Days Gone 15 - Large Scene Management and the Poser Hierarchy Editor

This is one of the largest scenes I've created in a long while. There are LOTS of elements and lots of pieces to them. If you've ever used Poser with a large scene, you know that it can be difficult (and frustrating) to use the Hierarchy Editor to find a specific nested node (in lay speak, that means you have to look through a complicated list to find something, like the hair, that is buried deep in the list of an item's editable properties).

A rare color view of my scene (note the pink light on the hero:
This sort of trick makes it easy to spot which light is hitting which surface
(and since I work in b&w output, the light color doesn't matter as
far as the final render is concerned).

You can also see a little of the complicated Hierarchy Editor, which shows
a list of everything in the scene.

The way I navigate this long, complicated list is to put really long names with dashes (or other characters) in the item name property. So, instead of looking for Nirona, Michael 4 (Hero) and the Dragon, I'm looking for:

• V4 Nirona +++++++++++++++++ V4 Nirona
• Michael 4 = = = = = = = = = = = = =  Hero M4
• DAZ Dragon 3 - - - - - - - - - - - - DAZ Dragon 3

A compressed look at the items in the scene, as shown in the Hierarchy Editor.
Also notice that I mark one item with the words, HIDE, which is a very
useful note for later. I also used numbers (2 ----- 2, or 1 ----- 2) to
mark which items are near each other.

These long names really stand out in the list and (so far) do not seem to have any negative effect on application performance. Here's a screenshot of the Hierarchy Editor window, and although it's not highlighted, you can see that I also mark specific items of interest that are nested inside a figure. In this case, I've added a bunch of dashes to the M4 figure's hair, making it easy to find in case I need to make a quick fit adjustment.

Click to see it in more detail.

I know a few people who find this to be VERY weird. They like short names and don't want to clutter things up. I, on the other hand, find that this is a very useful method of finding what I want very quickly.

NEXT TIME: Moving on to the next steps