Hi guys
*Where are the Syltermermaid girls for Poser **?
***Cant find 
thank you all

I think she plies her trade over at poserpros now!

She currently has 40 characters available at PoserPros, including a couple that are currently on sale at $5.00 and 4 ProClub specials at $2.49 each. She also has 10 characters available at Content Paradise through Digital Designs Unlimited, about half of which are also available at PoserPros, and 4 available at DAZ3D.

Man, she took down her whole store here.  Can't find her anywhere.  Shame.  I'll have to look in the wishlist as I think I have 2 or 3 set aside..... Oh well....

I am hoping that it's a temporary glitch and things will return to normal in a few days!

:(

I bought several of her packages during that 30% off sale and had some others in my wishlist that I wanted. I'll have to go check the other stores and see what is there and put them back in my wishlist there. 

How do you search by vendor over at Daz?

In the top most search engine input field just type in or paste in the artists name.  you will get a listing link such as outoftouch and you will see outoftouch link pop up. Very simple

She's gone from RR???? Wow! I know someone was giving her a hard time and being nasty but I'm not sure what over or why. She said some things on few renders.

well I know she got a few complaints about using copyrighted photos in her gallery promo images. And she seems to have taken that as a sign of persecution. As far as her store stuff though, I dont know.

Lyrra

She doesn't appear in the list to credit sellers when uploading an image and appears to have stopped posting to her gallery.
It's a real shame if she's gone, for whatever reason.

Mike

Her last upload seems to be gone as well, whether it was by her or the powers that be.  Apparently the marketplace had rejected her last submission because she was hurting herself by flooding the market with V4 characters.

That's paraphrased obviously from what I recall and was probably paraphrased from what they told her as well.  Hopefully it blows over as it's a shame to lose access to her beauties here.

I just got an email from her and she is banned for 7 days because she quoted an email RR sent her. She will be back. I have no idea what was going on because she doesn't do nudes! I only thought us pin-up artists got banned for our naughty pictures, LOL! I have been off line because I caught a nasty virus from a Japanese freebie site and I had to reformat my drive on my new PC. I am so sick of this. My virus scanner did not catch it.

Ooh I'm just playing catchup too - it seems that having to reformat PCs is a 'thing of the moment' just now - I'm just getting my machine back into order.

Syltermermaid is one of my fave artists and I receive notifications of her uploads.  I haven't had time to go thru the ones I've had.

Pity she's had to step back for a while, for whatever reason - wish I had her talent!

Sheila

Well in the meantime you could buy the merchant resources she uses and see what you can mix up yourself. After all if she can whip up some of those girls in a day, I imagine you all could do just as well. Not as if theres any custom morphs involved anyways .. so anyone can play

I know! have a "looks like SylterMermaids" contest and see who gets closest! :)

Lyrra

Quote - Well in the meantime you could buy the merchant resources she uses and see what you can mix up yourself. After all if she can whip up some of those girls in a day, I imagine you all could do just as well. Not as if theres any custom morphs involved anyways .. so anyone can play

I know! have a "looks like SylterMermaids" contest and see who gets closest! :)

Lyrra

That is a bit petty.

Nah, wouldn't work, I don't think anyone could top some of the unique 2nd skins she's come up with in the past...really amazing detail.  She does have a lot of her stuff over a PP, I just got Kara a few days ago.  She does come up with some really beautiful models.

She has some here too:

http://www.digitaldesignsunlimited.com/

I'm very pleased with the packages that I bought from her.

Which of her characters have second skins? I just went and looked at PPros, and I couldn't find any.  Granted, I didn't look through all 400 of them.

Hhmnmm, it seems that none of her PP stuff has 2nd skins.  When she first started out here with the V3 stuff, almost all of her models had at least 4  2nd skins.  The latest she had here for V4 was Yasmina, an East Indian beauty with 6 second skins.  the best I can do is show you a pick I did in my gallery (nothing grand, but, an example)

http://stevieg007.deviantart.com/art/Sultan-s-Gift-73986268

Click in it to get the larger pic and you can see the detail I'm talking about.

petty? I'm just quoting whats she has said herself. shrugs I can't think of a single one of her characters that doesnt use merchant reources. So in theory a creative person should be able to come up with somehting similar using a similar starting point right?  I'm sorry if you think thats a slam against her work... but face it. Theres a difference between working "all day" on a character and working "all month" on a character and it shows. But her customers are happy with her work and hey, everyone likes something different right? if thats enough to keep them coming back for more, than all is well and good.

