(Five Stars out of Five)
This time we take a look at a program that every Poser user should own to help manage their growing collections of Poser Assets. 3D Content Installer is a small, well-designed, and inexpensive program that automates the content installation process and makes managing multiple external Runtimes a lot easier.
One of the issues that faces every Poser user as they start to learn the ways of the program and build their library of assets is content management. All the figures, textures, MAT poses, props, and animated poses can grow to several gigabytes in size and since, by default, installers and Poser itself like to put everything into the program’s own internal Runtime, this can make Poser’s functionality start to suffer. Assets become harder to find in the ensuing confusing mess of a Runtime and Poser takes longer and longer to switch directories within the Runtime.
Eventually, the user is left with no choice but to “nuke the site from orbit.”
Migrating Poser assets into multiple Runtimes can be a daunting and mind-numbing task of re-installing each and every asset by hand. Given Poser’s system of file dependencies among its assets, re-installation is the only way that migration works. Simply trying to move assets within the Runtime or even move the assets to an external Runtime stands an excellent chance of breaking the file dependencies and making the asset unusable. Trust us on this.
Okay, so now that we’ve defined the challenges involved in managing and migrating Poser content, let’s take a closer look at one tool that can make content migration much, much easier. 3D Content Installer, available at Renderosity for USD $9.99, automates the installation of Poser content into any user-specified Runtime.
The program is small and self-contained with a very easy install. To use the program, place the Poser Asset installers and/or zip archives into the “Install” directory. The program will automatically start going through the “Install” directory and activate or extract each installer/archive in turn and then install the content into the specified Runtime. It’s a lot of fun to watch, especially on Daz installers, as the program automatically chooses the correct options and fills in the blanks. Installers/archives are then moved into a “Success” or “Failed” directory, depending on whether the content was properly installed.
The program looks for the proper Runtime directory structure in each archive and if it fails to find one, it will bounce the archive into the “Failed” directory. These can be manually installed later on.
The program also gives users the option on successful installs to delete the installer/archive. For obvious reasons, this is not an option we’d recommend—at least not without ensuring that the installers/archives were properly backed up onto DVD-Rs first.
And if you’ve made an error in assigning an installer to one particular runtime, 3D Content Installer also gives you the option to create uninstaller files for every bit of content that you’ve added, making content management just a little bit easier.
By editing a text file, you can create a list of your favourite external Runtimes to populate the program’s drop-down menu of install locations. This can be a huge time-saver in adding content to existing runtimes.
How effective is the program? Well, let’s put it this way: we recently had to do a complete migration of over 32 GB of Poser content into two dozen external Runtimes and 3D Content Installer allowed us to do this within a day and a half. The largest part of that was just sorting out the installers/archives into the proper categories so they could be batch processed by 3D Content Installer. A manual migration attempted over a year ago took us over a week and was so riddled with errors that we had no choice but to “nuke the site from orbit” and purchase 3D Content Installer. In contrast, 3D Content Installer only had one problem file out of the thousand or so that we migrated.
The problem file was Victoria 4.2. We ended up doing a manual install on her, so we’re not sure if the problem was the Daz installer, or 3D Content Installer. But we’re willing to give 3D Content Installer the benefit of the doubt.
This program is one we highly recommend for every Poser user. It’s small, professional, inexpensive, and very good at what it does and will save you a lot of time and headaches. It’s certainly entitled to the five stars we’re giving it.
(Five Stars out of Five)
