(adjusts his reading glasses, and scratches his gray-stubbled chin...)

Gather around, my children, for you are about to learn some history!

In a far distant past, your 3D/CG hobbyist forebears were a hardy and determined lot. They dared to escape the stifling cities of Expensive CG Gear, and set out for a new land, with a promise of forging a place where computer-generated artistry could (at least occasionally) occur without requiring a second mortgage. So they hitched up their broken-mesh oxen to their meager 486es and Pentiums, and set out for the Promised Land.

They struggled under near-total deprivation. They had to endure the long, cold render times and slow and clunky interfaces, as their low-speed wagons lumbered over the jagged low-poly terrain. Overcoming the unknown and the dangers, they laughed with challenge in their hearts at their untextured meshes. They joyfully sweated out the long, lonely hours in a text editor, just to get a some odd bit of conforming clothes to actually work as advertised. You would find them happily banging away at crude pen tablets (and in most cases a --gasp-- mouse), to gently tease out smooth lines where there was once torn mesh. They suffered horrendous and heart-wrenching crashes (as the vendors respond: "but it was a feature!") They were forced to weather synapse-stretching disappointments, heartache, anger, and far, far more. When they had a chance (given Bryce's epoch-straddling render times, they had plenty) they fearlessly ventilated their frustrations at the world and at each other, in ways that would make today's tender-hearted Poserite turn white with fear and drop to the floor in a dead faint.

These hard-bitten pioneers found an unspoiled and free land. They managed to take pure crap, and turn it into works worth contemplating. They forged and built the land in which you so carelessly play today.

Nowadays, you get to ride smoothly in high-powered Multicore CPUs, and along freeways paved with chained GPUs. You tread upon soft, gently rolling, high-poly land. Your render speeds are (on average) less today, than it once took to cold-boot a computer.

You are truly spoiled. You get cranky and shout to the rafters when a new item comes out that isn't in your favorite color. You whip out your credit cards in eager anticipation of the next "texture set". You beg, plead, and cajole for someone, anyone to build you something to your personal specifications, in spite of swimming in a veritable ocean of cost-free and capable modeling suites. You've planted billboards, banners, and advertisement at every turn. Your merchants travel in large packs, gleefully following the latest fashion or eye-catching element, spewing near-blatant copies and knock-offs wherever their dances take them.

Maybe someday you may appreciate this. Maybe you never will. But no matter what you think or how you react? Know that while the days of the Poserdom pioneer have gone the way of the cowboy, the gent armed with sword, and the sailing-ship rigger, the results live on today.

Don't bother to thank us. We have ceased to give a shit long ago, as life and circumstance have carried us into the four winds (and in many cases, into the Great Beyond). Instead, do us a favor. At least once in your miserable artistic endeavors, build something excellent (mesh, texture, item) that works in its own right, and give it away to the world for free. The next time you need something for a project and do not have it, choke back the urge to run out and buy it, or to beg for someone to make it. Take the time to build it. From scratch. Sure it'll look like crap, but that just means you have to refine it - do that, and keep doing it until you love (not like... love) the results.

Finally - have fun with this stuff. That's what it's for.

Regards, and Fair Winds!

/P

Hear hear!

uhm... some hobbyists are a bit lazy; they just want instant gratification as far as  art production is concerned.  It's a hobby after all, say what.  Those who have the money to spend, will spend it.  Desperadoes who can't find anyone to cater to their custom whims and fancies, will have to learn mesh or texture creation on their own. 

I love the idea of a generation of old geezer users who cobble stuff together using derelict platforms and software, and whip out something jaw-dropping.  It's heroic and romantic form a geek point of view.

But, I cannot imagine how I would use a tablet surface and direct touch of finger tips to create Poser type art.  Perhaps someday, there will be a holographic telepathic interface for that.

