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I want to take some of my neater figures, and package them as completely portable items, where all of the dependencies are included into one neat .rar or .zip file (yes, even the commercial ones made by other people). Is there a script/utility that does that?
As an alternative, a question: would export to .obj, import as morph, rig/ERC-freeze, then Save As Morph Asset do the same thing, but create one morph with no dependencies? I can check that bit of it, I believe.
I guess what I want to know is, how do you (if you do) save out characters with no dependencies, but as a complete item?
Yeah, seem like export the character as an OBJ and then later importing it as a morph is your best bet.
Also you could use dial fusion to create separate head and body morphs.
Can you check it out if that work?Basically you'll have to build it up just like any other model product. The usual data-People-Runtime structure. Just make sure you have copies of the materials in the proper location and that your model is using those, and not the original dependencies. Everything else should line up when you save the character preset, and then it's just a matter of copying out those paths and making a package. You probably want to make a proper Product out of it in Daz, so it's complete with Support meta.
Be careful about morphs, if it's using say, 200 Plus morphs package, better to leave that as a dependency rather than make clones, or you may wind up with nasty "duplicate formulas" errors and other weird crap. Custom morphs, just wrap them up with the package.
Does this do what your after?
I gathered as much, insofar as needing to have all the pieces in the right places. The trick I was wondering about centers around the dependencies. I think I can test my way out of that by setting up a separate DS content library (while disconnecting the main one from DS) and including only the bits and pieces I want/need until it loads correctly.
I think that, if it doesn't do the job, it will aid in it greatly - thank you!
Content Gatherer is a useful tool, albeit a bit clunky and not so user-friendly. But if you can tolerate it, it's sure helpful.
Really, if you're serious about content creation, you should really get used to manually keeping track of your assets and dependancies IMHO. You're spot-on about doing product development in an empty Content Library, otherwise it's easy to miss a dependant file, and we all know how that sucks to distribute something with missing files...
*whistles and looks out window*
Anyway, if you get way deep into the product creation phase and find a situation where you *know* something is missing, but it still installs cleanly in your Daz platform, you probably have orphaned meta references to parts of the product. Sometimes you can track down the ghosty file references in the content browsers and delete them, but not always.
Best shot: along with a blank runtime (Content Library), make a blank CMS database too.
There's at least 2 ways:Create a new database (cheat and copy the existing one), and point Daz to it using the Content Directory Manager, then you can nuke it if necessary to have a blank slate (or simply start Daz, it will build a brand new empty DB).
OR,
you can be all cheaty and simply make a backup copy of the cms folder, name it something like "cms_BACKUP", and then go ahead and reset the database in Daz using Content DB Maintenance tool. When you're done with it, you can keep it renaming it to whatever, and restore the original cms folder's name to "cms"The database folder is located at C:\Users\%USERNAME%\AppData\Roaming\DAZ 3D\cms by default.
Now, if you have a funked-up product, you'll get the appropriate warnings and placement of smart files when you test-install it (such as in LOST AND FOUND) so you can get a clear picture of what needs fixing.
I'm not Ethiopia @Pooper, though we do share a similar avatar 🙂
Only one big issue with saving out as an obj and reimporting as a full character morph. If any of the morphs you used to make it relied on jcms or corrective morphs to prevent mesh bending oddly or crinkling the mesh then your full character morph is going to have issues. I learned that several years ago when I thought "Wouldn't it be great if I saved this character out as a single morph so I can trim down my morphs folder?"
I don't use the CMS at all as I have an anally organized runtime that follows my hyper logical nature. I actually have every single one of my G-G8 morphs in a separate unloaded runtime. I have my base runtime, a runtime called character which has the data/DAZ 3D/etc folder in it containing only the base figure morphs plus only those morphs used by characters I use. When I want to make a new one I add, haha, "God" runtime which has data/DAZ 3D/ all the morphs I have in existence, and wait 5+ minutes for it to load, create my new character, remove the god runtime, then load the character I created. I then only move those morphs it says are missing into my character runtime. This way I avoid a LOT of the morph crosstalk that happens between hundreds of morphs plus faster load times. I base all of my characters on a base male shape and a base female shape I have tweaked and worked on for years. You can even take the same shape, change the hair, eyebrows, skin and come up with two characters that don't even look like the same person.
@frank22 - my bad 🙂
A bit of explanation of the environment I'm in and my motivation for this is in order.
Environment-wise, I'm in the same boat as @oldwolf ; I avoid using the CMS at all costs... it's a legacy of my Poser days, where I just kept everything organized. Using organized folders is just easier for me, so blowing away the CMS is not a problem (although I am handy with postgresql, so if it's really needed I could just pick out the bits that are required and at least do things that way? Never looked too deep into it).
Modus Operandi? I'm not going to become a commercial artist or anything, but instead I just want to take the more interesting characters I made and put 'em up here, in case anyone else finds them useful. I tend to kitbash them from a lot of different parts, and this forum looks like a place where I can share the results without a half-dozen vendors losing their tempers. Credits will naturally be listed if I can find/recall them all.
There's going to be dependencies I can't shake, but I can list them if I can't bring them in.
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