I don't know about you guys but I never use anything as it comes 'out of the box'  :) I'm always messing about putting things together in new ways..see what shakes out. I suppose her characters are okay if you like the way she does make up and all ... but if I'm going to shell out money for somehting its going to have to be fairly unique. (Dulce, Sin, Bella Nightshade, Lady Jane by Surreality)  I'm up to my eyeballs in large breasted blonde v4's .. dont know about you lol  And unique to me does NOT mean "cobbled together from things I own already".

Lyrra

The ones I bought are celebrity look-a-likes and don't have second skins.

I'm not a big fan of second skins because they tend to look flat and "painted on". They just don't have that dimensionality to them where the clothing supposedly meets the body.

Quote - petty? I'm just quoting whats she has said herself. shrugs I can't think of a single one of her characters that doesnt use merchant reources. So in theory a creative person should be able to come up with somehting similar using a similar starting point right?  I'm sorry if you think thats a slam against her work... but face it. Theres a difference between working "all day" on a character and working "all month" on a character and it shows. But her customers are happy with her work and hey, everyone likes something different right? if thats enough to keep them coming back for more, than all is well and good.

I don't know about you guys but I never use anything as it comes 'out of the box'  :) I'm always messing about putting things together in new ways..see what shakes out. I suppose her characters are okay if you like the way she does make up and all ... but if I'm going to shell out money for somehting its going to have to be fairly unique. (Dulce, Sin, Bella Nightshade, Lady Jane by Surreality)  I'm up to my eyeballs in large breasted blonde v4's .. dont know about you lol  And unique to me does NOT mean "cobbled together from things I own already".

Lyrra

Oh - I didn't realise that her characters were mainly MR based - certain elements, certainly, but surely not all?  I'm a novice at texturing - back in the pleistocene era I uploaded 3 freebies for V3, but they were done over weeks and weeks.

However, I don't think we should knock her.  She's a lovely person, gains enjoyment from her hobby (and makes a few bob on the side - wouldn't we all love to do that?) and lots of people like her interpretations of the MR's

Sheila

Quote-
Oh - I didn't realise that her characters were mainly MR based - certain elements, certainly, but surely not all?  I'm a novice at texturing - back in the pleistocene era I uploaded 3 freebies for V3, but they were done over weeks and weeks.

However, I don't think we should knock her.  She's a lovely person, gains enjoyment from her hobby (and makes a few bob on the side - wouldn't we all love to do that?) and lots of people like her interpretations of the MR's

Sheila 

Amen to that Sheila. Merchant resources are tools in the same way as other artists models are tools we use to create our own art.

I own a number of syltermermaid's characters and I'm very happy with them. If I like a someone's model and I have spare cash then I buy it.

We all have the option of modifying the model to suit our needs and when we do we are, in effect, using their model as a personal merchant resource.

I have no problem with a merchant selling many characters. I know I won't buy many of them but it gives me a great choice.

Cheers

Mike

After all, if you don't like something don't buy it. I think many of everyone's V4's are looking similar. The ones with nice tattoos are different. I know Ute was trying to make a living off her Poser products because her husband was sick. That must be hard to do.

No offense, but what does her husband being sick have to do with whether it's hard to make characters or not?  Mine's in prison.  Doesn't make it any harder to push pixels around Photoshop. I don't think I follow your logic.

She was trying to sell a lot to support them. They were living off her Poser money, she said.

Lots of people support themselves on their Poser money.  I support myself and two disabled kids on mine + SSI.

I think I must be missing an important point here somewhere.  :-(

is easily confused

I meant she has to make a lot of Poser products to live off the earnings, I would think.

Oh.

