DIM, Smart Content, DazCentral all biffed by DC Install
ac_mr_blonde
Posts: 100
I thought DazCentral looked interesting, so I installed it. What a mistake. Now DIM and DC think none of my products are installed, and the smart content pane is empty.
After looking through DIM's settings, I noticed that all the directory paths are now pointing to a directory that doesn't exist, and definitely isn't my actual archive directories. I cannot change the path, since DIM insists on adding "/Applications/Data/DAZ3D/InstallManager/" onto whatever base path I give it, so I can't even point it at the correct directory. I have no idea what's wrong with Smart Content. Someone suggested reimporting metadata, so I tried that. It ran for 30 minutes and Smart Content is still blank. This is fun.
DazCentral is also broken. when I open it, it shows me all my products, which is nice. When I click "Open" it opens daz studio, then sh!ts the bed. Says the file it is trying to open doesnt exist. When I look at the setting for DC, I noticed that it says "Install Paths Managed by DIM", which we know is broken, so that's probably a fail right there. When I change the path to where my manifest folder actually is, DC updates and says I have nothing installed, not even Daz Studio. SO MUCH FUN.
So it's been 24 hours since i got the email heralding the new Daz Central. I see other posts from users who have been kicked by this, but I haven't seen a peep from anyone at Daz about what to do or when a fix is coming. Please advise.
**UPDATE**
When I copied my manifest download and thumbnails directories to a folder that matched the path in DIM, DIM correctly updated to show what I do and do not have installed. But Smart Content did not. And I do not want to keep the files in that kludged directory. I have three copies of the download directory now (at 300 gigs each) and I am afraid the next product I buy will go into a directory that Daz can't see it it.
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Comments
On the DIM side, it seems that DazCentral sets the "Manifest Archive" location to an incorrect location. In DIM, click the gear icon in the upper right corner and choose Basic Settings. Click on the path listed for "Manifest Archive" and navigate to the correct location -- C:/Users/Public/Documents/DAZ 3D/InstallManager/ManifestFiles. If you go to Advanced-Settings and click on the Installation tab you can correct the location for your content folders (they may still be there and you just need to set the current one to the one you want.
As for Smart Content and Categories, Content DB Maintenance > Reinstall Metadata should fix that. If you had custom categories/tags/metadata and had previously Exported User Data you can restore that as well.
So, changing the paths for DIM does work, and gets DIM back to correctly showing which products are installed and which are not , but my smart content pane shows all products needing to be installed no matter how many times i run Reinstall Metadata.
I installed all my products painstakingly manually! Because even the Install Manager has gone out of whack on my system. So I thought installing Daz Central could be another venue of installing new products! Sigh! All blank now in my Daz Studio Smart Content! Even the ones I manually installed metadata!
What can I do? Please advise.
What I did when I realizer Smart Content was another layer of confusion on top of the - sometimes - cunfusing placements of assets were to leave it be and manually build the original Content Library to my liking. It takes a lot of space and work to have all the assets repacked but it's only done one time if there are no updates. Next time it's time for a reinstall I allready have the assets sorted the way I want them.
Why not just uninstall Daz Central?
Happened to me too. Eventually nothing worked. I had to do reset my PC again (second time this week because of DIM errors - most likely caused by me) and start over. I also couldn't find a batch installation with Daz Central instead of having to click on thousands of products individually.
OK GUYS I JUST GOT MY STUFF BACK!
So after all the checking and reinstalling - not working - I finally made a breakthrough! Well, the program was looking for CMS/cluster to fill the information which was lacking! It seems to have been taken out from it's usual location to another... my Local C: Drive/ProgramData/Daz 3D/cms
So I opened my Daz Studio Program and hit Edit/Preferences
Preferences floating menu will appear - Just look for CMS Setting CLICK it!
Cluster directory will be missing - and you will need to click the Arrow Down and Browse.
YOU will find your cluster in - Local C: Drive/ProgramData/Daz 3D/cms
After that a BLUE button will appear in the Smart Folder with the words CMS written - click it - you can now login and reinstall metadata via the small icon at the top of the smart content (Click an icon with triangle and lines) find Content DB Maintenance.
Hope this helps.
Good find. I had to search a bit further for my CMS directory. I had several lying around that were all wrong and linking to them did nothing. I'm not sure if these were created by the daz central install or what, but in the end I found a CMS directory in my appData/roaming directory, of all places, that worked when i used it in the CMS settings as you described.
Man, what a dumpster fire. I uninstalled Daz Central as soon as I could, and I wonder how much damage it did to my various paths and settings. I'm afraid of what will happen the next time I try a fresh install or a contend db migration.
Isn't this a showstopping bug and grounds for immediately pulling the program until the code's gone over with a fine-toothed pneumatic drill? I already didn't want to use Central; after all these glitch reports in recent days, there's no way I'd bother to install it.
Thanks for pointing me to the appData directory. DazCentral wiped out that link along with most of my Daz interface. Now all I have to do is figure out why I can't login.
Reloaded Daz and login worked.
Beta means Testing, it would probably be wise to wait for the final version of DazCentral.
I couldn't agree more. And there's been very little response from Daz.
Not sure what you mean. DazCentral was released with great fanfare and a "download now" link in an email. There's nothing "beta" about it. It's a released product... in name.
Here, it's the first topic pinned in The Commons section :
May 12, 2020: Beta for DazCentral, your new Content Manager
https://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/407131/beta-for-dazcentral-your-new-content-manager/p1
Where, on any of the daily emails or the DazCentral page, does it say it's beta? Nowhere. It just says "download now". The email I got this morning says "Introducing our new content management tool". That's not a beta. Perhaps they should have stayed in beta until it actually worked, especially since one of the "issues" they talk about in that commons post is the problem with paths, which is what is super-broken about DC now. I have no issue with a company asking its customers to test a beta for it, as long as they are told (like in that forum post) that it's not ready for release. Once they announce it to all users as an official tool, it better be bug-free or at least have a strong and immediate support infrastructure, neither of which are true in this case.