A noble sentiment indeed Pengie. From a practical standpoint though, you know there are probably a large number of folks out there who didn't sign up to push polygons or pixels. They just want to take existing stuff and make pictures. I can see tweaking the whiners maybe, but honestly, the whole noble savage thing is going to fall on beaucoup deaf ears. May as well ask everyone to learn to kill Bambi with a bow and arrow before they can eat at MickeyD's without hanging their heads in shame :-)

Totally OT  and honest curiousity as long as you're here - why given its roots on Unix workstations has 3D, AFAIK, not make a significant splash on Linux? I mean outside places like Pixar et al. I'm not aware of any of the major applications (not named Blender) - Max, Maya, Cinema 4D, Lightwave that have Linux versions. I'd think that given the price advantage, they'd at least have Linux render node packages.

*Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori *

What has happened, of course, is somewhere similar to car technique.

Yes, my first car I kept running in wintertime by putting pieces of plastic buckets over the sensitive parts of the ignition, and at least once a week I had the hood open for some form of fix, to clean the nozzle, tune the ignition. If I had this car which was my first today, the police would probably take if off the streets for being too noisy, emitting too much smoke, not meeting the safety requrements (althoug it had seatbelts, which was a novelty back then). It would be accepted as a hobby, maybe, for a round the block trip in summer, but not for daily commuting. 

Today, under the hood of my car, there's just a whole lot of electronics and gibberish I do not understand and fear to look at.

Old day Poser technique was pretty simple and could be understood by studying a content file. Today there is much more in there than the avarage hobbyist can understand. Anyone proudly bringing out a figure like Posette or Vicky, state of the art of Poser technology of their time, today would be regarded with pity.  

Poserism simply is not that simple anymore. 

I think we should not let the advance technologies in today's Poser environment ruin our enjoyment of Making Art with Poser.

Just Make Art.

Quote - I think we should not let the advance technologies in today's Poser environment ruin our enjoyment of Making Art with Poser.

Just Make Art.

Amen.  Just let each other use the skills we enjoy and move on.

Hmm, I can remember when we got excited about a 1K x 1 (bit) CMOS RAM chip in a 16 pin DIP. :lol:

Anybody remember the 2901 bit-slice processor? :huh:

Oh, and lest I forget the powerful 8008 uP ... WOW! What a power house ... but we'll never get CMOS to operate faster than 1MHz, hahahahahahahaha :lol:
Never say never, no?! ... Old Japanese saying, "Man who say it cannot be done should not interrupt man doing it!"

Sorry, guess I'm dating myself ... talk about conceit ... no, no, conceit is a fault and I don't have any faults. :lol:

Thanks Pengie.

cheers,
dr geep
;=]

PS: Sorry Motorola ... don't forget the 6800 uP, also.

PPS: BTW - I still have my monitor set to 480 x 600 pixels. :lol: (JK)

Talk about dating yourself, I can still remember playing Zork on a computer with a monochrome screen and no hard disk, because hard disks weren’t available yet. For you children out there, Zork was a text only game (no graphics) where you could type in hit the rock, rub the rock, scratch the rock, move the rock, etc. and get a different response from the computer for each action.

As technology grew I knew the pure ecstasy of having a color monitor and changing out the video card to upgrade from 4 colors to 16 colors. That was a big day. :::sigh::: We have come a long way.

My first computer didn't have a monitor, we hooked it up to a tv, an old console. (that children is one of those old tvs that stood on the floor and had a knob to turn channels)  Don't know that I played zork, but I do remember hearing about it. Played plenty of other text based games.

I just finished rendering some scenes with 11 fully clothed hi res characters in a highly detailed setting and Poser Pro 2010 didn't mind at all. If I had to do this scene in Poser 4 I would have had to layer render like 2 characters at a time over a background image ( not an actual prop setting ).

The 'Pioneer' days forced one to be innovative, but I don't miss them that much. :P

We are spoiled now.

There are so many freebies being made by gracious modelers and so much help and advice in the forums now that it does tend to make one brain lazy - ha ha.

A lot has changed but it still is as much of a fantastic community as it ever has been.

Well said! I remember editing cr2's on my Motorola 68040 and jumping for joy when transparency rendered the shiny plastic mannequin hair obsolete.But I may have been a relative latecomer with Bryce 2, Poser 2, etc.