Yes, Ute will be back in a few days. As long she is banned, she can´t sell her characters or get credits.
The only thing that Ute has done was to copy some sentences from a PM by the market-admin, under her image.
In the comment-thread someone has spoken about images with copyright in the marketplace, but it was not Ute who has used them. He or she was talking about another vendor.

Ute and her husband aren´t the youngest anymore. It´s true, her husband has much medical problems with his heart and can´t work anymore.  Ute has rheumatism and problems with her intervertebral discs. Last one is the result of a long time of careing her disabled doughter as divorced mother.

Ute really has a difficult life, and she is certainly not a "mad person" who hasn´t nothing else to do as creating characters for poser. One side Ute loves to create characters, but other side she also has to earn some money - as we all have to do that we can live. Also not to forget that Ute gives many characters away for free to her friends or customers, regardless if they have many comments or faves for their images.
Nobody here "must" buy Ute´s characters, we can buy them or not.
Nearly all characters that I own from different merchants are based on "Merchant resources", so I wonder why this seems to be a big faux pas by Ute only?

Quote - In the comment-thread someone has spoken about images with copyright in the marketplace, but it was not Ute who has used them. He or she was talking about another vendor.

Actually, that isn't correct. The copyright issue I believe Lyrra was speaking about was a gallery posting, not a marketplace product. Someone (quite politely from what I recall) mentioned this to her in a comment, as this kind of thing can get us into serious trouble -- there was none of the 'attacking' I've heard mentioned, just realistic concerns about this issue. It would be no different than if I took the cover of Vogue, scanned it, collaged my character into the scan, and posted it in the gallery -- we are absolutely not allowed to do that. She was probably very wise to remove that image on her own.

What about fake Vogue covers? I've seen people do that here. What is okay?

If someone did a fake Vogue cover, I would think they're risking trademark infringement. If someone takes a part of a photo from a magazine and chops it up to use in a posting here without permission or license to do so, they are definitely infringing copyright. There's not really any grey area in there to quibble about or attempt to defend, especially since the image was being used for product promotion. There is a handy post about these issues here: http://www.renderosity.com/news.php?viewStory=6249

I never saw the render so I'm not quibling. I hardly ever use photo backgrounds because I can't match the lighting.

Quote -
The only thing that Ute has done was to copy some sentences from a PM by the market-admin, under her image.

Quite a big thing IMO.

The rules of being a vendor here are quite clear and those rules include that we do not discuss information we are privy to in the Vendor's forum in public and that all communications between a vendor and the admins remains private.  After issues last year it was brought to the attention of all vendors that the marketplace admins would exercise zero tolerance in this area and you would receive bans from the site for doing so.

Not to mention if anyone posts segments of a private email without prior permission then it is, at the very least, unethical.  This is especially so when it is a business email and that is what any communication from a marketplace admin is.

Sorry to sound harsh but the personal lives of people who vend here should have no bearing on their products.  Whether any vendor has personal problems is not any concern of mine and I do not think that it is advisable to discuss anyone's personal and private life in the public forae.  

If they choose to try and make a living from Poser products that is their decision and theirs alone and to publicise such reasons in such an emotive way rubs me up the wrong way, maybe it is the great British reserve that we hear so much about or maybe it is just that I do not like emotional blackmail and that is what it smacks of to me.

Quote - What about fake Vogue covers? I've seen people do that here. What is okay?

If they actually use the name Vogue then they could be in a lot of trouble over that.  However, if it is a generic fashion/lifestyle magazine front cover layout with a name that is not a play on Vogue or Cosmopolitan then that would be entirely acceptable providing that no copyrighted materials are not used in it's creation.  After all, if the layout of such a magazine cover was copyrightable then we would only have one or two magazines in the local newsagents, instead of which there are plenty to choose from with new ones being published every month.

there are quite a few character makers who make their stuff entirely from scratch. Most of the ones who sell only at DAZ for one.

How to tell? look at the readme... if you see a whole list of merchant resources there I'd want to look at the resource and the character side by side. Did you know that you are by contract supposed to change at least 50% from the resource set before releasing it? I dont think Rendo actually enforces that though.

Thing is people who do things the hard way cannot work as fast as someone who is recoloring and pasting togther existing skins. So the market gets swamped with sets that are made from the same few resources and the original stuff gets buried. And then those few original creators get discouraged and leave the market, which is a shame.

