Tips/Tools to keep track of your assets
Mr_Fluffkin
Posts: 130
Hello,
I just wanted to ask how you guys keep track of the assets in your library, especially if you have a large one? Do you use smart content or the content library? And are there any tools you can recommend, like https://www.daz3d.com/smart-collections or https://www.daz3d.com/favoratings-favorites-and-ratings-system i.e.?
I already use these 2 and they're super helpful, but it's still difficult to find something specific that I don't know the name of. I'm almost at a point where I don't even want to buy new items, just to keep my lib as small as possible. If only the product library on this website would be better, like having the store view with a "Show ONLY items I own" button, that would be pretty helpful. But that's not the case, so I wanted to ask you guys how you handle the chaos?
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Comments
You can use categroies in the Content Library, you are not limited to folders in the Content Library and categories in Smart Content 9and the presets tabs). You can also add tags (in the area at the bottom of the Content Library and Smart Content there is a tags tab, select item(s) - to add new ones just type them in the text box under the existing tags) or your own categories (right-click>Categorise, on a folder or file(s)) or create links in other folders to have refernces to the file orgnaised how you want without breaking the existing install.
I use hand organised library, don't touch smart content since my DB got corrupted after months of organizing lol. I have quite a few different libraries to make it easier to find stuff. One for g8f, one for g8m, one for duo poses between the two, one for my dragon stuff, etc etc. I always hand edit the zip files to get rid of vendor vanity folders, correct placement, make better load icons if the ones the vendor made don't properly show what the product looks like, larger rollover images, make sure texture addons actually end up in a subfolder of the item it is made for. A lot of work before installing, but I only ever need to do it once since I save a copy of the altered content zip in my own archives.
I don't use Smart Content. I break my stuff up into multiple libraries. At present I have:
I have a corresponding set of Poser libraries for the older models.
The old Hooded Cloaks and Morphing Fantasy Dresses got their own library because all they shared UV maps, and hence textures, across several generations.
This scheme has the disadvantage that some clothing items that don't have separate installers for separate generations, and can't be handled strictly with the Daz Install Manager. It has the enormous advantage that I can almost always find what I'm looking for, except some of the really old Poser stuff, which looks at chaos from across the border on the far side.
When I was rendering in Daz Studio, I got frustrated enough to manually pull items out of the pestilential artist-name categories and arrange them by type of item, except in the rare cases when the artist is more useful than the item type. These days I don't care if Daz thinks I should remember to look for Crumbling Castle under the name of its maker, Third Underwater Rhinoceros, because I'm systematically exporting everything to Blender, into external directories.
(The external directories also suffer a bit from unavoidable fuzzy classification, and from the unsophistication of Windows' ability to associate images with directories. But I have even more differentiated categorization that usually makes sense to me.)
I use .doc files. The file title is the category (props - books, props - clocks, poses - casual, shaders - leather, etc) and each page has the product name and web address, as well as a picture of the asset. It makes for extra work when I get new stuff to get it all logged, but it makes it super easy to find whatever I need.
I haven't bought them yet:
MF Content Bookmarks | Daz 3D
Turbo Content | Daz 3D
are what I'm going to definately buy as I have 9000 items in DIM now.
Thanks for your detailed answers, that's already some great food for thoughts. I always used the smart lib since I started with Daz, maybe it's time to break up with old habits and start organizing my stuff in the content lib. A hell of work, but I guess it could be worth it. The tags are also new to me, never used them before or even recognized them. I'm gonna try them first to see if they're helpful enough to me.
I also like your idea with the doc files, @SilverGirl. I would love to have such a catalogue of my stuff but I'm scared of the work, I should had done that right from the start. If only the product lib in the account settings would be useable for that... I mean, it's so easy to implement, it basically just needs a switch case of the "Hide Items I own" button to give us a filterable catalogue of our bought stuff with all the product pages, that'd be sweet.
In DIM, you can export a .csv file of selected products, which you can import into a spreadsheet. (You'll need to do it for the three tabs in DIM if you want to catch all products). Once in the spreadsheet, you can manipulate the data in all sorts of ways. Select the products and right-click somewhere in the main window. You will get a pop-up with options for which fields you want to include.
Yeah, thankfully it was only 4-ish months in or so that I realized I needed a system outside of Daz to find stuff. It was still a heck of a backlog to work through.
Yeah I also support this idea. Spreadsheets work extremely well for this.
I started out with a spreadsheet... problem I ran into with that was that I'm a very visual person, and pictures and spreadsheets aren't the world's best combo.