I've got a bit of a moral problem. I bought a ship prop from the marketplace, and it couldn't do what I wanted. So I'm modeling my own ship in 3D Max, it's shape is inspired by the ship I bought, but it's functionality is vastly different - and I might say, superior.

Here's a small list of the major differences:

• my ship will be a posable figure (posable rudder, sails and hatches), not a static prop;
• my ship is scaled to accomodate Poser characters as crew;
• my ship has much more detail in the rigging and hull;
• my ship has UVMapping that allows a simple wooden plank texture to follow the lines of the hull planks;
• my ship renders fine in both FireFly and the P4 renderer.

Now I wonder, if I upload it to freestuff, would it hurt sales by that merchant? And if so, is it morally acceptable to upload it? Or is it unfair competiton?
A note: I model everything myself, not a single polygon of the merchant's ship has been used. Same goes for textures, I'll make them myself too, so there will be no copyright issues.

I'd like to know your views on this. I feel this is a different situation from character packs, since generally speaking the character packs in the marketplace have at least the same quality as those in freestuff.

I am not a coordinator but I would say it is fine to upload it as a freebie, I am sure that there are many other free versions of marketplace things already. I wouldn`t worry about the things being similar.

So what you're saying is that a product extant in the store doesn't do wha tyou want it to do, so you are making your own version that does, correct? That wouldn't be unfair, that would be simply competition. Unfair would be if you were to undermine the sales of the other set on it's own merits by, say, contacting renderosity and saying if they make it harder for him to sell than you you'll give them a bigger cut. That's business. It has a set of rules that are completely different from the other rules at play here: Artistry rules. What you are looking at is what I call artistic integrity in the marketplace. It's bad terminology on my part, but it basically means that folks in the marketplace have this habit of not doing what someone else has already done. A sign of a maturing market is the loss of that integrity. I say go for it. But it does tend to go against the grain of a lot of folks...

THe fact that you're doing your own modeling seperates it from the other figure. Everyone models differently, and quality shows. There's a ton of Vicki dresses that look alike in style, with very minor variations. Let's say your ship is a galleon. The other ship is also a galleon. Yours will have a slightly different style, the way all galleons did (after all, each was made from a slightly differing blueprint). Your textures will be different. Your rigging will be different. It's not the same ship. In fact, your ship may actually increase sales of the other one, since you'd want two different ships in a good sea battle. An example of this is the Aeon figures. People picked up David to get the converted morphs Dodger made for the Aeon figures, then transfered them to M3. David sales increased, his morph sales increased, and Aeon sales increased. Go for it.

Now that I think about it, I'm actually building something that doesn't exist in the marketplace yet. My ship is about 10 times as large as the prop that inspired it, and designed to be used in naval scenes with Poser figures on board. And it WILL be free, I'm not a merchant, and I've no intention of becoming one. Thanks for the input!

Keep us posted.

I see no reason for not having both. In fact, I'd bet a chest of gold doubloons that prop will sell even more because of your model. Folks'll want it for background detail while using yours with for the main image. I know I certainly will.

svdl -Are you going to post any WIP pics?

I went through similar anxiety over my
free SoundScape script. It sort of resembles
an earlier MP product, in that it connects
actions to sounds.... but I finally decided
that it simply isn't the same thing.

Overall, if each new product had to avoid
resembling other products, there wouldn't
be any competition. If Ford could prevent
other automakers from producing four-door
sedans, Ford would have a monopoly on that
type, and its quality would inevitably decline
until nobody bought any four-door sedans!

Message edited on: 08/26/2004 15:07

Not your fault that someone else wasn't able or was unwilling to improve... /P

Not your problem. If yours is not more or less identical, you can do your own thing. :] Fish

no problems here seeing someone create an item similar but better to a marketplace item and give it away for free.

It's lookin' excellent !!!

Keep on truckin' ... ;=]

Suggestion ... Keep a watch on that polygon count ...

... and reduce it where ever you can.

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

Woah! And you're giving this away? Quick, somebody call a doctor! Seriously, that is one sweet boat. Can hardly wait till it's released, I've got some pirate gear from Poserworld I'm just dying to try out.

Oh MY. Now =THAT= is drool worthy! Save some of your polybudget; can you imagine the effects you could have with dynamic cloth for the sails (images of animations in VuePro dancing in the noggin.....) For that matter, you might want to see if one of the developing dynamics guru's can suggest some alternatives for the ropes (example being adapting some of Ajax's EPT tubes for the main lines; if used with dynamic sails, then you could animate the lines and have the reaction seen in the sail).

