Recently there was a thread posted about getting comments and feedback in a couple different forums regarding the galleries and such. I sorta decided, ok, I'll start giving contructive feedback on different pictures if the artist expresses an interest in recieving some. And, I have to confess, I've been rather gallery shy for a long while. As hard as I try, there are some things about the gallery system and it's history that still sorta rankle under my surface, so I tend to view them with a jaundiced and prejudicial eye (towards the manner in which the popularity contest is run). Since I've also taken part in another artists site (acid music) which has a bit of a popularity system going to it, I can understand fully the issues that go along with the gallery system and how it works. This time, however, I did my best to go through them and look at the pictures pretty closely. And ran smack dab into a problem that picked the hairs up on my arms. That problem is the wholesale ignoring of the categories. And the single most horrifically destroyed category of them all is the fantasy category. Now, right about now there is a bunch of folks who are already typing replies, lol. Ok -- here's the gist of this one: The categories are there to be used. Pin-ups are pin-ups. Women and men posed provocatively for the predominantly cheesecake look are not fantasy, even if they are in the latest halloween fantasy outfit that exposes the bulk of flesh. I like pin ups, mind you. They are a difficult to master art form, and yes, they are definitely a form of fantasy -- won't argue that point. But there is a reason that the Pin-up gallery is separate from the fantasy gallery. One is for pin-ups, one is for pictures which fit a more literary form of fantasy -- not a more literal definition. The same issue lies within the Horror and the sci-fi gallery. So what's up here? I mean, what's the deal? Are we incapable of putting pics in the right category? Do we need better definitions? I'm even willing to earn the ire of everyone by offering myself up for sacrifice on the rock of actually bothering to sort the damn galleries (although what in God's name made me just do that I'll never understand...). It's an area we are all passionate about, our art, and while we all want the best exposure for it, what's the thoughts of everyone...

What category does naked vicky in a viking helmet fighting space zombies with a vibrosword in an Escher-space go in? Um... just in case I decide to post that image. =D

And in what manner did you compose this masterpiece? Me, I'd likely drop that in the "you need the room next to mine" category. Or fantasy.

My personal thought is that there is too much here ... too many forums, too many gallery categories, too many brokers, too many unused accounts, just too much. In Renderosity's attempt to be all things to all people, it has turned into a nightmarish site. That could be the biggest reason why it has also become nearly impossible for the coordinators and mods to do their jobs properly.

I agree whole heartedly, Deecey. hey -- anyone wanna come over to ODF and hang there? oh. ok. Sorry. nevermind.... hangs head and sulks away, kicking a rock....

I think some people find the categories a bit confusing; I must admit I do. For instance, a couple of my pix look like they're fantasy, given the costumes, weapons, etc. the guys are wearing but I put them in the science fiction section because they're characters from "a distant galaxy". And my Snape renders, they're film/TV, right? But he's a wizard and wizards come under fantasy except my newest one could also be a pin-up. Sometimes I think it'd be simpler if there were only categories for image type (2D, poser, Photography, etc.)and rating (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17). Or would that not work because it'd be over-simplification?

Well, in "the old days" it used to be that there was just a Poser gallery, and a Bryce gallery, and so on. But as membership got larger and the number of postings got to be so many per day, they added the categories so that folks could choose to browse ONLY the categories they were interested in. But there are really too many gray areas in this approach ... first, if you use Poser to develop and pose figures, and then add it to a scene created in in Bryce or Vue, and then do postwork with Photoshop and add effects from Kai's Power Tools, which gallery do you put it in? I don't think the galleries should be broken down by application at all. 2D, 3D, and photography. Why? Because there are a lot of us that could stand to learn things by looking at images done in OTHER applications that we would normally not even think about looking into. Or ... if you do a picture of an alien riding his spaceship with a load of Christmas presents, do you put it in Science Fiction or Holiday? Since you can't double-post, how do you know that you are putting it in the gallery that those interested would find it in? The problem with doing ratings is that EVERYONE will be posting in the R and NC-17 area (LOL), and you are also setting up the site for being even worse in the "titillation" department (word chosen purposely) than it already is. I say the best solution is to drop the application galleries and simplify the categories.

I enquired about gallery rules in other forums so as to have something to compare with the fractal gallery rules. I chose the two biggest program forums that would normally be used to produce some type of artistic statement; bryce and poser. Note here that a photoshop gallery does not exist. If it did I would probably post there. What I determined will strongly affect my future submission placements as to gallery. I consider myself to be a software artist. I do not wish to be pigeonholed as a poser artist, a bryce artist or a fractal artist anymore than I would call someone who paints in oils a grumbacher artist. If these inquiries cause upset please accept my apologies. Mivan

I know this may not be the most sensible suggestion but wouldn't it be far more sensible to combine the Galleries (for the reason stated by ArtyMotion) and allow multi selections of the Catagories? It would allow people to learn what others are doing in other digital art forms, it would remove the need to create extra galleries as new software emerges, and would allow people to post to multiple catagories, so you do not run into the is it Fantasy or is it SciFi.

and allow multi selections of the Catagories That is a brilliant suggestion! One post, multiple categories.

