PzDB Update

Now that I've been toying with my digital model archive for awhile in relation to PzDB, I've worked out a system that seems to work quite well. My initial experience with PzDB was pretty good, and I was respectably impressed, but with some caveats. As installed the program works more or less as advertised, and any average user would be more than satisfied with its performance.

But the admittedly over-anal-retentive left-brain-leaning nerd I am was disappointed with its less than 100% efficiency. Granted, PzDB categorized the vast majority of my model archive properly, so that when I search for something there's a fair to decent chance I'll find it. But it's not perfect, and there are not only things it misses, but others that it adds incorrectly. This is to be expected, and generally one would simply work around it (and most of you probably will, and should). My goal was to find a more effective way to make it behave better.

Since PzDB is just an algorithm, the only way to improve efficiency is to give it what it wants. In other words, you need to provide the search criteria that it looks for so that it can find it readily. With 3D models there are two way you can do this: 1) by organizing the archive itself into folders with relevant category names, and/or 2) by appending search terms onto the files themselves. PzDB provides a third option, which is to add keywords to items within the program itself, but this is difficult if the program doesn't find what you're looking for in the first place, and needless if it does. You could literally go through every item and customize the keywords, but that would be laborious and tedious at best, and defeats the purpose altogether. Certainly some initial cleanup will be required in any case, but since the point of PzDB is to have the program do the work, a better method is clearly needed.

So this leaves us with our first two options. Thus far in organizing my database my method has, for obvious reasons, been relegated to the first - the "obvious" reason being that Poser's search functions, improved as they are in Version 8, are still inefficient, and generally not useful. My system thus far has been to create subfolders under each of the standard Poser categories of "Character," "Hair," "Materials," etc., for each of the major criteria I would be looking for. So, for example, under "Animals" I have subfolders for each major type of critter, such as "Aquatic," "Birds," "Domestic," "Insects", "Wildlife," and the like. Similarly, under "People" I have one for each of the major figure models, and beneath those their Characters, Clothing, Hair, Morphs, MATs, and whatever else might be relevant. Under "Clothing" I have further subdivisions for Contemporary, Fantasy, Futuristic, Historical, and Second Skins (which are technically MATs, but function as clothing).

This has proven fairly effective in PzDB, and I recommend it as a major part of your organization method, but it's still not perfect. The main difficulty with this system, both in and out of PzDB, is the many props and costumes that can be applied to, or used by, more than one figure model. Which brings us to method number two.

Although I've already moved around my models quite extensively, I've been pretty careful not to duplicate or lose them. In a few instances I've copied models so as to have a version under two different figures who can use them, so that I might find it more easily. But if you're using PzDB you don't want to do this! PzDB will find them both and it will only serve to bog your searches down. Fortunately I haven't done this often, but it still has made more work for me, as I'm having to go back and delete the duplicates as I find them.

The alternate/additional method I suggest is to append search criteria to some of your models. You only need to do this for items not found in a folder with a search term you would use for it. So, for example, a clothing item designed for Victoria 4 alone, would go in her folder, and thus be found when searching for V4 clothing. However, if it is an outfit that might also be used by other figures, I recommend you put it in the base model folder (i.e. Victoria 4 or Michael 3, or what have you), and append to the model's name shorthand tags for all the other relevant figures, such as A3-A4-V3-G4, for example. You don't need to append the name of the base model since it's in that folder, but you can if you want to be thorough and consistent.

Now again, you must be careful in doing this. When renaming Poser files (I don't use DAZ, so I can't offer any advise there, but I would guess it's pretty much the same), you can change the main cz2/pz2/etc. and it's corresponding .png image (and they have to be exactly the same when you do this!), but DO NOT CHANGE the .RSR or .OBJ files found in those folders! The altered cz2, etc., will still find the data it requires so long as the names of the .rsr and/or .obj files remain the same. Also, NEVER move any files in the Geometry or Textures folders. You'll never need to find those anyway (unless you're altering textures or getting into model manipulation, but by then you'll know what you're doing anyway), and moving them will break the integrity of the file structure and keep the model from loading properly.

I also recommend you keep everything in your main Runtime folder. I don't even bother to use the "Downloads" folder, in order to keep my archive clean and concise. PzDB can search enormous archives fast enough on even a moderately decent machine that it's no longer necessary to build multiple smaller databases. But feel free to do it if it works for you. Just note that there are models out there that require you place them in the main system Runtime in order for them to work. This is mainly a Python script issue, and is as good a reason as any to just put everything in one Runtime. However, if you're working with multiple hard drives this isn't always possible, so just be aware that any installs containing a Python script must be in the main Runtime, and you should be fine putting anything else on a secondary drive.

With these few additional steps taken PzDB now functions almost flawlessly, finding every possible hair or shoe or what have you to fit any figure model I might search for. General props are a bit more tricky, since they tend to be spread out all over the place, but so long as you append an appropriate word - such as "chair" or "candle" for example - to any of the relevant models as you load them, you will always find them when you need them later. Props like candelabras and furniture I don't like to move into category folders, since they tend to function in sets, which you may or may not want to use all together. So I am now in the process of going through my set props to make tags for "floor" and "wall" and "window" and the like, so that I can build my own custom sets with whatever building sections I might have. This might be a bit excessive, but then I'm anal-retentive, so I can't help it.

By the way, when you're tagging your model files, you only need to do the one main file, as all the others will then show up in the related folders section of the search pane. So this isn't as exhaustive a process as it may at first have sounded.