I know I can't be the only person who only buys original works. I dont even buy prints of pictures. If I cant have the original, I dont want it. :) Now if Samildanach comes out with one .. I'll buy it, because bets are I've never seen anything else like it. Unique ..thats the key to great sales. Surreality's lovely Lady Jane is already in my runtime waiting for me to finish that preraphealite gown for a series of commisioned images. 

Admittedly some people can do amazing things with a resource set .. but too many use it as a crutch to pump out as much stuff as they can.  I dont think she realised that by churning out stuff so similar so fast shes flooded herself out of the market .. as well as damaged the market for other artists. Now thats thinking of other people, eh? She would have done much better to diversify .. after all there are well over 35 base figures out there... and if you make anything for say Maddy or Laura or Luke you get instant sales.

As far as being ill and supporting herself .. shes in the UK right? I imagine shes well eligible for council housing and all. Unlike some artists I know in the US (most expensive health care in th world) who'd never make a peep of their condition in the forums.

So I dont know .. you make your own decisions eh? I've never thought well of any artist that thinks their personal beleifs or issues means diddly when it comes to looking at theit work. Let the work stand for itself without all of the creators baggage.

Personally of the three of her sets I've laid hands on I'd never use them. Blurry skin, baked in shadows and highlights, garish hard edged makeup (to my eye) and horribly flattened photos jammed on as second skins. Nah .. I can pass.

But for her loyal customers .. power to you.  I think you can still get all her gals over at Poserpros.

Lyrra

I'm not a merchant so I know nothing about merchant rules. Someone asked where she was and I just put my two cents worth in. Personally, I never could figure out those "Skinned alive" textures for the characters. How do you get photos of people flattened out like that? If I ever were to be a merchant, I would love to model sets like Danie and Marfornos, etc. I am a prop addict. I also love well-done furniture. PS If threads start to get nasty, they should be locked by the admins.

drifter

well first you get a nice sharp knife and a cabin in the woods ....

no! lol really all you need is photoshop, good photographs and the patience of a saint

you have to take each section and lay it onto the mesh, at the right size so the hairs and pores are in scale. and then when youve patched it togther you have to go back and get rid of as much skin shine and shadowing as you can. All that should be done by the modeling of the mesh when its rendered. So as you can see getting all the little details on hands and feet can take a very long time.  After the base skin is done then you get to do makeup and tatoos and what not. then setting up the skins with shaders , if you use them that is. So its a lot of careful work but not too tricky :)

In comparison props are much much easier :) especially nice big things like buildings where you can use tiling textures.

In my opinion as an ex moderator .. I dont think this thread is nasty. Mind you I'd be watching it like a hawk .. after all Loyal Customers never do like it when someone points out flaws in their favorites work and they can get nasty.

But as long as its just a relatively calm discussion of the merits of merchant resources vs. custom work .. I think thats okay. Though the thread did get hijacked a bit, for which I must apologise. Mea culpa :)

Lyrra

I have to be blunt for a moment here: this -is- a business that should be handled in as professional a fashion as possible. Different sets of rules applying to different people is just not the way to go about that; the rules are there for all of us. I don't see anything any nastier than I usually see directed at the vendors in general around here. It's just that the roles have reversed a tad from the way it normally goes -- the people cheering this vendor on are often the ones dishing it from what I have seen. Another important aspect of professionalism is the ability to take criticism into account. This is minor league stuff compared to anything I ever heard when I was in art school. If that's considered 'nasty', I should be suing my professors for therapy bills instead of being grateful for what they taught me. High on that list? "I am not perfect, I will make mistakes, and the way to improve is to learn from them, not whine about someone telling me I made a mistake." As far as the flattened skins go... it varies. I know I just had to make a large investment in software that will allow me to step away from resource bases entirely, but while the software helps with the seams, it still takes a remarkable amount of time. (3 weeks and counting from custom morphing on head and body in Modo to working on finishing up the textures which are still not complete yet and have a long way left to go.) There are a lot of ways to go about it, and everyone you ask will probably have a slightly different method than the next person. Definitely try the prop sets -- there are some really good applications out there for free to experiment with to find something you like, and others have demos you can try before you buy.