I'd like to see multi selection in both catagories. and the ability to filter out specific catagories when viewing. for example: I wanna see poser work that isnt pin-ups or portrates and doesnt contain nudity.

I think we're all agreed we want it simpler, the trick now is how to do it. I very much like your idea of multi-selections, with filtering ability, of course.

Fewer catagories, and a more robust search engine. Hands down, that's what the whole site needs. You have to search through twenty less-than-optimal catagories to find what you want, and there is always the chance the one you really wanted is in some catagory you didn't think applied. And, of course, in every one of those catagories you have to wade through the inappropriate and the outright spam. Yet, you can't run a proper search as the engine doesn't handle phrase search or booleans. This over-catagorizing, this terrible urge to pidgeon-hole everything and to get to the customer as efficiently as possible only what is most like what they bought previously, has infected American merchandizing. I'd like to see less of it here. Winnow it down to perhaps eight major gallery catagories. Of course, the downside is that within a catagory what is new will go that much more quickly to what is page twenty...

This over-catagorizing, this terrible urge to pidgeon-hole everything and to get to the customer as efficiently as possible Like those automated operator recordings you get when you call customer service ... For English, press 1 ... para Espanol, dos (beep) ... 15 minutes later they FINALLY tell you to press 0 to talk to a real person. 8-)

I can see people putting something into pin-ups to get more views but I kinda doubt they're doing that with fantasy. I imagine they're putting it there because to their mind, it is fantasy. You could perhaps provide more extensive guidelines for each category--that might help. I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that if you start moving things around there will be a huge **** storm. Multiple categories is a great idea though I can imagine images with an airplane barely visible in the background being tagged as aviation for one of the categories etc. Good luck whatever you come up with.

And in what manner did you compose this masterpiece? I composed it by handpainting oil on canvas and scanning it into photoshop (it is really hard to get the oil paints off the scanner glass). Next, I used my scan as a reference to model half of the scene in Maya, the other half in softimage|XSI. I decided that wasn't enough, so I pulled out Lightwave and whipped up a new, better Vicky model, took the whole thing into Poser to add dynamic cloth and hair, then opened that into VuePro for the final render. Postworked in Painter 7 with some minor details added in MS Paint! Me, I'd likely drop that in the "you need the room next to mine" category. Or fantasy. Does the room next to yours include a free "I love me" jacket? (You know, like the one they gave me that lets me hug myself all day long?) =)

On a more serious note, of course, I think the galleries really do need a major overhaul. I'm not as concerned about the people who post in the wrong categories as I am about the fact that there is no obvious place to put cross-genre work. I also don't like the whole "Surreal and Weird" category. That category implies that anything out of the ordinary belongs to Surrealism, and tends to make classically trained artists take communities like this one less seriously. My last complaint on the matter is one that has already been mentioned which is pigeon-holing. Cyberpunk is a genre that exists somewhere between horror, sci-fi, and mainstream, for instance. It's a genre that many people could find compelling for its parallels to modern society, its psychological thriller tone, etc., but lots of people (like my parents) would never even consider it if it it says Sci-Fi on the cover.

I agree with softriver and sdw. Multiple selection of categories (I work in Poser but a lot of the time you can barely recognize my recent stuff as Poser) would be great. Posting my work in "mixed media" lets it settle to a dustbin. Being able to post "Poser + mixed media + surreal + abstract + portrait" would be great.

I really don't like the term mixed media being applied to digital or software art. 'Mixed media' is a term applied to traditional art in which the artist uses more than one form of material to create a work. Since all computer work is digital, the term I prefer is "Multi-digital". Mike

I actually posted a picture a few minutes ago wher I was very much in doubt of where to put it. See, it contains 2 characters, which are posed in Poser. Then I took the pz3 into Daz Studio because I wanted to get it into Bryce. In Daz Studio I had to reapply the hair because it had dissapeared :o/ And I slightly altered some poses. THEN I took it into Bryce where I made a scenery and rendered the image. Finally I took it into Photoshop for postwork and filtering. Now logically, this should belong in Mixed Media, yet I chose to post it in Poser. Why? Because the one pic I ever placed in Mixed Media got close to zero hits, while the SAME picture, posted in Poser got quite a few. Go figure... Oh and the subcategory? Well.. it's technically a Harry Potter-pic, since it depicts Harry and Draco. But it's from a fanfic story so it's not REALLY Film/TV. Neither Harry nor Draco looks like the ones in the movies either (coz I haven't got around to making the proper morphs yet). SO I decided to put it in Illustration, since that's more or less what it is. But it almost took as long to decide where to place it as it took to make the actual picture (OK I said ALMOST...) Some sort of multiple selection of categories could be great. Checkboxes. They have it elsewhere...

