Create Metadata for 3rd Party Products in DAZ Studio - YouTube Video Tutorial

[Agent0013]

I know a lot of folks that use DAZ Studio 4+ don't like Smart Content which is made possible by metadata files for the products, but I have found that Smart Content makes finding files relevant to your selected item a whole lot easier. When you have a product in your scene that has metadata, any product that also has metadata that is made for that product can be found via Smart Content. Yes the first iterations of Smart Content were not not that great. Now since DAZ Studio 4.5 to now, this feature has been greatly improved!

Say you have Genesis 2 Female in your scene, (including any special character morphs for her). You want to find Clothing and Accessories for her. You could go to the Content Library and navigate to her folder, but if you have a lot of those types of files installed, you will still be searching for what you want to use wasting some of your time that could be used to further compose your scene. Alternatively, you can go to the Smart Content and by clicking on the filters that help to narrow your search, you can find what you want a lot faster.

The tedium of the search is one thing I get frustrated over, so having metadata files for the products can make my life much less of a hassle when I am creating a scene. A typical search in DAZ Studio's Smart Content for the above mentioned clothing may look like this:

Have G2F selected for this to work.
In Smart Content > Files open Default for the dropdown list.
Find Wardrobe and Click it.
A list of types of clothing will appear in a secondary dropdown list.
Choose let's say Shirts from the list and click it.
A third dropdown list opens under that in the second one.
Select for instance Vests and click on that.
In the right side panel a series of nothing but Vests made for G2F appears, and you can load the one you want from there.

This is just an example of how simple Smart Content is to use.

Now here is why I am starting this tutorial thread. All of us have a lot of products from DAZ 3D and 3rd Party  sites that do not have metadata! Without metadata those products will not show in Smart Content. How can you fix this? Well it just so happens that DAZ Studio has a little known feature that can be used to create metadata and set it all up to show in Smart Content, and even make it work relative to the product you have selected in your scene! This is not just DAZ Studio formatted products that can have metadata that works this way. If you have had DAZ Studio at least since D|S 4.0, you will know that Poser Formatted items can also have metadata.

Up to now though, because this feature was not advertised, and that made it mostly unknown, metadata was not included for any 3rd party content from any other site! Now that has the potential to be changed though. Here is a tutorial that walks you through the steps of making metadata for your 3rd party content. This method can even be used to make metadata for product from DAZ 3D that never had it, and for your own products you have made for DAZ Studio, whether they are in DS formats or Poser formats. The process is the same for both types.

I did not make this tutorial, but it is so well done and will help a lot of us hugely, that I have to share it. So enjoy the video, and perhaps you will learn something of worth to you.

PS: From what I gather there will be more tutorials from this guy on the subject of metadata, so I will likely be sharing those here as well! Be on the lookout for them if this interests you. Let's make using content in DAZ Studio easier!