Best practices for saving a character

Cross22

I have applied morphs, poses and tweaked all the surfaces on a Genesis character to my liking. Then added Wildmane hair and some wardrobe.
Now I would like to use that character in a couple of scenes. What is the recommended way of saving said character including his wardrobe ? There are so many Save As.. options I don't know which one to pick.

Same question also applies to props- after importing an Obj customizing its shader and attaching some child objects, how should I save that scene prop ?

SpottedKitty

For the complete character, the best thing is "Save As Scene Subset" and make sure you're doing it in the Content Library tab. This saves your file into a known content location, which makes it much easier to find again and solves a few other potential problems.

Saving a prop is potentially a bit more involved, but the gotchas are easily avoided. The save option you want is in the File menu; it seems this can't be done directly in the Content Library tab. It's File>Save As>Support Asset>Figure/Prop Assets and make sure you are saving it to a folder in a D|S mapped content location. This has to be done manually, so if you don't know where your content folders actually are, now's the time to find out.

One other thing, where is the .obj file you originally imported? Again, this should really be in a known content location — your content folder has a Runtime folder, inside this is a Geometries folder, and the .obj file should be in a folder inside the Geometries folder. I know this looks a bit awkward, but it's done like this so that all content files used by D|S are always in a content folder it knows how to find; otherwise it's easy to lose track of things stored in any old folder somwehere else if you need to move the entire content folder, e.g. if you're moving everything to a new computer.

Cross22

I am not seeing "Save as Scene Subset" inside the Content Library tab.
Where should that option be located?

When I select File>Save As>Support Asset>Figure/Prop Assets, does that save the entire geometry and material data? If so I would not need the original OBJ any longer, right?

SpottedKitty

The "+" at the bottom of the Content Library tab pops up the save menu, "Scene Subset" is the second option down. Note that this is only active in the "DS Formats" section, you can't save D|S native files into the "Poser Formats" section.

Strictly speaking, you could just forget about the .obj file once you've saved something as a Support Asset, it's just that the last few D|S versions have had the ability to use the Poser-format files as a backup in case the D|S-format converted files are lost or corrupted.

In that case, it is important that the old files were originally placed in the content folder, so that D|S knows where to find them. It's just a habit many long-time D|S users have got into, since importing object or texture files from random places outside the content folder is perhaps the biggest single cause of broken content. (If you give that item to someone else, D|S will look for the folder that exists on your computer, not their computer. This is the whole point behind having a content folder and keeping all content files in it.)

Cross22

Much appreciated. Thank you, Kitty !