• Welcome to the Community Forums at HiveWire 3D! Please note that the user name you choose for our forum will be displayed to the public. Our store was closed as January 4, 2021. You can find HiveWire 3D and Lisa's Botanicals products, as well as many of our Contributing Artists, at Renderosity. This thread lists where many are now selling their products. Renderosity is generously putting products which were purchased at HiveWire 3D and are now sold at their store into customer accounts by gifting them. This is not an overnight process so please be patient, if you have already emailed them about this. If you have NOT emailed them, please see the 2nd post in this thread for instructions on what you need to do

Live Webinar Event! Mastering Clothing Conversion Between Poser & DAZ Studio

Alisa

RETIRED HW3D QAV Director (QAV Queen Bee)
Staff member
QAV-BEE
There is a discussion thread about this, by the way:

Mastering Clothing Conversion Webinar 09-17-16

And if you missed it, you can now get the video recording!

Mastering Clothing Conversion Between Poser and DS - A Digital Art Live Creation at HiveWire 3D

 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
(Joining in) I purchased it from the store, but there seems to be an issue about getting into the files.

The first one comes down with a typical .zip icon, and although I kept getting error messages, it eventually opened and the video plays (I didn't watch it to the end, just saw that it opens and started playing).

The 2nd file comes down with an UnArchiver .zip icon, and it gave me a different error message, but again, after several tries, it finally opened and gave me a playable video file. The error message insisted the file was incomplete, so I don't know whether I've got that whole file, but since it does start playing, I am assuming that I probably do.

The other nine files all come down win a generic document icon and nothing will open them. Changing, the extension of the first of those from .z02 to .zip gave it a typical .zip icon, but it still will not open and gives me the same error messages as when the extension was .z02 Changing the extension back does not change the icon back.

Is there some specific decompression utility which is needed to open the other nine files? I've tried the one that's built into ElCapitan, the StuffIt Expander and the UnArchiver. None of them can get into those files.

I do not recognize any application which would give one extensions .z02-.z10. What were the files compressed with? Is it something that's specific to the PC?
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Those are split multi-part archives. I didn't think they still had those. Back in the mid- to late 80s, on my first DOS 5 computer, I had to do those type of archives on floppy disks because I didn't have a CD/DVD ROM drive in those days.
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
Oh dear. Well. I'm going to have to hope for some kind of solution for getting into them. Otherwise I'll just have to treat it as a return and dump the files. Since even though there may be useful stuff on the two sections that I was able to open, that isn't what I paid for.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
From what I understand, Windows' WinZip works with them, and I believe, though you'd have to check to make sure, there's a Mac version of WinZip. Check it out before you dump them.
 

Sunfire

One Busy Little Bee
QAV-BEE
Contributing Artist
WinZip should open them, you need to open the first one, and unzip it the others will unzip with it. Either that or else it was zipped up wrong as there should only be one file with the .zip extension and then the rest with the z and a number.

I would suggest putting in a ticket to support about it, or giving Alisa a nudge letting her know that multipart zips are not so nice on a mac.
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
Well it doesn't. The free trial gives me a 'file not found' error, and the program -- which I bought -- (I've contacted them to cancel the order and give me my money back), has an interface which makes it apparently impossible to unzip anything until you have already zipped it first. Which just puts you back to where you started, if what you are starting from is a zipped file. Unzipping is evidently just grudgingly served up as an afterthought by the developers. There appears to be no way to set the program to unzip things first.

Any *reputable* compression utility ought to come with an unzipping utility. Or offer one for free for the people who end up downloading one of their damned files.
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
Well, I think I finally got it. That program certainly doesn't make it easy. Who the hell decided that clicking a command when everything in the window is greyed out was clear instructions?

But I do seem to have it now.. The file size is right for the number of pieces (1.05 GB). The two files that I managed to decompress earlier were both smaller -- although one of them was close.

I suspect that I'm still going to want my money back though. I don't approve of companies that force you to purchase the whole program (with a subscription service added in) to decompress their files.
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
I don't use WinZip . . . not sure I ever did. I used to use 7-Zip, but the past few years I've been using PowerArchiver, but I'm not sure if it does multi-part zips.
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
Like I say; it doesn't make it easy. And the application window is no help whatsoever. It took a lot of blundering about with menu commands that looked like possibilities before I stumbled across the right one. And even then everything in the list was greyed out and nothing could be selected. I had to just blindly hit an UnZip button and see what happened.

Talk about opaque interface design...
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Sounds like it. I certainly wouldn't like to use anything like that.

