Fix your Metadata

3D Software Discussions DAZ Studio
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1

If you have noticed that you can no longer filter your Smart Content based on the figure that’s selected in your scene your metadata has become corrupted.

This started happening to people about 6 months ago and was caused by some bad metadata in one of the products we’ve bought, downloaded, and installed either through DIM or DAZ Central (both applications use the same database).

The fix is pretty simple, and I just got done doing it and can verify now that it works.

Here’s how to do it:

  1. Use DIM and uninstall every product that has the word “starter” in its name. Sure you can only uninstall the Genesis 8 and the Genesis 3 starter essentials if you want, but I decided to go for broke. Doing this uninstalled about 20 different products.
  2. Now, if Studio isn’t running launch it. If it’s running, no biggie. Move on to Step 3.
  3. In Studio, go to your Smart Content tab. Click the pancake menu, select Content DB Maintenance.
  4. In the Content DB Maintenance window, click the Re-Import Metadata option and then click Accept.
  5. In the Import Metadata window, make sure everything is selected (it should be by default), and uncheck all the options except User Data Overrides Product Data (this way if you’ve made any custom metadata changes and have saved them out they’ll still apply.).
  6. Click Accept to begin the process.
  7. And wait. Depending on the speed of your machine and how many products you have installed it can take a few minutes or up to an hour.

While it’s doing its thing unfortunately Studio won’t be accessible. So now would be a good time to catch up on some YouTube videos. :slight_smile:

  1. When the process has finished, go back into DAZ Install Manager.
  2. Re-download and/ or re-install those products that had “starter” in their name that you uninstalled in Step 1.

Congratulations. Your metadata is fixed.

So what actually happened?

Re-importing your metadata caused Studio to basically re-insert all those metadata rows back-in to the Postgres database that powers DAZ CMS (and the Smart Content).

When you re-install the starter essentials at the very end of the operation you’re basically telling studio to re-set up those linkages and indexes that link up the various Genesis characters with the rest of the metadata.

This should clear things up for you semi-permanently unless DAZ fucks up the metadata in another product down the road.

Hope this helps.

2

The amount of poorly constructed metadata that comes out of DAZ is staggering, so many male products (even Named Characters I’m looking at you Dasan 8) that come listed as for Genesis Female is pathetic.

I have so many tickets open for this problem and even though I provide them EVIDENCE (its in the damn XML files they package) they insist for a year that the problem is me or my metadata or the fact that I FIX their broken shit and thereby somehow make it worse (no, I’m not a DBA, but I’ve done more database work than 99% of your support employees, combined).