Zip file installation in a custom directory?

codec800_998b724087

I apologize right off since this has been covered countless times, but I cant seem to find a surefire answer. I buy alot of content from Renderosity and the content comes in a .zip format. I want to unzip the folder and unload it in another location rather than Daz3d's default location on my C drive, I dont have much space left. I have a folder on an empty drive labled "My Daz3D Content". When I unzip the zipped folder I have a folder called "content" and tow other files labled "Manifest" and "Supplement".

Am I just placing the "content" folder into my "My Daz3D Content" folder for a manual install or do I need to take the multiple files inside of the "content" folder and put them somewhere else? And then what else after that? Direct Daz3d program to look for my custom new location?

 

Thankyou!

Richard Haseltine

Usually you'd want the stuff from the zip's Content folder

SpottedKitty

codec800_998b724087 said:

Am I just placing the "content" folder into my "My Daz3D Content" folder for a manual install or do I need to take the multiple files inside of the "content" folder and put them somewhere else?

The Renderosity .zip files have that /content/ folder because the DAZ ones do — it's a requirement for the DIM installation program, although only DAZ installers can use it. This is where things get a bit complicated; both /content/ and /My Daz3D Content/ have been used as the name of the DAZ|Studio content folder, but you must only use one folder — a content folder inside a content folder is Not A Good Idea™ and will cause problems.

What you need to do is take the contents of the /content/ folder in the .zip and merge them into the contents of your existing /My Daz3D Content/ folder. In many cases, you should find that the top-level folders in the .zip already exist in the content location; this is normal.

SixDs

Just to illustrate what Richard and Spotted Kitty are referring to, using a couple of examples:

I have my content on a separate data drive on this PC that I named 3DContent, rather than My Daz3D Content as you did, so we can assume that they are the same for these purposes. I manually download and extract all my content regardless of the source, and once you get the idea, it is not difficult to keep things straight. Whether you are downloading from another site or from DAZ, the zip files will tend to have similar internal structure. I must say that I have never had a file from another site that I can recall that has the "content" folder - that tends to be something that exists almost exclusively within DAZ product manually-downloaded zips. And I highly doubt that either the "maniest" and "supplement" files would be there, either. I normally extract the contents of zip files into a temporary directory at first so I can see what I am dealing with, prior to moving them to my content folder. For example, I have a previously-downloaded file from DAZ called IM00023284-01_FWSAQuinnforIzabella7.zip. Opening this zip archive (or extracting the contents) reveals the Content folder that you referred to, plus the Maniest.dsx and Supplement.dsx files. Since I don't use DIM, the latter two are of no use to me and I discard them, leaving only the Content folder. If I open the Content folder I find three folders: Runtime, People and data. The first is a Poser format folder (still required) and the other two are DAZ format folders. It is these three folders (and their contents) that I need to copy to my 3DContent folder. I usually just drag and drop them in Windows Explorer. Since I already have folders named Runtime, People and data in there, I'll get a pop-up asking me if I want to merge each one. Answer: yes. And that's about all there is to it.

Now for products for other sites there tends to be a slight difference. For example, I have a file from another site named FWSAAngelV7andG3_194808.zip. Opening this reveals no intermediate "content" folder, but four folders called runtime, People, Documentation and data. Sound familiar? In this case I can simply drag all four to my 3DContent folder and proceed as above. (The fact that the runtime folder is not using an upper case 'R' doesn't seem to bother Windows).

Once you learn to recognize the standard DAZ Studio and Poser folder structures, it all becomes fairly easy and occasionally the intermediate folder step will allow you to identify any problems before dumping things into your content folder.