I did not have to make my own computer chips by hand. I had it EASY! Now I blaze along on my first generation Intel Mac Quad Xeon (2006?) watching with envy as more modern computers render on by in the fast lanes.

I remember when hand coding in HTML passed me by.  Poser is fast doing the same. 

You know, it has become boring. Making a program do things it wasn't supposed to was the best part of the process. Getting things to sorta/kinda look like something gave you a huge sense of accomplishment. Seeing works by Robin Woods or Beton were thrilling. It was a frelling huge amount of work, and took forever to get a scene right and wait out the render. And it didn't cost an arm and a leg. Bryce was about $100. Poser a little more. From then on, there were freebies, and learning how to make do with what you could create. I'll admit I fell into the trap of buying better modeling apps, but it was the render engines that really got me. Instead of faking GI in Bryce, the temptation of real GI that was easy to use and turned out amazingly real renders sucked me in. And why struggle to model something when excellent ones are so reasonably priced? That texture giving me fits? Someone else has a perfect one for sale. Something got lost along the way. Maybe it was the adventure of something new. Maybe it was the sense of community when not so many people were doing it. Maybe it was before money got so integrated into the mix, and people were happy to share techniques and what they made. Maybe it was that amateurs were happy being just that, and didn't compete with professionals. Maybe I've just gotten jaded about the whole process. Yeah, I miss that time. Not enough to open up the Bryce DTE, though. ;)

Quote - My first computer didn't have a monitor, we hooked it up to a tv, an old console. (that children is one of those old tvs that stood on the floor and had a knob to turn channels)  Don't know that I played zork, but I do remember hearing about it. Played plenty of other text based games.

Our first PC didn't have a monitor except the green screen.  We hooked it up to a TV to play a silly game that I can't even remember the name of.  Little blob jumped from block to block...

When we got the color monitor, it took my parents days to figure out how to make it work on the PC.  They had to write a BasicA program to get it to work.

This was on an original IBM PC - no hard drive, just single sided floppy drives.

You were lucky.

When I started 3D there weren't even any polygons, we had to make models with cardboard and wire... with our bare hands. 

And if you told that to the kids of today they'd never believe you...

I hope that at least someone gets the reference ;-)

Jokes aside, the first 3D software I used (in about 1987) required each vertex to be entered by typing in its co-ordinates, there really were no polygons, only edges. And no mouse yet. But it was already fun.

We used to live in a shoe box in the middle of the road......I wish I still had some of my 16-bit Spectrum artwork from....oooh, 1982?  Loved it, I'm sure that the restrictions placed on me by the hardware and software in those days pushed me to be more creative than nowadays.  Sigh, "pose", "light", "render" = art.  Or maybe it was the fact that I was in my early 20s rather than my early 50s like what I am now!

Great thread for us oldies!

Good! I was feebly alluding to that skit. Is it any wonder so many Poser related apps are in Python?

When I was a lad there was not even 3D-the whole world was flat and 2D!

Quote - You were lucky.

When I started 3D there weren't even any polygons, we had to make models with cardboard and wire... with our bare hands. 

And if you told that to the kids of today they'd never believe you...

I hope that at least someone gets the reference ;-)

Jokes aside, the first 3D software I used (in about 1987) required each vertex to be entered by typing in its co-ordinates, there really were no polygons, only edges. And no mouse yet. But it was already fun.

Hi
what the OP describes is in no way unique to the Myopic "poserverse"

tis merely a symptom of the
larger societal shift away from individual thinking to "group think"

Caused by our ever increasing dependence on automation and prefabrication and having an "app" or trend setter
that thinks/decides for us.

A very telling sign of this was a news story
about some young "tech savvy"
 "smart phone" users here in New York.
when the support networks for their precious devices were rendered useless by the Catastrophic hurricane damage. many of them could not figure out how to use a coin operated pay phone.

Cheers

Quote - Hi
what the OP describes is in no way unique to the Myopic "poserverse"

tis merely a symptom of the
larger societal shift away from individual thinking to "group think"

Caused by our ever increasing dependence on automation and prefabrication and having an "app" or trend setter
that thinks/decides for us.

