I'm rearranging my libraries again, hopefully to reflect my workflow when I'm doing a project. I have four top-level categories: Figures, Objects, Places and Utilities. (To explain briefly: I use either Dimension 3D's Poser eXplorer or P3dO to load content into Poser, so I hardly ever open the library palette; I can arrange my content to suit myself, and I don't have to conform to the usual Runtime layout. I'll be putting a tutorial together at some point...) I had planned to put hair under the Figures category, grouped with the figure it is meant to fit, which is what I've done with clothing and characters. However many hair pieces have fittings for several figures; should I repeat them (and all their MAT poses) in each figure category? And most HR2 type hair can be fitted to another figure without much effort. Hair is more universal than most other figure-specific things. Maybe I should have a separate hair category; but then, how should I sort the hair? By style? By length? By artist? I'm all at sea here. I suppose I should just put something together and see how usable it is, but in the meantime I thought I'd ask if any of you have any ideas. When you're deciding on hair for a character, what's the first criterion you use to narrow down your search?

My first criterion is the figure. Not all hair styles fit all figures.

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I find that hair can be used across figures, so I have all of my hair in a separate runtime.

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Quote - I find that hair can be used across figures, so I have all of my hair in a separate runtime.

Mine is as well, subdivided into what character it's for (otherwise it goes into the "Multi Hair", for fitting multiple characters).  If I have enough from one particular merchant, I add another sublevel for the merchant.

Thanks folks. I've stuck with a universal hair folder for now, but it's still a mess (yeah, I'm having a bad hair day). Nobody tried to answer my final question: how do you go about deciding on the right hair for your character? Do you look for a specific style; stick with tried and trusted pieces that you know will work; or choose something that has a lot of morphs available so you can tweak it? I've done all three at some time.

I ask myself, do I want the ears, face, and neck showing? Like for Faes and Elfs.
Is it going to be a realistic render or funny?
Is it  the hair hard to pose?

I have my hair under the merchants names. Then I have a category that is called other that I put the rest in.

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As far as sorting my hair I have it under male and female and then long and short under each of those.

For desiding what hair to use I usually have a rough idea of what style I'm looking for ie, formal, casual, long,short etc. Then I scroll through what I have till I find something I like. And I try it. If I like it, it stays, otherwise, I find a different one.

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I have my hair separated by figure when there is a hr2 provided for each figure, for multi figure hair i have two catagories. Pose fit and morph fit. This way i know how or if a hair will fit the figure i wish to use.

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I just sling it all in a folder called Hair which is then subdivided by creator, such as Jim Burton, Quarker, that kinda thing.

Since hair can pretty much fit any character I don't much care about the original target figure.

I do, however, divide clothes by figure, since they generally are figure specific.

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First of all I should make a distinction between transmapped, dynamic and old-style plastic helmet hair (that's still useful for toon renders). Then I think I'll arrange it by style. Ultimately, there's no substitute for knowing the contents of your library. As a one-time long-haired hippy I don't think I'll distinguish between male and female hair; some of the male hair looks good on the females, and no self respecting barbarian would be seen with a short back and sides. :P Thanks for the comments, everyone. They were very helpful.

hello everyone, i'm new to poser and would like to learn more about user control and my first question is can you actually sort poser libs with the windows explorer and not break poser?
i see poser uses python (to what extent i don't know) but i was thinking that the structures might have been coded into a script that makes it easy for poser to find things and messing with my lib structure outside poser for anything but installing characters, props etc.  might make me have to re-install poser although i hope i'm wrong!

Thanks in advance!

Morpheus74, to the best of my knowledge, the only way to delete a Poser folder is to go outside Poser and to do the deed in Windows (or Mac).   Similarly, I believe that a new Poser runtime folder has to be created outside Poser, too, before being added as a new runtime within Poser.   Occasionally, Poser content is badly packaged and needs to be moved manually to correct destinations;  that has to be done outside Poser, too.   I don't think that the Poser library organisation is sufficiently sophisticated to be easily damaged by any of that.

Regarding the question of where to put hair libraries, I think Acadia's idea is best.   I generally use TY2, Miki 2 and G2 (mostly Sydney), none of them lavishly supplied with dedicated hairstyles.   Fitting a hairstyle to a new figure (i.e. not one of those intended by the vendor) is generally pretty easy, so categorizing hair by character is unnecessary.   I have recently started the looong process of re-installing all sorts of Poser stuff on to a new machine, so I have been giving these questions a bit of thought, lately.   I didn't have a separate Hair runtime before, but it certainly makes sense now.

Thanks Morgano!