Looks great SVDL!! And I wouldn't worry about competing; there's plenty of things I've bought which I felt weren't up to snuff and would have caused me to improve them if I had the skills. Competition should also make vendors improve their wares if they've got pride in their work. So it is good what you're doing, on both levels!

Actually, I was going to use cloth dynamics in Poser to generate billowing morphs for the sails. That works, my previous sailing boat has billow morhps in its sails made that way. And the fluffy stuff of the ropes are not polygons, it's a noise shader on the displacement node. The long straight parts of the ropes consist of only 6 polygons each, it's the knots and bent parts that's consuming lots and lots of polygons. I think I can keep it under 100,000 polys. I've run into a limitation of dynamic clothes: only the last bodypart in the hierarchy can be saved as dynamic cloth. The cloth room is clearly designed for cloth props. I want the ship to be usable in both P4 and P5. The P5 extras will consist of better materials, using displacement. I've got another trick for the main lines: point-at behaviors combined with welding to non-parents. Works perfectly, and you don't have to pose a thing, it works automatically! A trick I thought up after reading B.L. Renders book on figure creation. I've got a simpler boat (only two sails) here in freestuff using that technique. The only thing that doesn't work right in that one are the three line ends. One of these days I'll replace them and use some separate EasyPose rope figures.

That's a great looking ship, and it's free, too, so if anything, you're doing the Poser community a big service by offering it. Thanks in advance.

Isn't 100,00 polys quite big, not including textures? By the time you add some large texture maps, there won't be any memory left to even load a figure. BTW what does the point at behaviours actually do? It look great though!

100,000 polys IS big. But V3 has 75,000, so I expect the ship will work on systems that can handle V3. By the way, the Warraok Kitt by faveral - a fantastic ship! - has half a million polys and renders fine on my systems. I've got to admit, both my workstations are pretty high-end (Athlon XP 2700 / 1Gb / Ti4200 and P4 2.8 /1.5 Gb /Radeon 9600 XT) so that's no real indication. I think I can keep the texture memory down by using tiled UV mapping. Then I won't need maps like 4000x4000. I think I can have a great wood texture at 1000x1000, if I tile it like 8x8 over the hull, it will be very hires without using an excessive amount of memory.

About point-at behavior, it's most commonly used to have a character look at the camera. A simple test: load a character, select his/her left eye, choose Object|Point At and select the main camera from the hierarchy dialog. Do the same for the right eye. Now rotate your main camera somwewhat. You'll see that the character keeps looking at the camera.

I "wood" think you could get a good wood texture with about half of that. Maybe less. My concern wasn't just the base poly count, but adding cannons, and additonal props on board. I know the basis of "point at" but what are you actually doing with it?

The point-at trick I use: the ropes consist of two parts. The lower part has a ring on deck as a parent, the upper part has a ring on the yard as a parent. Their end points coincide. I let the lower part of the rope "point at" the ring on the yard, and the upper part of the rope "points at" the ring on deck. Then I hack the CR2 and add a weld statement so that the lower and upper part of the ropes are welded. That will work, since they have identical vertices. Now if I pose the yard, the ring on the yard will move with it, the lower part of the rope will rotate to keep on pointing at the ring, and the upper part of the rope will rotate to keep pointing at the ring on deck. Last but not least, the weld statement makes sure the ends of both rope parts stay together. Since it's rather useless to pose the rope parts and the rings themselves, I make them unselectable and hide them from the menu (hidden=1, addToMenu=0 in the CR2) If you want to see this trick in action, download my sailing boat from the freebie section here. I've used it on the pulleys and ropes that connect the boom to the deck.

VERY cool. you could use that on chains, or vehicle parts too, I'll bet?

It might work on chains, but I doubt it. The links of the chain will probably deform too much, especially when the distance between the end points of the chain changes. It'll work perfectly for pistons, actually, B.L. Render uses a piston as an example in her book. It's a sort of inverse kinematics, without the hassle of setting up IK chains, and it is surprisingly light on resources. I'm rather happy I found out about it!

oh w0w what a nice ship! NICE WORK!

I'll have to get that BL render book one of these days...