Beta or not, it's often risky to use the very first version of a new software no matter the publisher because there are always major issues to fix.
I name these early versions the "Public Beta" (first time used in real condition)
As of today, orders are prompted to install through DazCentral.
... and it's broken.
What are you talking about?!. I can still use DIM and the "Download & Install" button in my Product Library still opens DIM.
The nightmare continues. After several days of having no products and finally re-pointing at the cms in my roaming directory, i at least got my old products back.
But now... every new product i buy and install (through DIM, I'm not trusting DC enough to install it) won't show up in Daz Studio until i close, re-open, and then manually install the product through the content tab.
And then... just when i thought it couldn't get worse, today I bought and installed UltraScenery, and although it shows up in the product list, it simply says "File not Found" and does not offer the "Install" option at all. When I reimport metadata (which i notice now uses DC, even though I didn't install it), it tells me it failed and ends.
Daz... what [...] are you doing about this? It's been WEEKS. You've destroyed my ability to find my products, and I am terrified of re-installing and losing all the paths in my scenes.
FIX... IT.
Please don't use hard breaks to add a blank lline - it makes it impossible to insert a reply mid-quote without fiddling with the HTML, and the default style will give blank liines anyway.
What path did you change? The database is in the %AppData%/daz3 3d/cms/contentcluster/ folder byt default anyway so I'm not sure why Daz Central and other methods would disagree.
Theer's no point in installing through DIM and then through Daz Connect - you just end up with duplicated files. It does sound as if either DIM is not communicating with the content management system or, possibly, as if the content paths are not matching between DIM and DS. If you look in the Installed tab in DIM do most products have a tick next to them?
As far as I know UltraScenery does not yet work with a Connect install. What do you mean when you say that the metadata uses Central? Are you looking at the /data/cloud/metadata/ folder? That is used by Daz Connect, not Daz central (which is just a nother way to do Install Manager-style installs). What tellls you that it failed - the metadata import or the installation of UltraScenery?
Scenes use relative paths for content that was in a mapped content directory - otherwise they wouldn't be portable.
I am only installing through DIM. I uninstalled Central the first day, and haven't re-installed, but since that fiasco everything installed through DIM has to then be re-installed once i open Daz Studio (by right-clicking on the product icon and selecting "Install"). However, in this latest case of Ultrascenery, the "install" option is not available inside of Daz Studio, and it just tells me the file is missing when I try to use it (it has a yellow triangle icon on it).
While in Daz Studio I have tried to use "update metadata". that's when I noticed that in the log it says "Connecting to Daz Central" even though I don't have DC installed. It says updating 1 of 4 and then 2 of 4 and so on, then completes with the message 2 items failed to update. So it's the metadata import that reports a fail. The install in DIM always says it is successful (but i have no idea how that can be, as the product seems to think it is not installed once i open Daz Studio).
Sorry about the hard breaks. It's a bad habit from never knowing in a web page whether "enter" is a paragraph return or a submit.
That's where my cms directory is. DIM uses that directory as it' content db path, which is why I am so confused about 1) products installed through DIM not showing up as installed in DS, and 2) DC thinking that all my products needed re-installing.
If you haven't already you might check in DAZ Studio Edit_Preferences_Content_Content Directory Manager. Click on the + sign in each content set and verify all are pointing to the correct directory. This worked for me. DAZ Central had changed some of them and I had a heck of a time getting everything working. Good luck!
And do the same in DIM to make sure they match.
What is the correct directory? I guess I mean what is the default supposed to be?
You and Fixmypcmike were absolutely right. There were several garbage paths in both Daz Studio and DIM, and one of them was set to be used on DIM. Seems like the Daz Central install must have changed some of them, but deleting them all, finding all the products that had used them in an install, uninstalling those products, then reinstalling using the proper install path worked.
Daz Central - Large and In Charge!
Quite the mess, I have (as far as I know) not lost any content, but I do resent the forced installation of the regular DAZ4.12, I was happy with the pro beta 4.12, but now all of my paths have been taken over, and my custom content scattered between 2 installs, and none of my Installed Content is showing up in the smart content pane of 2 different installs. Now I have to fetch all of my files, especially my saved content, which reprents a few years of work, unique custom characters, some modelling, my scenes (hundreds if not over a thousand), Install packages, gather them all in one location seperate from Daz, then proceed to uninstall everything, and then do a fresh install and then re-insert my saved files and then re-install every single package, Probably about a five to ten hour process. Careful with this, it's nice to see that new users will get an easy way to do it, but DIM was not exactly a rigamarole. General IQs must be dropping that DAZ3d saw the need for this. I don't blame them, but wow, talk about being blind-sided and regretting the install. Guess I'm probably not going to use DAZ for another week or so. My runtime folder just clocked in at 945GB; maybe a break and re-organization can be a good thing. Guess it will be a few days before I can resume work on my projects. Might need another HD as well...
Word of advice, be careful and make sure you have a backup of your MyDaz3d Library (or just yank it before installing) because there could be a heart attack for users that are not careful here. It won't delete your work, but it might look as though it has until you dig.
I don't think you need to reinstall everything, just fix your paths in DS and DIM. DIM can uninstall anything DazCentral installed so you can reinstall it in the correct place
I get that, but at this point, I think it's time for a culling of content that I will probably never use again, and so many test renders that are taking up needless space. That's my clue and I have already started the process. I figured it out an hour ago, but thank you for the confirmation!