Wait about 6 months and V7 will be free or durned close to it when you buy something else if history can be trusted.

I can understand why Smith Micro would not bend over backwards to make a non-standard DAZ figure usable in Poser.  While it is sad that Genesis 1 and 2 were not terribly easy to use there, I can't fault SM for their decision.  If Generation 3 of Genesis IS industry standard architecture though, and Poser still can't use it, who is going to be left behind?  Personally I think Smith Micro needs to get it's butt in gear at this point if it wants Poser to stay relevant.  The whining though really isn't about Vicky 7, why should a Poser user care?  Unless of course they have some other axe to grind, such as the state of development in Poser...

Hmmm.... hadn't read through all the pages.  This one apparently started out in the Poser forum, then got moved to DAZ.  All the nonsense makes much more sense now.  Except for the part about why anybody would have started it in the Poser forum to start with, but, er, never mind.

As a DAZ user, Genesis was a marked improvement over V4/M4 if for nothing else then the vastly improved morphing system.  Add too many morphs to V4 and her belly would crinkle when you tried to make her smile.  Genesis did have some problems though, it was great for creating monsters, but lousy at realistic looking humans, Genesis 2 was an improvement on that.  Vendors over here never really supported Genesis, there were a few items, but with Genesis 2 the floodgates started open.  As Zevo said, the main push to Genesis 3 seems to be getting in line with industry standards which will make Genesis more portable to just about everything other than Poser.  That will probably help the PA's, the market will be potentially bigger.  For somebody like me who uses it mostly to create comics, it isn't necessarily a selling point, I'll have to see how much better the facial expressions are (they were abysmal with Genesis, but pretty good with Genesis 2).  Those are important for what I do.  The fact the UV maps don't port, that's a big negative.  We'll have to see what options become available there, for the moment that is going to keep me from doing too much with it.

If you're happy with what you have, I am happy for you.  To those that are bashing DAZ though, if you really don't like DAZ that much, why are you wasting time in this forum?

Hmmm... I want to add, for most files, you can move them whereever you want that makes sense inside the six main directories of your poser library (Camera, Lights, Hands, Character, Pose, Props).  For example, if you want to put your clothing textures with the clothes themselves you can do that, just move the folder.  Also you can make any subfolders you want, so if you want to group all the clothes together for example, make a subfolder called "clothes" under Character, and put all the desired folders in it.  I also subdivide further under clothes by model (V4, M4, M3, etc), and further under that by clothing type.

The only folders you CANNOT move anything in without breaking things immediatly are /textures and /geometry under /runtime, and /data under MyLibrary.  Don't touch those.  As always, making a backup before you make changes is highly recommended.

As others have mentioned, it is difficult to tell you what to do if we don't know what product you are trying to install, but here are some general guidelines:

(1) Nothing bought at Rendo is going to show up as smart content unless you create the entry in the content database for it yourself.  Frankly I find the smartcontent to be pretty much useless in finding anything anyway.  It will show up under your content libraries if it is installed correctly.

(2) Generally, unless it is specifically for Genesis or Genesis 2, it is going to show up under your poser library rather than your DAZ one, which means it should be installed under /My Library/runtime and not just /My Library/  This is intuitively obvious to anybody who started with DAZ 3 or earlier, and a lot murkier if you started with 4.5

(3) In addition (Thanks DAZ! cough) if you have been using DAZ since before the new content installer you have stuff in two different places - Everything installed pre-installer is going to be in your document root under documents/DAZ 3D/Studio/My Library, while everything POST installer will be in /public documents/My DAZ 3D Library.  DAZ does allow you to put content in as many libraries as you want, as your content library grows you will understand why that is a good thing.

Anyway, what I do, is unzip all the contents to a scratch directory.  There will either be a My Library folder or a runtime folder (sometimes both), or the folders /data and /people.  In the case of the My Library folder, go into it and copy everything into which of the two locations you have your library in.  In the case of everything else, just copy the existing folders into your library.

Grexx, I have both DAZ and Poser 2012, and generally find DAZ much easier to use though it is a matter of preference.  I would make one observation though:  You never mentioned what kind of writing you did.  If you are writing about beasties acting like humans, DAZ is hands down the way to go since Genesis opens the doors to using your clothing items on pretty much anything that is Genesis based.

