Novica & Forum Members Tips & Product Reviews Pt 7
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Well, you have an excellent reputation for customer service, so your efforts don't go unnoticed.
Everyone has their words that they have typos or don't spell correctly lol. Mine used to be their- it always came out thier. Such a simple little word!
I feel your pain. I have said "teh" more times than i bare to remember.
Ice Dragon Art- I saw that you had a question in an old post about the Content Cataloger re: serial number, as you had bought it. Do you use the product? It's under $5 right now with a qualifying product. Or anyone else, have you used it?
It was not what I expected and honestly, not something I use much since I custom categorize everything myself now. MIght be be useful to others though especially at that price. Might revisit it, I had forgotten I had it. Maybe I would like it better now that I am more familiar with Studio overall....
It's been a few hours since I watched the video, so I'm having trouble remembering everything.(Everyone that wants to see it, it's on the product page, scroll down.) I do know it works with Chrome, which is what I use. I don't custom categorize because I have waaaaay too much stuff. Quick images would be better. It's only $4.92 so...
I started categorizing very early on or it would be a nightmare lol. When I lost my info the last time it took me almost two months to put those categories together again with everything I had collected. It was awful. But for me, I have to have my stuff categorized in a way that makes sense to me, and the way Studio does it, isn't it lol.
Now imagine having an additional two years of purchasing to categorize. I joined in Sept 2013.
All those sales....
And yep, the organization of Content Library is a joke for quite a few things.
Ya, I break out in hives at the thought of losing my categories again...I've added a considerable amount in the last several months of sales and am not sure I would survive having to redo them lol.
This is my nightmare right now, and I only have one year of purchases under my belt!
I refuse to re-categorize my stuff. It would take weeks. Daz studio is doing weird stuff though with my userdatas. I now have 7 userdatas for some reason.
I've been here 1 year and two months. I have a massive content library. A ton of freebies, and two sets of pa and pc+ sales under my belt lol. I started categorizing about two months in and am super glad I did. I can't handle smart content its completley counter intuitive to how I look for things. And finding freebies etc is a nightmare, the poser side of things is interesting to put it mildly.
When I bought Uma (Jan 16 last year) there was another figure who was Connect only around that time, but I can't remember who it was. Anyway, got to thinking- Connects are supposed to go off that status after a year. Is January the earliest month that will happen, or were there earlier Connect products?
Just consider... I've been a PA here since 2003, and a customer since 2001 or so... now imagine MY library, not even counting my own products. :D
Oh my. you must have a lot of stuff... Fo you have that alien morph for millenium dog? I admit I've always wanted that, and they gave it out as a freebie before removing it from the library.
http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/89246/get-your-encrypted-daz-connect-content-here-thread/p1
The first ones were:
http://www.daz3d.com/medieval-storage-room Release Date: 2016-01-21
https://www.daz3d.com/lynsey-for-genesis-3-female-s Release Date: 2016-01-21
http://www.daz3d.com/dragon-queen-for-genesis-3-female-s Release Date: 2016-01-21
Thanks so much @Kerya! I think Lynsey is the one I was thinking of, she came a few days after Uma. So let's all remember to check on the 21st to see if these products do indeed go off Connect.
@Valandar- I bet you have a great variety!
You are confusing "Connect" with "Encryption". They are not the same thing. After a year the encrypted products are scheduled to no longer be encrypted. They are not scheduled to be removed from Daz Connect. All Encrypted products can only be installed with Daz Connect (not DIM or manual download). Daz Connect can install both encrypted and non-encrypted content. Clear as mud?
Wow, can't even imagine
Ooh wow, you both have me beat!
Valandar- your store is awesome. I dream of finding all of it in my Product Library some day!
Ice Dragon- I think you got here just before I did, and it sounds like you've been acquiring things as fast as I have. I'm going to follow your lead and start categorizing. I can't find anything at the moment. I spend a lot of time looking things up in my Product Library and DIM. And then I get distracted by another sale and end up with more stuff. Funny how that works!
I have found it well worth the effort especially once its done and you are just keeping it updated with new stuff. I spend far less time looking for stuff now and far more actually using it.