Quote - Sorry to sound harsh but the personal lives of people who vend here should have no bearing on their products.  Whether any vendor has personal problems is not any concern of mine and I do not think that it is advisable to discuss anyone's personal and private life in the public forae.  

If they choose to try and make a living from Poser products that is their decision and theirs alone and to publicise such reasons in such an emotive way rubs me up the wrong way, maybe it is the great British reserve that we hear so much about or maybe it is just that I do not like emotional blackmail and that is what it smacks of to me.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who doesn't understand what it has to do with anything.  I'm truly sorry to hear her life is hard.  I know how that is.  My life is hard, too.  My therapist is astounded at all the sh*t that happens to me.  What I've already said in this thread isn't even the tip of the iceberg.  Hell, I could reel off a whole list of vendors whose lives are hard; some of their lives are so hard they make me cry.  But I don't get why we're talking about it. 

I feel like that guy in Cool Hand Luke going "what we have here, is a failure to communicate."  Because from what I'm understanding, one person said her products were similar, made quickly, and used a lot of resource kits, and several other people spoke up and said "her life is hard."  I'm not seeing a correlation here. 

Also, I've seen several people basically saying "don't hurt her feelings; feel sorry for her."  Well I do feel sorry for her, even though I don't know her.   But similarity is a subjective opinion.  I don't think anyone can argue that she works quickly.  So unless she doesn't use a lot of resource kits, or is embarrassed to use a lot of kits, I don't see where her feelings could be hurt.  My older products use a lot of resource kit material.  My recent ones are photos only.  I work slowly (sometimes hideously slowly).  Whether or not my products are similar is a matter of opinion.  And I won't be insulted or upset if anyone says so.  In fact, if anybody does think my characters look too similar, I'd like to hear it, and to know what they think I could do to improve. 

And hey, if anybody wants to have a contest to see if they can make stuff that looks like mine, let me know.  I'll judge it. :-)  I thought that was funny.

Dee, do you mind if I ask what software you're using for seams?  I'm just using Photoshop (and often banging my head against the wall ROFL), but I like to hear what works for other people.

I ended up picking up C4D (BodyPaint) just before the holidays. (Yeah... ouch. So much ouch.) It was surprisingly well-behaved when it comes to V4's many-seamed nightmare templates. There are a few of them that are still a royal pain, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. You can essentially tell it to paint right across the seams as though they aren't there, which is intensely helpful -- especially since it has a clone stamp tool. I end up laying out what I generally want in photoshop, importing it over to C4D, fussing with seams with the clone stamp, then going back into photoshop for another round of cleanup and blending, and so on until I'm happy with it. It's time consuming, but fussing with it in photoshop alone and trying to match things up was taking me much longer. I had one too many stressful head-bangy moments, too. You can get a competitive upgrade from Bryce if you have it, which knocks $100 off the price, and that is very helpful. I got the most basic package they offered, and it was around $800 after the upgrade discount, plus shipping. I ended up picking it up since I was running into seam issues on the freebie I'd promised to do for Xmas, and there was just no time to do it any other way. As painful as it was to part with that much cash -- and it was nail-bitingly painful, I actually lost sleep -- it was very much worth it. I was able to do some spot fixes on my recently finished gal with it in a fraction of the time it would have taken otherwise, and was able to get most of a skin done that is purely photo-based since. (Still fussing over the limbs... sigh.)

Been reading through this thread and I thought i'd throw a few thoughts into the fray myself.  As to  the use or non-use of resource kits and or custom morphs in character creation.  I guess my thinking is, so what?  

I think the only way to judge such things is on the overall quality of the final product.  Let the market bear what it will bear.  If a vendor puts out a lot of items that are "lower quality" then they will get a reputation for doing so and have a much harder time selling future products.  If a vendor puts out a lot of items of very high quality then too that reputation will follow them.. I don't purchase a lot of vendor material myself (very little out there that suits my personal application, but that's a long story...lol)  but from looking through the marketplace occasionally it's pretty apparent which vendors put out consistent, quality products.  I say let the marketplace sort it out, let the marketplace be the final arbitor of what is and isn't a quality product. 

