I'm told that in newer versions of DAZ Studio 4 Advanced/Pro the "My Stuff" tab was renamed to "Smart Content", but since the vast majority of us do not have access to those versions of DS4, I'm not changing the name in the tutorial, until the Standard Edition is updated too, and we all see the same tabs again.
The new Content Management System for DAZ Studio 4 is immensely useful. Having the content of the "My Stuff" panel automatically filtered by whatever you have selected in the viewport greatly speeds up searching for the correct clothes, materials or poses to apply.
Unfortunately the CMS currently only knows about the sample content that comes with the DAZ Studio 4 beta. Fortunately you can add your own meta-data to the files that you already own; the tools are built right into DAZ Studio 4 (DS4).
To add meta-data to a file or set of files select the folder containing them in the Content Library tab, click on the tab menu icon in the corner of the tab group, and select "Content DB Editor...". A dialogue window will pop open.
The Content DB Editor will list all files in the currently selected Folder as "Assets" in the top half of the window, showing in a table what kind of meta-data is associated with each. Selecting one or more of the listed assets will make them show up in the bottom half of the editor window, where you can assign or edit the data.
Specifically the "Categories" and "Compatibility" sub-tabs are of interest to us, since they govern when and where these assets will appear in the My Stuff tab and the preset lists of the Posing, Shaping, and Surfaces tabs.
Select all the assets that shall receive meta-data at the top, then switch to "Categories" at the bottom. Select one or more of the listed assets, open the context menu (right click on the PC) and choose "Add Root Categories to Selected File(s)". A large list of all the existing default categories will pop open, which you can assign to the assets, e.g. "/Default/Wardrobe/Pants" or "/Default/Presets/Materials".
Switch to the "Compatibility" sub-tab, where you can specify the relation between assets, i.e. which of them are modifiers for which. Each asset can have a declared "Compatibility Base", which tells DS4 what it is, and can have one or more "Compatibilities", which tells DAZ Studio 4 what other assets it can be applied to. This is the information that allows the My Stuff tab to show only the materials or clothes that fit the currently selected figure in the viewport.
The Content Management System comes with several Bases already pre-defined in the database (such as all human DAZ figures from Generation 1-4), but for most objects you will need to create new root and sub-bases from the context menu of the Compatibility Base dialogue.
Declare a compatibility base for each asset that represents a selectable, modifiable viewport object, such as actor figures, props and clothing figures. Assets that share all the same modifiers (e.g. a long and short version of the same pants, which both take the same material, morph and pose presets) can share the same base for simplicity.
Add compatibilities to all assets that modify other objects, such as material presets, poses, morph injections, auto-parented props, clothing figures. Some presets can be compatible with multiple bases (e.g. generic material presets or multi-fit clothes or hair).
After assigning categories, compatibility bases and compatibilities to all assets where appropriate, you can now close the Content DB Editor dialogue.
Finally, in order for DAZ Studio 4 to recognise an asset when it is selected in the viewport or the scene tab, its internal "Scene ID" must be associated with its compatibility base, so that the My Stuff tab can filter ist contents appropriately.
Load an object into the scene, select it, and switch to the Scene tab. From the tab menu select "Edit > Scene ID Editor...", and a new dialogue will pop up. It show you the current name of the node within the scene, its usually invisible internal ID, and its compatibility base - which will be blank in the case of newly added assets. Select the base that you created for this asset and click OK. From now on, whenever this object is loaded into a scene, DS4 will know what it is and which objects and presets are compatible with it.
You're done! Enjoy your new meta-data.
Coming soon: creating Products to group assets.