It should be workable, my system is only a PIII 850 with a mere 526meg of RAM and I have rendered the Warraok 'sails out' with a fully clothed V3, fully clothed M3, treasure chest, Lyne's parrot, and a few other props and an imported BG pic (the clothing was all pirate outfits). So if I can pull off a render like that then your mere 100,000 polys shouldn't eat up too many crackers ;p

I wouldn't sweat it; if I'd had a nickel from everyone who had come along long after me who modelled something I did, I'd make as much money as some of the folks in the marketplace..of course, usually they're better and more detailed models..;) there's only so much originality out there..but then it's going to be yours in the end..and it would make a nice freebie as well..;)

Well I assume the "original" model was the warroak? I have it and I was also a little dissapointed when I found out you had to scale it like some 1500% to make it fit the Poser characters, coz the textures suffer badly. The warroak is a GREAT ship and I haven't regretted I bought it, but this one will be even better, coz it would be a PERFECT foreground and the warroak would be so perfect as background. I know what you mean about feeling unfair, but look at all the V3 textures and characters out there.. They're all essentially alike (since they're for the same character) but there are wast differencies in quality. (and the cheap/free ones aren't always the worst...) So please go for it! Now I gotta study your other sailing ship some more. I downloaded it a few days ago but I haven't had time to play with it yet :o)

No, the original was not the warraok. I have it, and I'm pretty happy with it, although the textures suffer when I scale it up. I can fix that in the material room for the tileable textures (dialing down U scale and V scale to 0.1 helps a lot!). The original is the medieval merchant ship by Pauli. That one has major problems. Inverted normals, about half of them, and the meshes are none to good either. It only renders well when it is rendered from a great distance and takes up only a minor space in the final image. I'm rather disappointed in it.

If you download the Powerloader from Vanishingpoint, you will see how the "point at" feature was used to make the pistons on the legs work on the model. You can also use the point at feature for some neat tricks, like folding undercarraige on aircraft, so that the undercarraige can have several moving parts, but you just turn one dial to retract the undercarraige, and the point at feature makes all the other parts bend correctly. (you'll see this in my upcoming mystery model)

Apart from Poser stuff, my other great love on the PC is Adventure Gaming. It'll take a lot for anyone to convince me that "The Longest Journey" is not the best game ever made (and I have played Vice City too). Your ship immediately reminded me of the one in Longest Journey, complete with the Captain who was waiting for some wind to be conjured up. Great!

Seriously, if a model has inverted normals I can't see how it could pass testing here. I would request a refund. That is a definate ERROR and should be corrected. I see I have to play more with tiling textures :o) Yeah the warraok is a great model and I'm happy I bought it.

I'd love one of these when it comes available. I think you've got a definate goodie there.

Check out the website for Longest Journey 2, due out either next year or the year after. The Longest Journey had to be one of the best adventure, if the not the best, games of all time!!!

I certainly will check out the LJ2 site (thanks). Now if someone could make a mimic ready April Ryan figure, then Victoria3 just might be out of a job!

No kidding eh? The new updated graphics will make a great game even better!!! Just hope that my current machine will be able to run it... I think I will have to go create an April Ryan character now outta V3 or SP3... lol

I'm a little bit of a naval history geek, and I have to say that your ship doesn't feel right, Obviously you're learning a lot about how to build and rig a ship for Poser, but this has a sort of cheap-Hollywood look to it. Anyway, one feature a lot of people miss is the amount of tar on ropes. You could probably make all the standing rigging black, or a very dark brown. The same for the timber of the hull. I'm afraid I know more about the Nelson era, so I can't really comment about the detail of the rigging and masts. Some things, like the different thicknesses of the ropes, should be easy to sort out. Now, as for Anne Bonney and Mary Reade, Vicky or Stephanie?

AntoniaTiger: Could you tell me a bit more? Fixing the colors of the ropes is easy, this was just a fast procedural shader slammed on, but there probably will be more fundamental flaws. I'm trying to build a 15th century craweel, something like the Nina or Pinta. For instance, I don't know whether those ships already had a steering wheel (sorry, I don't know the English word for it) or that they still used a tiller. It's very hard to get detailed information on that period. There's loads of information on the great ships of the line of the Nelson era, but building the HMS Victory goes beyond my skills - and patience! Besides, the elaborate sterns of those ships, not to mention the 80 or so guns and gunports, would play havoc with the polygon count. I'm not going for complete historical accuracy. But if you know a few facts about these ships - I'd love to know more about the rigging, I'm only guessing right now - please tell me.

svdl some Facts for you along with some hi-rez photos & an unfortunately very small side view blueprint of the restored Nina.

I'll be some of the plastic modelers who have models based on these ships would have good accurate info. They'll usually toss you way too much info!

Thanks cooler and Gareee! That's what I need.