Honestly what difference does it make if someone puts up 10 characters a month or just 1?  If they use a resource kit or do everything from scratch?   If the final product is worthwhile and people like it, use it, and are willing to pay for it then I really don't think it makes any difference whatsoever.  Think of it in terms of cars.. Sure, Mercedes Benz builds a really high quality product, but not everybody drives a Mercedes.  They have a certain market for there product, and those of us who drive Toyota's and volvos and such just don't buy Mercedes much, nor would we if Toyota and Volvo were forbidden from making cars anymore. That is in essence what were discussing here.

I say let Toyota build as many cars as they want as often as they want.. if they flood the market so what?  Eventually people who are tired of toyota's will simply stop buying them, and when they do maybe they'll be ready to consider shopping for a Benz instead.  Either way I think the best judge of the quality of a product should be the people who purchase it.  If they are happy with there purchase then mission accomplished.  If not, we'll they'll let you know soon enough and that will have a big impact on future sales as well.

Just my 2 cents worth
Stepdad

I have to agree with a good deal of what has been said here and in fact, she should be very grateful toanyone who pointed out that she might have been skating on thin ice and ultimately find herself in a far worse situation than she apparently is in currently. I believe that the majority of merchants are well aware of the consequences of publicly disclosing correspondence between themselves and Renderosity and that doing so is not only unprofessional but will see you shown the door in short order.

There are plenty of merchants who do not use merchant resource kits to create their characters and I'm one of them. Every single one of my characters is done from scratch and it took me two years of gut wrenching hair pulling before I would have dared to ask anyone to buy anything I created.

If, as someone has stated, Syltermermaid has 40 characters available in the relatively short time that she has been a merchant, there is no way on god's green earth, she created those characters without relying more than heavily on merchant resources. If you look at the readmes...something you should do before you purchase any product...you will find that she has used the same resources over and over and over again, hence the similarity in her characters. In many cases, even the promo information is the same save for the changing of a name to reflect the current character and worded to imply that there are no resources were used which I find disturbingly misleading. But if that floats your boat and you don't care, then that's fine, but remember you can purchase these resources and do the same thing yourself.

Now let's take it one step further. Let's say for instance that a merchant...any merchant...uses the same eye resource kit for every product. Either they don't know how to alter those eyes or they choose not too for whatever reason and you're willing to pay how many times for the same thing ? You now likely have that entire resource pack and you probably paid ten times what you would have paid had you purchased the resource yourself in the first place! I honestly don't see the logic in that.

There are many talented artists who use merchant resources to create beautiful characters and you would never know. To do that can take just as many painstaking hours and talent as doing it from scratch and those people have my respect. Resource kits are a great way to learn how to do things yourself but they were never intended to be used as an end product.

I think it's sad that the market is so flooded with them now and so many seem to think they're a fast track to being a successful merchant with a fat bank balance without having to actually learn anything when in fact the reverse is true.

Dee, WOW! That's quite an investment!! Good for you, though! :-)  And I sincerely agree with you about V4's seams. LOL.  Argh!

Stepdad, here's the thing.  What I think, and what you think about flooding or not flooding the market is totally irrelevant.  It's Renderosity's store, so love it or hate it, it's their choice.  And this is their decision and their policy.  We have to accept it or go elsewhere.  They're certainly not going to change policy just because someone asks.  Trust me on that one.  I've been in the trenches with them.  LOL. 

And like Kym said, you can use resources to create completely original characters.  But you can't put out several of them a week.  There is just not physically enough time to do it.  It's not an insult or meant as an insult.  It's just that regardless of how fast a person works, or how fast their machine is, it's still going to take a certain amount of time to put those pieces together.  Does it matter?  That's up to the vendor to decide when creating, and the customer to decide when purchasing.  Do they get sold here? That's up to Renderosity.  There are plenty of perfectly legal, legitimate, and worthwhile things we are not allowed to sell here, but are free to sell somewhere else.

