Organising content after many, many installs...

[starbase1]

Over the years I have installed lightwave time after time for various releases and upgrades, and I am in the process of moving to a new machine.

Does anyone have any recommendations for sorting out the thousands of references between different folders, image map directories etc etc?

I'm spending more time using the file search than Lightwave!

Nick

[IMI]

Oh, that's always a PITA. I had to do that recently.
I'm not sure what you mean by sorting out, but if you mean cleaning up and removing redundancies, such as multiple copies of the same image maps, I dunno - I fight that battle too. 8~

I have over 30 different Content Directories, many of which are more than 4 years old, and the new stuff gets backed up regularly to an external USB HDD. Then it's just a matter of plugging it into the new machine and copying it to the new HDD.
That doesn't solve your current problem, but you're probably going to have to either copy them all manually, or use the Content Manager on everything, unless there's some utility someone made for this. I'd like to know if there is such a thing.

[markschum]

I started a program to read the scene and object files and extract any files referenced . Its not complete yet cause properly parsing the obj file is a bit of a pain. :bangwall:

The biggest problem I have found is that all file referances seem to be relative to the content folder.

[starbase1]

I'd settle for fixing links manually, but I have seriously ended up with about 10 different sets. And I frequently have ended up saving a new model to an old content directory, if I use it as the basis for a new one!

It would be a lot easy to merge them if Windows offered 'overwrite none' as a copy option...

Anyone know of a really good duplicate finder? I have tried quite a few, but they all get messy in this kind of circumstance. In particular a 'wipe out every dupe you find in this folder tree subset' of the ones you searched' would be a big help. I'd plan on copying the lot into a mega content collection first then doing this before merging down...

Nick