Ah, I'm thinking one thing and typing another. Thinking encrypted and typing Connect. The first thing I did yesterday was take two extra strength Tylenol for a migraine, warded it off for the most part (lost eyesight off and on for about fifteen minutes with those darned aura fields) so probably wasn't concentrating as much as usual. I didn't work on the character list at all yesterday on the other thread.
I sure hope they have a system in place to "undo" the encryption automatically and not have to do it by hand. Ugh.
The things I have categorized are Uber Base, Slosh's hair shaders and V3D's converters. I go straight to Categories and they're in the top tier, no clicking at all. I'll probably do a Category for my fabric shaders and OOT hair shaders, which I need to explore. I'm just used to Slosh's, but have owned both a long time.
Yes!!!! We got rain!! Been about 70 days! Hope you folks in Tennessee are getting it, minus the winds. I have to say, I thought the people filming the fire as it lapped at their hotel door were clearly not thinking. (Well, roared at their door.) I'm not judging them still being in there, who knows how much warning they had, BUT when it surrounds your building, stop filming! (for folks overseas who didin't see it, type Hilton hotel burns Gatlinburg TN. A 16 story hotel was surrounded by flames and people in the lobby were just standing there.)
I decided to give it a try and bought it yesterday. I do not have my content categorized and use a combination of Smart Content and the Product Library mapped folders to find what I want. Here's my impressions from trying it out today:
1. It's a manual download, so go to your order page or product library and download the zip file. Windows only. I'm using it on Win 7 Pro 64-bit.
2. I extracted the zip into the Download folder and ran it from there. Does not seem to be location dependent but you'll likely want to move it to your Daz content folder at some point. The folder has five .txt and .pdf files and one .exe file. Run the .exe to start.
3. The dialog that pops up defaults to C: locations but those can be changed by either typing a new location or browsing to the folder where you want to keep the output and to wherever your My Daz 3D Library is located. I have my installation on the E drive and it was quick to make the two changes required.
4. Click on Build My Catalog button and go do something for a while. I have about 2900 products installed, seemed to take maybe a half hour to accomplish the task.
5. Go to the folder wherever you said to store the output, for me it was E:/Documents/Daz 3D/. You'll find a number of .html files (I have 15) and a content subfolder named myDocuments. I used the default name but you can change that name during the build; don't change it afterwards, as all the html images point to the folder with that name.
6. Open the first page, in my case myContent.html. You'll find a fairly simple page design, with a few links and lots of images:
7. The catalog follows the folder structure of My Daz 3D Library. It goes down every branch in alphabetical order and will create a section of images for each folder that contains standard 91x91 thumbnail .png's along with the folder name. One of the nice features is you'll have a section where all the animals are gathered in one place and you can quickly scroll down to see what you have. Same for architecture, shaders, poses, vehicles, etc.
8. The catalog is only as good as the structure of My Daz 3D Library and how items were installed by DIM. For example, in the Daz 3D folder I have the usual subject folders (like animals, architecture, camera presets, figures, etc.) but also vendor folders like Maclean, Magic-101, Merlin, etc. So the products in those folders will not be organized by subject but by vendor. For example, the props for Maclean will be on the html page myContent007, not with other props on html page myContent012 (since M comes well before P).
9. The same applies to everything in the runtime folder. Props in runtime will be on a different page than the props in the toplevel Props folder. The runtime folder also organizes alphabetically by product name, so you won't see similar items all in one place.
10. CCEZ only looks for .png files, so it will not catalog your texture folders.
11. You can also browse the myContent folder which has every image. This gives you the quickest overview if you just want to refresh your mind about what you have. You can use the position of the vertical scrollbar to give an idea what html page to look at for the folder name: say the scrollbar is 1/4 down the page, then look at html pages 3 or 4 for the image number. The image number range is also at the bottom of every page.
12. I have not tried to run an update. Given the sequential numbering of images, I'm guessing that it rebuilds the catalog each time from scratch.
All in all, it looks useful to me, as scrolling through and clicking on folders in the Content Library is slow and it's hard to tell the full-range of what you own. The biggest issue I see with it is it faithfully follows the DAZ 3D Library structure which has several oddities. For those who categorize your products, I'm guessing it may not have much value.
For more on this product, go here.