That said, however, I'm not surprised you couldn't select them all, as each one, as I remember from years ago, is tied to the previous zip, so when one is done, it would prompt you to go on to the next zip in order. I don't recall the software I was using, because I was working on DOS based computers back then, and with the advent of CDs and then DVDs, I didn't think there was a real call for these types of zips. Then again, you can't really download a CD or DVD, so I guess for online purposes, it's the only way to go with something which can't be broken up into individual zips successfully.
 

Alisa

RETIRED HW3D QAV Director (QAV Queen Bee)
Staff member
QAV-BEE
Sorry, everyone. This file is too big to be uploaded to our store. We thought the trial version of WinZip would be sufficient to unzip these. We are looking for other options for these humongous files.

I was thinking 7-zip would work, as it's free (I use it exclusively), but I don't think it's available for Macs.

Lisa is dealing with some family issues at the moment so we appreciate your patience.
 

sanbie

Noteworthy
Contributing Artist
Yep took me an awful long time to get the download...but got it in the end by only downloading 1 link at a time!
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
OK, I just searched for 7-Zip for Macs, and came across something that may work best for Mac users, AND it handles multi-part archives. It's called The Unarchiver, and according to the site I found the link on, How To Geek, it's free and available in the Apple/iTunes store.

I'm not sure if it's appropriate to add the link to the How To Geek article here, as it has nothing to do with 3D graphics, so if you want the link JOdel, let me know, or do a similar search for 7-Zip for Macs, and I'm sure you'll find it. The article explains how to use the software, so you can get an idea if it's something you could work with.
 

Sunfire

One Busy Little Bee
QAV-BEE
Contributing Artist
I am surprised winzip is that way for you. I use WinZip and I have never had a problem with it, or with it opening zips I didn't archive myself. Maybe it's the difference between Windows and Mac, I set my default archive program to be winzip but before I did I'd just right click and open with winzip
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
I've been using the UnArchiver for some time now. It's a very decent decompression utility. I had that one pointed out to me over on the DAZ forums when I caught a slew of downloads of updated PC products which evidently had zero-byte files in them. The built-in decompression on the MacOS (of the time. This was a couple of years ago, when I was still running SnowLeopard) couldn't handle those, and they stumped StuffIt Expander as well. The UnArchiver decompressed them without a fuss.

Couldn't handle these, evidently. Although one of the oddities in this whole business is that the first and 2nd file in the set both come down with Zip file icons. The first is a generic .zip icon. But the 2nd was an icon for the UnArchiver (or, more probably, it's companion/parent application, which does compressing). The first eventually opened up as a 100MB file. The 2nd after some fighting, opened up into a file that from its size probably contained the information from the files labeled 01-10. So it now seems quite likely that I did have it all, even if it was in two pieces. But at the time, I wasn't looking at the file sizes, just seeing that I didn't have an obvious way to get into the other nine files.

Yeah, I can see that they wouldn't want one selecting single items from a list of connected files. So greying them out makes a degree of sense. But being able to select the folder they are in, and letting you know that selecting the folder will work would have been helpful. As it stands, there is no clue.

Or, for that matter, having a toggle to change the default from compressing, to decompressing there in the main window, so one can just drop the whole set into the window and have it all decompress. But noooooo. Can't have that.

It will be the end of the week before I find out if they refund my money. If so I'm dumping the whole thing. Otherwise I'll hang onto it, because I paid for it. But I'm not happy. Particularly since the subscription add-on didn't seem to be an option that one could decline
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Ahhhh, I just saw the listed file types for Unarchiver, and figured that would be the answer to your problems.

It's too bad it wasn't. Hopefully you'll be able to get a refund.
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
Well the issue is undetermined. Not that it matters now. I suspect part of the problem is that after the first file opened up from StuffIt, it was no longer in the folder, when I tried the UnArchiver, so I only got a partial result. Obviously, all of the pieces need to be in the same folder.

But, really. Feh!
 

Alisa

RETIRED HW3D QAV Director (QAV Queen Bee)
Staff member
QAV-BEE
The file formats are different for different programs and not every program will combine files split by another program, thus the need to find something free that will work with all OS. The split one WinZip creates do not have the same extensions as the split ones 7-Zip creates. I know 7-Zip works with Win 7 but I don't have a MAC and my computer with Win 10 isn't running at the moment

Anyone who has a Mac or Win 10 and is willing to experiment, please shoot me a pm and I'll split a zip file and see if you can use 7-Zip in Win 10 and UnArchiver to piece it together. That might provide a free option for people. Thanks!
 
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