.  For example if a set of expressions goes with a set of poses, you can make a second folder off of the pose folder for the expressions, and keep them in two places.

Smart content slows me down, it doesn't speed up anything.

All it takes is having the discepline to put stuff where you are going to look for it when you install it the first time.  In general the only items you CAN'T move around without breaking things are textrues and geometry (.obj).  Anything in the six main folders can be tranferred to any other folder as long as the vendor has used paths correctly.

For DAZ anyway, I don't know if it breaks anything in Poser to do that.