OMGosh Rich! That was so much work! Thanks for showing that! I'll put a link in the first post so people can find it. (in awhile, I am doing folders and testing a few things for someone else at the moment. The how-to-set-up is invaluable for me, so not technical on stuff like that.
It might be plausible to get some scissors and do a cut-strips and organize things where you have all your rocks together then you can zip right to them because they are all together as a visual reference. (If you follow what I'm saying.)
I can't remember, is there a limit on products it can show?
Oh lord, good luck testing the cart. If you were (and sigh, you should know by now...) clever enough not to hop on the sale yesterday and wait, there are some artists who overlap in one promo, with artists in other promos. Even if you're not quite sure if you want something, you will find you'll get it almost free because the price drop of other items pays for that one you may not use very often.
If you get an Edgy item, and have the orange banner from yesterday (ends midnight tonight) then you get a discount on Edgies AND the stores listed, which also get the extra 30% from the promo today- so think about looking at those stores first if you haven't shopped yesterday.
What are you looking for? (And I'm not seeing hardly any products, I own too many, so most are hidden) Well, if you have an Edgy product, and the orange banner from yesterday, with the 30% promo today- P3D is in Edgy promo, Ozichick is in the Holiday stores, and P3D and Ozichick do Avery, so Avery is $2.65. That kind of testing. Boggles the mind what combos you may find if you don't already have the items. If you do find some feel free to post.
My mind is hurting. I've loaded the cart to test it (and GAWD NO I am not spending this!) $798 minus $574.80 is $223.20 for 40 things (I picked a large, even number.) so $5.58 on average for sets, characters, hair mixture. Let's round up to $800 original price and do 220.00 for the final price- overall, what you're looking at is paying- wait for it- 28% (which is $224, close enough.)
So now, off to empty most of my cart!
PerspectX's products are discounted nicely too, and many beautiful sets to choose from. It's really hard to stay within a budget with so many great deals. UGH
Yes, if you printed out the html pages, you could then reorganize them however you wished. If you have an html editor (I have Dreamweaver), you could also cut and paste electronically.
There are 3 choices when you make the catalog: 500, 1000, or no limit on entries per page. I believe the number refers to the number of images that the page contains, not the number of products. The author recommends against no limit as you may overwhelm your browser's ability to load the page (plus now you have one giant page to scroll through). I used the default of 500 and my 2900 products gave 15 pages, so about 7500 images. To my knowledge, there is no limit on the number of products cataloged, as it will just create whatever number of html pages are needed.
I just ran a test to see if you could create partial catalogs and you can. Instead of choosing My DAZ 3D Library, choose a subfolder like My DAZ 3D Library/Poses. Now you have a more manageable size catalog of poses to scroll through. Just be sure to use a different name for the catalog (e.g., instead of myContent, use myContent-Poses) so you don't overwrite the full catalog. This can also help with Runtime being a separate entity. For example, catalog My DAZ 3D Library/Props and My DAZ 3D Library/Runtime/Libraries/Props using the no limit choice and you have just two html pages to review. If you know how to create your own html pages, you can then make a master page with links to all the sub-catalogs, then bookmark the master on your web browser for quick access.
EDIT: I did what I discussed in the last paragraph. Result is here.
It's an older product, but here's a render of Neo Station, retextured (slightly) for Iray. Monitors and signs are emissive, to get more of a modern LED signage effect. A straight Uber Iray conversion left the floors and walls looking like polished granite and way too slippery for a train station floor. Modified with MEC4D's concrete texture and added back in the original diffuse and bump maps. I really ought to redo the benches, but that will involve more work with the Geometry Editor than I'm willing to spend right now.
Very nice- it looks sleek enough but functional- good call on the floors. I love the lighting, it really sets the mood for the environment.
I really must start bookmarking reviews/showcases of products here so I can find them again when I'm ready to buy LOL. I'm sure someone had done Lakeside Folly http://www.daz3d.com/lakeside-folly before? I'm curious whether it was decided it was good? Can anyone remember?
I don't have a render labeled Lakeside Folly and I try to name them by sets. I'll see if I can crank one out (won't be perfect.) Anyone else have it?
And BTW, the price on Avery went up and it shouldn't have.