That's pretty huge if you have goblins, ogres and other mishapen beasts among yoiur characters.  If you are writng generally about humans, then either one would work, and Poser Dynamic items are better than the DAZ ones, where they even exist.

I've noticed them from time to time too, mostly after a number of renders.  I find generally that closing down the program and trying again fixes the problem, so it may be tied to memory usage.

Poser Dynamic anything does not work in DAZ.  If it has the word "Dynamic" in it, you can't use it.  That goes for clothes and hair so make sure you stay aware of that word.

As others have stated, Python Scripts do not work in DAZ, it uses a different scripting language, and shaders work differently, but that can be gotten around.

Often PZ3 scene files do not load completely properly in DAZ, the cameras and lights are off.  Lights are a particular problem, they sometimes come accoss as black or too bright.

Aside from that, pretty much everything else works.

Props, morphs, clothes, and figures generally work in DAZ.  Rumor has it there are problems with some of the Dawn clothing working in DAZ, since I don't use Dawn I can't help you there, but my understanding is that Dawn for DAZ and Dawn for Poser are not the same figure, and autofit has a fit on some of the clothes for Dawn since it (by design I assume) does not recognize the figure.

I'm still trying to figure out a good reason for migrating off of V4 to tell you the truth.  I use Genesis a lot - for everything other than photorealistic humans.  Genesis was a step backwards as far as that.  So DAZ recognized that and came out with G2.  Um, which STILL doesn't offer a whole lot that V4 doesn't with the proper movement morphs.

Can't say that I see Dawn as a significant (significant considering what I have tied up in V4 morphs and characters) either.

Genesis handles morphing chanels a heck of a lot better than V4, other than that...

The major problem with V4 previously regarding clothing was poke through - and collision detection/smoothing modifier took care of a lot of that.

So anyway, my question would be not what Dawn does for DS users, but why any of the newer stuff is enough better than V4 to contemplate moving off that character?

That or buy a business class machine.  Those still routinely come with Windows 7 because business ain't exactly buying into the Windows 8 hype just like they didn't buy into the Vista hype.

What that means for example, if you are talking Dell Laptops you want to be looking at Latitudes rather than Vostro's.

That and the business class machines usually have better class components (unless you go into gaming machines)

To anwer the question of why Smart Content slows me down:  The problem is you can't move stuff around or you break the smart content system.  So you really can't afford to organize your content AND use the content system, because you have no idea of what the content system is tracking.

And if you do use the content system, you can't find your non-smart content because it isn't organized.  So either way you can't find half your conent.  The other problem with the Smart content system is it works fine as long as you don't have much content, but breaks down if you do because it doesn't have subcatagories that make sense.  For isnstance clothing.  Now remember, we are talking Genesis here, where all clothing fits everybody.  So if I am looking for a particular item of clothing how long does it take to find it vs finding it in a well organixzed tree structure (genesis/clothing/female/dresses/formal) for instance.

On the disk space issue, yes, my content takes up a lot of space, but I have a one terrabyte drive (Cost: $100) devoted to it.  You don't have to put your content on your c:, in fact there are some really good reasons not to do that.  And for those that are curious, I have about 200 Gigs of content not including scenes, which I store in the content library to find them eaisily (thanks D/S 4.5).

I use DAZ chiefly for comics, my main characters change shape, travel through time, use magic, and need access to all sorts of odd items.  Which I need to find quickly if I don't want to spend all day rendering one scene when I need about 200.

I realize other people have other constrains in using their computers, but I am all about maximizing my productivity, and hardware is cheap compared to my time.

Quote - Content other than the Starter content shouldn't need reinstalling, though moving from 4.0 to 4.5 you may encounter the Duplicate IDs warning which is best fixed by getting the updated version of the content - however, I do have a script to fix it in place (see the index of free scripts thread in the Freepozitory forum at DAZ).

Thanks, I was wondering about that.  I would vastly prefer not to have to download and install all that content again.

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.

I have the same problem.  There are some vendors I already own over 50% of their items.  Actually what might increase sales is to work it so loyal customers of certain participating vendors can get a discount for that vendor only on remaining items.  It would appear to me that would be a winning situation for the vendor, since he can target those customers that are already fans, and have some guarenteed sales for any new items that come out.  Anyway, it is something you might want to think about.