Like I said before, my older characters use resource kits, my newer ones don't.  I felt that I could only go so far with the resource kits.  Beyond that, I was altering them so much that I decided there was no point in using the kit in the first place.  So I don't use them any more.  I have no problem saying I have characters that are still for sale that use resource kits.  But I don't feel like I have anything to gain from using them in the future, so I won't.

Ok, I lost where I was going with this... ROFL!   I'm sure I had a point when I started, but I can't remember what it was. :-P  Oh, well.  I've got mesh wrangling to do, anyway. 

Quote - I ended up picking up C4D (BodyPaint) just before the holidays. (Yeah... ouch. So much ouch.) It was surprisingly well-behaved when it comes to V4's many-seamed nightmare templates. There are a few of them that are still a royal pain, but I'm slowly getting the hang of it. You can essentially tell it to paint right across the seams as though they aren't there, which is intensely helpful -- especially since it has a clone stamp tool. I end up laying out what I generally want in photoshop, importing it over to C4D, fussing with seams with the clone stamp, then going back into photoshop for another round of cleanup and blending, and so on until I'm happy with it. It's time consuming, but fussing with it in photoshop alone and trying to match things up was taking me much longer. I had one too many stressful head-bangy moments, too.

You can get a competitive upgrade from Bryce if you have it, which knocks $100 off the price, and that is very helpful. I got the most basic package they offered, and it was around $800 after the upgrade discount, plus shipping.

Hello my dear, been awhile!!

I want this program.  I think one of the biggest letdowns of Deep Paint, not a bad program but... NO FRIGGIN SUPPORT.  Forums are basically useless, the two gals I know that use it are too busy to help me figure stuff out so..... it's too much head banging and cussing to want to aggravate myself with it.  Too bad, good deal through DAZ at the time.  Wish they would team up with Maxon.  I'd be very happy.  I do have Bryce so I guess that would save me that $100.00 although I'm not sure why that would be considered a cometitive upgrade considering one is a landscape rendering program and the other a 3D paint program!!  Odd! 

So my quesion to you is hows the support for their products? I know, it's probably really good but thought I'd ask your opinion on that so far. 

As for Ute, she's a very nice gal.  We have exchanged emails before talking about this and that.  Very sweet.  She does produce products at unheard of rates it seems.  Some look quite nice and others.... a bit rushed or lacking details.  Perhaps it's because of her health or her husbands... not sure but if she's making her living off of this then more power to her as long as she has the buyers.  I wish for her the best.  I'll say no more on the subject. 

Hey, thanks for that information, Richard.  :-) I didn't realize there was no support for Deep Paint.  I will cross it off my list of things I want but can't afford. LOL. 

Hey Sweety,

Yea, it's really too bad.  Interface is a bit crude too.  Like if you want to go from projection mode to rotate, zoom and move mode it's not instantaneous which is not exactly a time saver.  I have actually 3 gals I know that use the program and love it.  One is Kath, the gal that's doing that amazing texture set for Apollo, looks like a real dude.  She says she wants to release some tutorials for DeepPaint 3D but when??  That could be a year from now.  The other is Deecey as well as Connie that's using it to texture her Wizard Robe for Apollo.   All 3 very talented gals but all busy as bees.  So if you need the help who else do you turn too? 

Oh and I can't figure out a way to get that Maxon - Bryce sidegrade Dee, where do I look for that hon??

Thanks much

Richard ;-)~

Heya Richard. grin I looked at www.maxon.net in their online store. It wasn't easy to find the link -- but do yourself a favor and work with the demo -first-. I'll dig around in a bit and see if I can find the competitive upgrade part; I think it was a tiny little link at the bottom of the main order page that went to a different link. It's a lot of money if you decide you don't like it, you know? Bodypaint standalone is going to cost the same amount as the very basic C4D+Bodypaint, weirdly enough, so I'd recommend going that route. More tools for the same price is always good. Support... dunno. It's definitely there and I did have an issue I had to call their tech folks about in the beginning, but they resolved it in -seconds-, and were very friendly about it. There are a lot of tutorials you can buy, but honestly, I had a friend walk me through the basics to help me because after that I couldn't afford -anything- else (and still can't for a while yet).