A very telling sign of this was a news story
about some young "tech savvy"
 "smart phone" users here in New York.
when the support networks for their precious devices were rendered useless by the Catastrophic hurricane damage. many of them could not figure out how to use a coin operated pay phone.

Cheers

I'm amazed there are any payphones left!

I remember when getting formatted text output meant manually inserting codes in text and then printing the document out to see the result. ‘WYSIWYG’ text processing made things much easier and faster. Some people probably spent the time saved trying out endless garish font combinations that were the bane of novice composition. People can now spend time making pictures as opposed to creating or tweaking content. Becoming consumerized and commoditized is a sign of Poser’s success. The pioneers are always going to feel a sense of superiority over the consumers, like the mountain men dissing the dudes who, surprise, actually didn’t want to sleep on the ground and crap in a hole.

“Something got lost along the way. Maybe it was the adventure of something new.”

I think that nostalgia is pretty common, no matter what the subject. I’ve heard any number of people who lived through WWII say that in a way, it was the greatest time in their lives. I imagine part of it is the tendency to view the past through rose colored glasses. Still, there’s undoubtedly something different about a new thing while it’s still confined to a relatively small group – there’s a sense of excitement and camaraderie that’s bound to dissipate as things become bigger. The Antonia/WM folks were certainly excited so it’s probably possible to recreate that some of that feeling in new projects. I think that you really can’t go home though. 3D or computing in general is never going to seem as it was in infancy – at least not to us gray beards. We have seen so much technology that it’s hard to be really amazed any more. We’d likely see even some super robot as just a really smart computer. It would take something entirely new like Star Trek’s transporter or holodeck to really be amazing I think.

Wolf, much as I agree regarding ‘group think,’ or as I call it, the seeming hive mindedness of the current generation, I think that it is a separate issue. The more fundamental thing you allude to in speaking of ‘automation and prefabrication,’ is as old as history. People not being able to use a pay phone? What would happen if automobiles and food stores vanished – how many people would know how to hunt, cultivate or saddle a horse if one were available – for that matter, how many people don’t know how to drive a standard transmission vehicle? You could easily do a funny video showing people under 40 or so trying to use a rotary dial phone. A technology that doesn’t become more automated and prefabricated is probably one that didn’t survive. Our embrace of technology has certainly left us vulnerable, to a disturbing degree, to natural or manmade disasters. That trend probably goes all the way back to when we became dependent on agriculture though.

Strangely, the penguin seems to have dropped this egg and left it for us to incubate. Probably a passing flash of nostalgia or a bad taco. 

"I think that nostalgia is pretty common, no matter what the subject. I’ve heard any number of people who lived through WWII say that in a way, it was the greatest time in their lives. I imagine part of it is the tendency to view the past through rose colored glasses."

Very true Sir.
I honestly dont understand this notion that the poser base has "lost "something .
when in fact it has gained quit a bit as far as technology is concerned.
The past is the past
 use the current software & content as your needs require and dont worry about how much the "sense of community"  blah blah etc has changed.

For me personally that "Golden Era" to which the OP & other "veterans" wistfully refer,
was Frankly the Dark ages of poser particularly when it came to rendering.

Cheers

I think part of it has to do with the difference in mindsets between the producer and the consumer. I think one could argue that in the earlier days Poser was more about producing, the software was pretty basic and there just wasn't that much content around, so everyone had to improvise on some level.  And I'm not talking about 'vendors' here, I mean everybody. People figured out how to hack a .cr2 file or change the texture on a bikini to make underwear, or how to hide the legs of jeans to make shorts, and even if the results were crap the sense of satisfaction was still real. 

I get the feeling that's not happening quite as much now. Perhaps it's partly because standards have changed a lot. Back in the day there were only about five styles of cowpat hair - anything else was an improvement, no matter how amateurish. If you needed a rucksack you could get away with making oneout of a default sphere, a magnet and some donuts, it wouldn't stand out in a render because the rest of the render was probably pretty crap too.

