No wonder CL posts here so rarely. .

Why should they bother?

We've got enough whiners around here to make the atmosphere cloying enough to choke off any serious inquiries into many issues.......

Who wants to regularly visit a place where the crowd hurls insults and throws things at them about half of the time?

If someone owns a dog that bites 50% of the people that visit them, then I wouldn't go out of my way to plan any trips to be a guest in that person's home.

Lemme tell you. When I worked at Curious Labs I was literally affraid to post here. The thought of knowing that you were going to be attacked made my stomach week. I would honestly feel pukey.

"Its easy to use an existing mesh and modify it a bit ... " And if you have the skills and tools to do that, it's damn near as easy to assemble a set of wings from scratch yourself. I could do a passable job of it in Poser4 using some of Geep's tutorials with primitives, deforming magnets, and a couple of export-imports to weld the mesh. Clunky, but it could be done (rigging to pose is another issue). With all the flak over copyright in the forums here over the last few years, taking a nonsensical and easily discovered (once the mesh itself is available to scrutinize after the 21st) shortcut like ripping off a relatively easily made mesh would not only be CL shooting themselves in the foot, it would be the equivalent of burning it off at the hip. Absurd.

*Lemme tell you. When I worked at Curious Labs I was literally affraid to post here.

The thought of knowing that you were going to be attacked made my stomach week. I would honestly feel pukey.*

Imagine having to be in charge of this bunch 24/7.

I think that I'd rather be taking out my own trash.

Ahem. I used to be an embroidery digitizer. One of the designs I found myself doing OVER and OVER was spread eagle wings. If Virus did his anatomy he should know two things: 1. Three rows of feathers, their counts, relative proportions and rigging aren't a copyrightable work or a distinctive style but a reflection of basic anatomy. Designers working independently of one another are necessarily going to create VERY similar designs. 2. With all due respect to Virus, this isn't a complicated enough prop to make ripping off someone else's work worth it -- compared, say, to the incident a few years back where subdivided versions of Posette's hands ended up on a new female figure. If I guess correctly Virus probably spent more time rigging the joints than pasting, scaling and positioning feather copies on a wing. Let me reiterate that I'm not trashing Virus' wings (although it's a pity he didn't transmap them). And we will see wireframe renders of Jessie's soon enough to resolve this. I was here to remember Anton's side-by-side comparison of key vertices in the hand wireframes.

Virus - Is this your wing?

Ya know everyone is going off on who's wings, can you prove, who should prove. The artist that did the box cover for Japan Poser 5 used vicki he's stated that, and there was already an issue with that artist and CL Poser 6 box art. I never heard a resolution to that one. It wouldn't suprise me if some geometry was used for the "queen" as there have been so many issues lately and a limited number of people taking short cuts (can you say Alexa?). I think once the preorder ship of course that it will all come out, good bad, indifferent.

Just so everyone knows, I sent an email to CL asking for help to order from Europe through the US military postal system, and I just got back a note from Tori with a link to the correct page. Just a few hours elapsed, and I got the info I needed in a cheerful manner. Makes me want to play with them! :D Ya know? Most people will respond nicely if you talk to them like they are nice, intelligent people. No need to be nasty or confrontational, most of the time. Just my $0.02...

Ignoring the fact that I did not use back face culling on the above wing image they both look the same dont you think! You had better think long and hard! If the answer is YES - dont you think that you should think twice about crying wolf when you are one yourself? If I were you I would sneek of quietly befor the BIG wolf who created these comes up and bites your ass! If the answer is NO - then I guess lots of people have the same creative processes because these are most definatly not your wings!

....

Attached Link: http://www.varian.net/dreamview/dreamtools/poser/

There are comparison pics of a LOT of angel wings at this URL ... Quite a few of them, actually, have the three rows of feathers, it seems. I remember buying the Hokusai Angel Wings way back when, but those look like a variation of Virus' wings. There are also similar wings by Thorne, Howarth, DAZ3D, Sharkey, and Darkworld.

Well, there is this funny thing about feather bird wings. They evolved. Efficient wings kept the bird owning them alive long enough to eat, meet, and breed. Some of the wings are tubby (I still don't know how a duck gets aloft!), some are sleek. But they all share certain strong similarities due to function. Long tips at the end are good for turning using minimal energy. Scoopy feathers near the body are good for landing without falling on one's nose (ever watch a jet land?). Just as all birds are related, their wings are related, too. Any designer working from real bird wings is going to ceate something similar in overall shape, number of bands of small feathers, number of long wing tip feathers. 6 pointy feathers here and 6 pointy feathers there won't convince me if an eagle happens to have 6 pointy feathers. Some places to check would be the modeling of the individual feathers (virus's and dagmath's examples look awfully similar) and if/how the wings are joined to a central embedded "body". A short-cutter might take pains to modify something visible, but be careless about something out of sight. Carolly