Personally, I've always find the "organized by software" concept to be really strange and somewhat backward. To me, it seems more inutitive and sensible to have the categories by content/style and then options for software, rather than the other way around. What if I import a figure from Poser into, say, Maya and render that, and then bring it into Photoshop and then use some filters on it and then take it into Painter and add some more details, etc... ? bonni

Don't forget that some people don't have much English (maybe only what Babelfish will do for them) so they won't have any grasp of the fine distinctions that are being debated here. My favourite mis-categorisations are the ones who use the modelling category to display photographs of human models. The same words, different people, different meanings... ;)

Aside from "gimmie a bat, I'm goin after Elle"... Considering all of the basic concepts that sit underneath this, what I'm basically getting is the idea that I'm not alone in this peculiar bebotherment. I/m also getting an idea that maybe the galleries need to be seriously revised -- but will that happen? Definitely something long term for the all powerful programmers to consider (along with that little line of gag code for crazy folks), and it should be comparatively simple to create. Implementing it, however, might be a bit of a challenge. Still, we did sorta survive the changeover to the category system. Ok, so how would people feel if someone suddenly up and dove into what we have now and more or less "cleaned" it up by tossing stuff into various categories based on their particular notions of what fits into different categories? And what if while they were willing to consider moving it back, they didn't always do it within the 10 or 15 seconds we typically allow such, um, efforts? And EnglishBob, you raise an outstanding point. Oddly enough, though, the bulk of the folks who seem to be the most, eh, outside the bounds here, tend to speak english very well -- or at least one could judge so from their written posts. I'm also going to note that there is an enormous chunk of the community at large who do not wander into the forums. They only engage themselves in the galleries (I tend to call folks like that gallery bunnies and folks like me, who do the opposite, forum bunnies -- but I've got a twisted sense of humor). Btcha they'll b somewhat off put by this...

I applaud the principle behind your suggestion, but I suspect it will be about as difficult to put into practice as communism. :) People will always differ over their interpretation of words, that's how divorces and wars happen. :D - EB the equal opportunity bunny.

...Just pass me that baseball bat, would you? ;-) I agree with most of the points raised here. I do think that people tend to stick with a category once they've found it. Someone who usually posts in fantasy will often keep posting in fantasy even when they're clearly producing pinups. However, we're talking about subjective viewpoints, and two people may have wildly differing opinions on where one picture should go. Of course, this may be because it fits in several categories... I do not think removing categories, at this stage, would be a good move. It would mean displacing some pictures and probably annoying a fair amount of people. It would also be a considerable amount of work. Whilst I'm not against work, I don't see the benefit outweighing the cost on this one. I would favour being able to select from the genre rather than software>genre. I also like the suggestion of multiple categories being pickable. I suspect, from my limited knowledge of programming, that the first suggestion might be relatively easy to implement, the second one quite a bit harder. Elle, why don't you start a thread up in the Community Centre and get views from people posting in the other galleries?

Is Boris Vallejo fantasy or pinup? I'd lean more towards pinup. Where does Frazetta fit? Maybe a bit more to fantasy, but there are pinup elements there. One person can make those decisions. A thousand artists won't necessarily make the exact same calls. Even if all the images are sorted by one person, it will only fix things for that point in time. With over 200 new images per day, it won't take long before the same mess exists, not to mention some arguments about whether new placements were correct. Figure a minute per image to move it across a web based system (time to load to view the images and the time to use a dropdown menu to recategorize the image) and there's three hours of work a day just to sort the new stuff, let alone correct years of images. While considering correctly sorting images, how about new categories for real cool stuff, cool stuff, needs work stuff, and stuff that's so bad it's not worth looking at? I'm being a bit facetious, but which is more troublesome, wading through incorrectly sorted images or wading through tons of junky looking thumbnails just to find something that might be worth clicking on? I sort of feel as if there's no realistic way to fix things and I'm not upset enough with how things are to push for an alternative. I'm also not against things being moved, but there are always going to be borderline cases where one person's judgements won't agree with everyone else.

Hello. This is the first time Ive posted in the forums.

I was originally going to put everything I do in pinup for obvious reasons then some pleasant person [sarcasm] commented that my pic was no pinup, but was grotesque. So after that I started putting my pictures in different categories. I think there are too many. Im not losing any sleep over it but I did notice that when I switched from pinup to horror or gothic, I got no comments, not even negative ones. That kind of stung since they were the best 2 renders Ive done so far (Im a newbie). Id like to be able to just put my pictures in Vue and Poser or Poser and Vue, but the current category setup doesnt allow for that. I am far more interested in what software the artist used so I can learn from that, than content labels.

Now I might be wrong here but wouldn't making the Genre selector a multiple choice (as suggested above) be a simple case of changing the html code from (and I am using spaces here for obvious reasons)
"< SELECT name="filter_genre_id" >"
to
"< SELECT name="filter_genre_id" size="5" multiple >"

Of course this would depend on how this change interacted with the gallery.ez form filter.