PzDB - The Poser Database Solution

A few days ago my friend Dustin Neff turned me on to this program, knowing I've been struggling with the bane of Poser users: organizing its chaotic library database. As successful as I may (or may not) have been in achieving some semblance of order in this regard, it's been an incredibly labor intensive process, the results of which are adequate at best and inefficiently cumbersome in any case. It was Dustin who turned me on to 3D art in the first place, so I have to thank him yet again for blazing the trail ahead that I might follow in his wake.

PzDB is a content management system which not only sorts your Poser content into shape post-haste, but allows you to find any prop or pose you might need in just a few short clicks. Using content groups and keywords PzDB catalogs and cross-references every item in your library with fairly respectable effectiveness, and allows you to fully customize the resulting archive to your heart's content. In fact, although the initial import phase does require the longest setup time for the program itself, the "clean-up" time (adding missed groups and deleting incorrect keywords and the like) is what looks like it will take me the longest. But in the end the effort will be well worth the investment, as it should save me hundreds of hours of stress and headache down the road.

Still, the initial import of my library did take quite awhile. The user's manual claims a 3 GHz system can index and cross-reference 100,000 files of over 16 GB of content per hour, but my 3Ghz quad-core system running 16 gigs of RAM required something like eight hours or so to import my 68 gigabyte library: I went to bed after it had been running for 6+ hours, with an estimated 200 minutes still remaining. Windows had done an update in the night and rebooted my machine, so I had to run a second import again in the morning to finalize the indexing, which didn't take long, and I'm guessing it took no more than nine hours total to finish up, which is only about half as fast as claimed.

Of course, I'm not running a dedicated machine, and at least a portion of my CPU was being used for nightly virus scans and automatic backups, not to mention several resident programs a work machine likely wouldn't have, so I'm not complaining. It's still pretty quick when you consider the stats: 474,159 files scanned (not counting the Poser base library, which I've kept separate and only took about 15 minutes to catalog); out of those, 192,533 database entries were created, containing 3953 keywords and 164,577 relational group pointers (i.e. cross-references). PzDB created 46 groups, mainly based on the major human character models, although Hiro was notoriously missing, as were all Gen4 models except for V4 and M4, even though I have folders for them which PzDB should have interpreted as base models and assigned to primary groups. Still, keywords for them were created, so it was just a matter of manually creating new groups and assigning the keywords to them.

This is one of the most unique and revolutionary features of PzDB, and I can't stress it's usefulness enough: once a group is created with keywords, any model installed into Poser thereafter will be automatically indexed, cross-referenced, and added to the group (assuming it has a reasonably descriptive name, which is generally the case). So, for instance, now that I've created a Stephanie 4 Elite folder with the relevant keywords, any poses, clothes or characters I acquire for her will be found when I open her group - automatically! - as long as they're in my Stephanie 4 folder, or have any variant of "S4" or "SP4" in their name. If not, all I have to do is add any one of these keywords to the item and I'm good to go.

The search functions in PzDB are extensive and blazing quick. Even in the "All Content" group with nearly a quarter of a million items the program runs lightning fast. And its integration with Poser is excellent: you can use a remote function to open items in Poser from PzDB, or even better, create Collections in Poser from searches or groups in PzDB, effectively multiplying your library's efficiency. Even better still, the pending Version 1.2 (view the YouTube promo below) will not only support drag-and-drop directly into the Poser window, but will also integrate with nearly any other 3D render program, including DAZ, Bryce, Vue, Lightwave and Carrara, as well as indexing scene files and textures, neither of which Version 1.1 support at present. I have Bryce, but haven't gotten around to using it much yet, although I fully intend to, so this is a nice feature which adds expandability to the current program. However, you do have to pay the moderately premium price of $65 to include future upgrades rather than the standard $35 one-time licence (or wait until it comes out, I suppose, although it may be more than $35 for that version). But the cost is negligible given what you gain in return.

For anyone interested in reading a fairly humorous explanation of how Poser's library system got so bollixed up in the first place, I highly recommend you read page 24 of the user's manual, which you can access online without even having to install the program. It's quite informative and explains a lot about the industry as well.

ADDENDUM: WEDNESDAY EVENING LATE

One thing I've noticed now in messing around with PzDB that I see as a serious problem is that there is no way to remove keywords from an item once they're attached to it. This isn't a huge issue, but it does tend to require a few additional search steps to be taken, which is not ideal. However, looking at the promo materials for Version 1.2, I see there is a new button added to "Remove Keywords" so I hope to see this upgrade out soon. The site says second quarter 2010 for the scheduled release, but that clearly hasn't happened yet, so they're a bit behind schedule. But hopefully we'll see it soon.