Hello all, As of several moths ago, I returned to CL to handle and accept the responsibility for all of the content for all Curious Labs products. I have pushed many people very hard in an attempt to make Poser 6 a better product for you. I don't think I have ever posted to Renderosity before, and likely won't again even though some of my work has been the recent subject of unfounded accusations, as above. Posting would only offer the opportunity for some to pick and bash. I will let my work and that of our team speak for itself and will offer no explanations. That being said, the good people that did the Winter Queen pack and many other things for us worked long hard hours and deserve the respect of a reply to this thread from me. I pushed them (and many others) way beyond what could be expected. They are respected community members who you all know of, as are most of the people that created the P6 in product content. Bottom line, they created the wings from scratch in Maya. Best of luck to all of you with whatever you may do. Sincerely, Steve Y. Product Manager Curious Labs

Well, that oughta settle it. Thank you kindly, Steve, for taking time to explain/clarify things. P6 does seem very promising, looking forward to seeing it in action.

hauksdottir - I always thought of ducks as mother natures interpretation of that aeronautics engineering principal - if you use a big enough engine, you can make anything fly ;)

Steve Y. I guess any member of this comunity deserves the same respect you are asking for other members, don't ya think?, after all they as I do, we are potential customers of your company. I just e-mail you back closing this issue by my side. As I said, I belive in your word, and if you say that your team at Ireland make it from scratch, is Ok for me. They just seemed to me very similar (similar is not identical). Wish you luck with Poser 6 release. Sincerly Virus

Considering I know of one of the contributors to P6 and they happen to have modelled wings themselves in other products, I do question the validity of the claim... I tend to believe Steve fully when he says they have been modelled from the ground up. Said contributor is a merchant of high standards here at R'osity.

Steve, Thank you for dropping in here with the official word. Please let your team know that the models look nice... and many of us will appreciate the time and care that went into them. Carolly Pssst! I realize that battle angels are strong sellers and the marketing folks probably insisted upon that, but could we get a peek of the dress and tiara? Please?

Hello All, because a goofed I posted some messages that was no the right to do it. I do a public apollogy, and because the respect for the CLs team at Ireland I will delete the other messages I put in this treath For your understand thanks Virus

Virus, I don't think you have anything to be sorry about. You seemed to be level headed about the whole thing. The other members just jumped in and made it look worse than it actually was. That happens a lot here due to the shear volume of members. A crowd asking ANY question is usually Interpreted as a mob. Mr. Yateson, Nice to see you're still kicking around Steve. I haven't seen you since the old Metacreations Beta programs. Boy, it's been a long journey on a crooked road huh? -ScottA

But we are SO glad the journey is still going on. 8-)

In the spirit of this post, I too have removed the image posted so that noone can make judgements based upon a single image to the authenticity or originality of Virus wings. ~Dag~

*Hello all,

As of several moths ago, I returned to CL to handle and accept the responsibility for all of the content for all Curious Labs products. I have pushed many people very hard in an attempt to make Poser 6 a better product for you.

I don't think I have ever posted to Renderosity before, and likely won't again even though some of my work has been the recent subject of unfounded accusations, as above. Posting would only offer the opportunity for some to pick and bash. I will let my work and that of our team speak for itself and will offer no explanations.

That being said, the good people that did the Winter Queen pack and many other things for us worked long hard hours and deserve the respect of a reply to this thread from me. I pushed them (and many others) way beyond what could be expected. They are respected community members who you all know of, as are most of the people that created the P6 in product content.

Bottom line, they created the wings from scratch in Maya.

Best of luck to all of you with whatever you may do.

Sincerely,

Steve Y.
Product Manager
Curious Labs*

Welcome to Renderosity, Steve.

Please remember that not all of us act like.......nevermind.

And some of us will even be glad to help you in these sunny climes.

---

Yes, you and your team are worthy of all the respect from the community that your hard work deserves.

It's the efforts of both you and the fine team at Curious Labs that make our obsessive hobby possible. Without CL, we wouldn't be able to do what we do.

I wish to personally extend my thanks for all that you and your team have done for us.

I look forward to receiving my copy of P6 in the mail soon.

You are the best.

Thanks.

---

BTW -- if you never post in here again, I can't blame you for that.

This place has some........(how can I put this mildly?)......individuals with little to no class.

I am always serious about the renderer in Poser and it has nothing to do with anything else. I really hope that Poser 6 improved the renderer to make organic looking poser figures. The shadows and lightings in P3 to P5 always make poser figures look nasty and charcoal like painting. When I first heard about P6 adopting openGL implementation I went to the website and looked at the P6 box with an image of Snow Queen, I immediately preordered it. But I just received an email from CL with an complete image of Snow Queen, the renderer still look crap. It is not what I preordered for. Geez.. This is a honest complaint and it need to be heard GWeb

Much better all around. GWeb, There ought to be even more render settings to play with, and image-based lighting and the rest of the lighting options will help. Don't be discouraged yet (we haven't even seen it in the hands of the experts here). After these folks get some render settings for the new tools posted here and make a few comparison shots, we'll take off flying. Carolly

As others have pointed out, OpenGL does not improve the final render. It just makes the previews look good. It should speed up the workflow, since you won't have to render to see how something looks.