Attached Link: http://www.naut-res-guild.org/

Attached Link: http://www.bruzelius.info/Nautica/Nautica.html

Gack! You guys type faster than I do! However, I HAVE been on such a ship. (Santa Maria replica) 888888888888888888888888 <---pieces of eight My understanding is that there have been threads in the past in the Merchants Forum, complaining about "competition" from freestuff providers. (This is hearsay.) However, freestuff was here first. Sometimes it is better. The price of something is totally unrelated to quality or scarcity in a virtual market. If you make something better and give it away, the merchants will have to improve their products, provide services, whatever. Sometimes the services include stability (knowing that you will be able to get help with something next year), sometimes flexibility (works in P5?), sometimes interlocking support from others (morphs-textures-clothes). Koz and Maya give away great hair, but Quarker, Hmann, Neftis, Anton and others have all managed to sell hair. Lots of hair. What I would suggest is that this ship be a little different from the Craweel. In the age of wooden ships each one was hand-built. Sailors exactly identified that fleck on the horizon by the line of a prow or height of a mast or cut of a jib (useful when piracy was rampant and you might need to run for it!). Ships were not only hand-built, but patched at sea. In a convoy of Indiamen, one would expect to pick out peculiarities of each boat, even more so than ducklings in a line! In a sea battle, or even sitting in a foreign port, one would be dealing with different nationalities... so what would the Danish and English and Spanish ships of this time have featured? Even a slightly different cut to the sail would add variety. If Pauli's ship is German and yours is French, for example, there is a solid underpinning for any images showing battle, confrontation, or a race to claim a trade route. Another thing I'd suggest might be harder, but you are planning this for close-ups. The decks were sanded daily (probably to keep them from getting slimy and slippery), so would look softer, whiter, with a less obvious grain pattern than the hull or any of your upright trim pieces. I'm not sure when they started putting copper on ship bottoms, but they'd be pitched to the waterline (noticeable when a ship is leaning with her sails full of wind). If you go with smaller maps, you can have more of them, and actually improve the realism. As long as your ship is not derived from the other (no mesh or textures used as a stepping stone to your own), there shouldn't be a copyright problem. However, he has done a certain amount of research in order to build a likely reconstruction for his ship. Merchant ships such as this have appeared on the heraldic devices for families and cities as well as guilds: The North Borneo Company; Bristol, the Borough of Bermondsey, the Burgh of Alloa, the Town of Eccles, the Town of Oban; Conder, Albemarle O Dewar, Sir Arthur MacPherson, Charles T Brisbane, Campbell, William K MacDonald, John A Galbraith, Arthur A Reid, Alexander MacMorran (all from a quick eyeballing through one of my heraldry books)... yes, I still would rather reach for a book. Columbus's ships were trading ships: small and tubby. 2 were caravel/carvel/craweel. A replica of the Santa Maria is at Columbus Ohio, and it is open to the elements - not decked over - so that must have increased the misery. The Mary Rose has been raised. The Vasa is slightly later. A bit of Google/Image dug up these, so you should be able to find a nice specimen. http://www.citycliks.com/nina.htm http://www.abc.se/~m10354/publ/vasa.htm http://cma.soton.ac.uk/Research/Kravel/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/wales/2413337.stm http://www.geocities.com/glupscherle/shipsection (Drawing of a carrack of 1502, David Meagher 2001) http://www.maryrose.org/visiting/tour1.htm http://www.webrighter.co.uk/modelkit/jotika/maryrose.htm (model with crisp details) HTH, Carolly

Hauksdottir: Thanks for the links. I already checked out the Mary Rose and the Vasa, but those were large ships, too large for my project. My intention is to have a ship that allows a small Poser crew, so maybe three masts is too many. There are two major reasons I won't use any of the meshes or textures of the ship from the store. First, it would be theft. Second, they're not good enough. I've done some research myself, too, and there are already marked differences. For istance, the foremast of my model is tilted forward (based on images I found on the Net), whereas Pauli's ship has a vertical foremast. The mizzen sail I use is triangular, Pauli uses a trapezoid. I just found out the yards of most craweels consists of two pieces lashed together, I'll incorporate that in my model. Also a marked difference. Thanks for the pointer on the pitch, I'll use very dark textures for the bits under the waterline, and light colored wood for the deck planks. As far as I know, copper plating wasn't used in the 15th century, I think they started using that late in the 16th, early 17th century. I'm seriously considering dropping the forecastle, the Nina and the Pinta didn't have one, and the difference between my model and the one in the store will be much more marked. By the way, was the Santa Maria clinker built or carvel built? From what I read, I think it was an older type of ship than the Nina an the Pinta, more like the Hanze ships of the 14th century. I don't know the English name, the Dutch name is 'kogge'. As far as I know, the Santa Maria didn't have a rudder at the stern, but a steering oar, much like the Viking ships. I'd like to know some first hand information! Thanks again, this is useful info, it'll delay my project, but it'll make it much better. Steven.