Guide to Making and Using a Clean Library

By Steve C

Clean Library Purpose:

The purpose of a clean library is to help isolate and catch errors before submitting, or after completing fixes. Some of the errors it will catch are Listed Below, and when used in conjunction with the trouble shooting log a large portion of errors could be caught before submitting, thus saving time till product is passed and put into the store. This could possibly be the biggest time saver you can use to speed up getting your product into the store.

Some Errors Caught when using a Clean Library in order of frequency: (There are more, these are just the common ones)

1) Texture path errors

2) Data folder pathing errors.

3) Missing data files.

4) Missing texture files.

Creating a Clean Library

To Create a Clean library, it is recommended to download the needed files and make it manually.

Follow the steps below:

1) Load the Daz 3D Website [https://www.daz3d.com]{.underline}.

2) Log into your account

3) Look for the Product Library Icon {width="0.2707075678040245in" height="0.37188867016622923in"} at the top

4) In the Filter Section type Daz Studio 4.x Pro and hit the filter button.

{width="2.4948009623797027in" height="2.34in"}

5) Select Daz Studio 4.x Pro at the bottom to pull it up. (at the time of writing current version is 4.15)

6) Look for Default Resources for DAZ Studio 4. near bottom of the page and hit the download under the manual column.

{width="6.4563823272090985in" height="0.40177055993000876in"}

7) Save this to your desired location.

8) Repeat the process and download the following as examples: (based on your needs ensuring it is only the base figures start essentials here I list Genesis 3 and 8 since they are most common.)

a.  Genesis 8 Female Starter Essentials

b.  Genesis 8 Male Starter Essentials

c.  Genesis 3 Female Starter Essentials

d.  Genesis 3 Male Starter Essentials

e.  The Anatomical Elements are needed if you are going to be
    > supporting/Working on the External Anatomical elements. Those
    > are named such as Genesis 8 Female Anatomical Elements.

9) Create a folder called Clean Library (it can be anywhere) and unzip the files you just downloaded into this folder.

10) This is all that should be in the Clean library nothing else.

11) Congratulations your clean library is ready to use.

12) If you work with things like the Genesis 8 Female or Male Head and Body Morphs download them and put them in their own folder, and map in to content library as needed. this way you will not contaminate the clean library with un-needed files.

Mapping in Your Product Folder and Clean Library

For the purposes of the rest of the guide we will refer to your current working folder as Your Product Folder. I Will give a short example of how you map in the Clean Library and Your Product Folder.

1) Open Daz Studio and locate the Content Library Tab. Depending on your layout your workspace may look different.

{width="3.907782152230971in" height="2.9340616797900263in"}

2) Right click on the DAZ Studio Formats and Select Add a Base Directory then navigate to Your Product Folder and Select it.

3) Repeat that process to add in the Clean Library This is called "mapping" a folder in.

4) If You Already have things here Select Remove All Base Directories, or if you prefer you can select one of the directories under DAZ Studio Formats right click and select Remove Base Directory.

5) If your product requires another product to function correctly for example you are working on a texture expansion for a prop, then you would map in that required product folder individually after the Clean library.

a) It is a good idea as a content creator to keep individual folders of characters or whatever to map in as needed instead of mapping in a folder that has all the characters/Props, then it can be extremely hard to tell what is causing the errors if there are ton of products mapped in.

6) The reason for putting Your Product Folder first is that if you need to resave and make corrections it will go into Your Product Folder incase you forget to point the save to correctly, and not get into the clean library, saving you from corrupting it with extraneous files.

Using the Clean Library and Trouble Shooting Log

The Following section will be a very short rundown on how to use the Clean library in conjunction with the trouble shooting log. The example that we will use is a prop.

1) Load each prop into the workspace(scene)

a.  Look for any pop-up errors

b.  Look in the trouble shooting log for any errors you can find the
    > trouble shooting long under Help \>

Troubleshooting > View Log File

c. Errors can show as Warning, Or Error.

d. it is beyond the scope of this guide to list all the possible > Errors/Warnings, if in doubt about something ask > [pasupport@daz3d.com]{.underline}

e. You can not just rely on pop up messages for errors, looking in the > trouble shooting log is a must for ensuring that your product is > error free.

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2) Load the materials if any for the props and follow the above steps

3) Do this for all the items in your product.

This was a very simple example and used just to illustrate how it is done.