You may be confused, because OpenGL really improves the look of 3D games. That's because they are always in preview mode - redrawing the scene on the fly.

It sounds like there will be some nice new render options in P6. I'll be happy if they just fix that "small scale" problem.

Nice that CL creared up things :) Greets Chris

Attached Link: http://developer.nvidia.com/page/home.html

No OpenGL does improve the final render. Did you go to Nvidia website? They are responsible for from gaming to professional films.

http://developer.nvidia.com/page/home.html

CuriousLabs claimed that they took technical support from Nvidia to implement OpenGL in Poser6. I assumed that it improved Poser's final renderer engine.

BTW I am OpenGL programmer. Nvidia is my grail.

Message edited on: 03/09/2005 08:51

Attached Link: http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato_developers.html.

The Scoop on the Gelato Developer Program Did you know that Gelato (NVIDIAs software renderer that uses the GPU to accelerate high-quality, final-frame rendering) has its own developer program? The program is aimed at developers looking to extend Gelatos functionality through the use of plug-ins or add-on tools or those looking to integrate their own products with Gelato for use in digital image production pipelines. So far, third party developers have created several key add-ons for Gelato. There is a plug-in that reads RenderMan RIB scene files and allows Gelato to render them and a utility that translates RenderMan shaders into Gelato shaders. Winnipeg film studio Frantic Films has even created Amaretto, a plug-in for Discreets 3ds max that allows 3ds max users to choose Gelato as a renderer. This complements the Mango plug-in that NVIDIA ships with Gelato that performs the same function for Aliass Maya software. Gelato is aimed at the film and television markets, but can be used anywhere that high-quality, final-frame images are required. Information on the Gelato developer program is available at http://film.nvidia.com/page/gelato_developers.html.

Gelato is not using OpenGL. "There is a plug-in that reads RenderMan RIB scene files" That means it is compatible with Poser 1 and higher. Wohoo!

Message edited on: 03/09/2005 09:22

Gelato is renderer engine plug in that uses Nvidia GPU and the 3D scene. OpenGL is code language to communicate with GPU and memory block through the script process. I am sure that Gelato is created with OpenGL, without it Gelato won't be possible because it need to know where the 3D data are placed in. They released entensions for Gelato to be able to read outside 3D formats such as Renderman RIB. If I were programmer for Gelato, I would translate outside 3D format into Nvidia card's memory block for faster rendering using OpenGL references.

Want to add that OpenGL have matrices reference that made Gelato possible.

So, I wondered if CL used Maya with Gelato renderer that created an image of Snow Queen for the Poser6 Box?

I would be very surprised if Gelato went through OpenGL. My bet is that Gelato is using some interal APIs to talkt the GPU directly, bypassing OpenGL. After all, Gelato is not a renderer that renders its stuff entirely on the GPU but it is a renderer that uses the GPU as a part of its rendering engine, rendering other things on the CPU. That's why Gelato, unlike OpenGL, does not have texture size limits. Gelato supports a lot of features that OpenGL doesn't, like raytracing, GI or fine displacements. Also, Gelato shaders do not have size restrictions where OpenGL shaders do. "So, I wondered if CL used Maya with Gelato renderer that created an image of Snow Queen for the Poser6 Box?" No. Question: How do you say would OpenGL enhance the appearance of a rendered image? As you are an OpenGL programmer, you should be aware that OpenGL does nothing that CPU rendering wouldn't do, where there are a bunch of things that are common in production rendering (e.g. stochastic sampling for DOF and motion blur) that OpenGL can't do.

Attached Link: http://www.opengl.org

(beep) wrong answer

I am sorry I have to say that you know nothing about OpenGL and you have never practiced matrices before. OpenGL is set up with all references inside GPU and may be manipulated it in memory block to create new references. You may make your own code language without using OpenGL to communicate with GPU if you know all the remotes to it. So the bottomline, Gelato is built with OpenGL for renderer plug in to 3D softwares like Maya and 3DMax.

Matrices is what made 3D and ray tracing, GI, displacement, dof, motion blur and all other things possible. You always can recreate new code reference with OpenGL and put it in memory block. Please spend some your quality time at www.opengl.org It is very old website. There are several active members including myself in there. OpenGL already have motion blur, dof etc.. you will find it in link I provided.

Message edited on: 03/09/2005 11:38

Attached Link: http://www.opengl.org/resources/code/basics/redbook/redbook.html

Here is the link to the DOF http://www.opengl.org/resources/code/basics/redbook/redbook.html

"I am sorry I have to say that you know nothing about OpenGL and you have never practiced matrices before." Wrong answer. Getting personal is the easiest way to kick me out of a thread, and you just did that.

Point taken. I wish I thought of other way to say it without getting personal.