Content Library vs Smart Content Panes

christopher-2607496

So I've only been using Daz for a few days. I've bought about $80 worth of content so far and most of it appears in the Smart Content pane as was referred to in the tutorial.

But.. two of the items I've purchased (Morphing Python and Fantasy Book) do not appear in the Smart Content Pane, they only appear in the Content Library. I'm a bit confused because these two panes both seem to do the same thing, just in a different manner. Am I doing it wrong or is there some reason for this?

Thanks!

sriesch

The purpose of the Smart Content pane is to make it easier to find content by only showing content that works with the current selected item. It will also only work with content that has been made smart (either sold as smart content, or content that you yourself have modified to become smart.).

SpottedKitty

It's a matter of legacy features. The Smart Content tab was only introduced with DAZ|Studio 4.0, before that everyone used the plain Content Library tab. Also, the "smartness" of the content depends on extra data included in the content installer — naturally, this didn't originally exist for any DAZ content made before D|S4 came out. The back catalogue is being fixed to include this, but it's a huge job and nowhere near finished yet.

The big difference is in how each tab is used. The Content Library shows all the content files stored on your computer, exactly as they were installed. Note that there are separate categories for Poser and D|S format content; they can both be used however you want in a scene, but you can't see them both together in the Content Library tab.

Smart Content is different. It doesn't show your content files, it shows a sorted and filtered view of a database of links to your content. This does mean you can rearrange everything to suit how you prefer to work, without moving the actual content files, but it also means everything depends on the database. A new database system was added recently to replace the slightly flaky older version, but when you install D|S you get the old version, you have to choose to install the new database version manually.

Edited I-just-remembered extra note: Smart Content only works with things you buy from DAZ, anything from other stores won't have the extra data in the installer, so it will only appear in the Content Library.

sriesch

SpottedKitty said:

The big difference is in how each tab is used. The Content Library shows all the content files stored on your computer, exactly as they were installed. Note that there are separate categories for Poser and D|S format content; they can both be used however you want in a scene, but you can't see them both together in the Content Library tab.

Just to clarify; you can organize the content in the Content Library pane however you want as well, including putting poser and DS format files next to each other, independent of how it is stored on disk, as SpottedKitty described for Smart Content. The Content Library pane offers several views of your data; your custom categorization ("Categories"), Poser formats only, DS formats only, other formats only, and alphabetically by product name, but out of these you are only allowed to modify your custom categories (with the exception of Categories > Default).