All that has changed, in a PP2012 render if your figure needs a rucksack it'll need wrinkles and stitching and zippers and conforming morphs and Fresnel/Blinn/Phong whatnots or it's going to totally ruin the image - everything else in the scene is that good. For a typical user learning the skills to make something of the required quality is out of the question, so that means only one option - buy it. And so we see someone who in former times might have had an urge to get their hands dirty improvising, now joins the consumers and goes shopping for a solution instead. 

And the car repair analogy above is a good one. More complex technology, whatever benefits it may have, also has a way of disempowering the user.

"Strangely, the penguin seems to have dropped this egg and left it for us to incubate. Probably a passing flash of nostalgia or a bad taco."

@lm ... I'd vote 4 the "bad taco" :lol:

Yeah, da Penguin is good at doing that, ain't cha Pengie. :biggrin:

Yeah, Poser 4 renders, for the most part, look pretty bad compared to the latest versions. That was ok, though, because the meshes weren't all that hot, either. There were incredible artists who stood out from the crowd, and some aspiring artists who truly put their heart in their work... just like today. I am going to belabor one point, though: technical perfection seems to have over-shadowed actually having something to say. I prefer a render showing less technical adroitness, but with substance. (Does that sentence make sense?) The "pretty/shiny factor" has increased, I'll grant you. When you're trying to put something you feel strongly about into an image, though, sometimes the demand for technical perfection makes it fall apart. I'm babbling... and I just had tacos for lunch. ;)

It is not the kit, it is what you do with it.

Quote - We used to live in a shoe box in the middle of the road......I wish I still had some of my 16-bit Spectrum artwork from....oooh, 1982?  Loved it, I'm sure that the restrictions placed on me by the hardware and software in those days pushed me to be more creative than nowadays.  Sigh, "pose", "light", "render" = art.  Or maybe it was the fact that I was in my early 20s rather than my early 50s like what I am now!

Great thread for us oldies!

Must've been a pretty damn unique Speccy, then.  Mine was 8 bit.  Far as I know, so was everyone else's. 

Well, I certainly wasn’t one of the producer class ÷) I suspect that the vast majority weren’t either. There were a few people who stood out – Koz with transmapped hair, someone else with this or that … They showed us how to do things and people implemented them. I don’t know that the percentage of real inventors was any greater then. There may have been more people who used those hacks because the content availability wasn’t there initially. As soon as pants came with material zones to create shorts, for example, of course many people bought them rather than roll their own. Again, the movement to a content driven, consumer orientation was inevitable for Poser to grow. To overuse the analogy, photography would still be limited to pros and a few folks tinkering with dangerous chemicals in their basements if Kodak hadn’t come up with roll film and the Brownie.

Poser 4 renders only look like crap when compared to what is easily possible today. At the time they were perceived relatively as being as good what we have now. I’m not sure that the time and skill required to achieve the highest quality has changed that much – the bar has simply been raised as to what constitutes the best. To use the rucksack example, even back then, one cobbled from primitives wouldn’t hold except in the background. If you wanted a nice one, you either got one of the very few that might be available of modeled one. I agree that a different skill set is needed now to get quality results. Perhaps some people who truly enjoyed tinkering and creating have abandoned that approach and become solely consumers. I think most came to Poser to do art anyway, not become hackers. Now, the frontier has been closed so to speak. With indoor plumbing, electricity and supermarkets, it’s not surprising that even some of the pioneers may be content to buy rather than venture into the woods – to say nothing of the newcomers. It is true that the old hunter-gatherer skills wane as the need for them declines. That includes certain cultural things as well. Facebook will never replace the pleasures of sitting around the campfire making arrows for those who experienced the latter, but such is life

“… technical perfection seems to have over-shadowed actually having something to say.”

I agree 100%. The physically correct, photorealistic school has been in ascendance for some time. It seems at times to have almost become an end more than a means. There’s nothing wrong with that per se, but I personally find the most engaging images are not usually the ones where my first impression is ‘wow that really looks ’real.’ The 3D Trompe L'Oeil effect may be a technical tour de force, but as art, I usually find it less satisfying. That’s not to say that realism can’t be beautiful art, but it may be that the combination of accomplished technician and inspired artist is rarer the individual who possesses one or the other.

..we had to make models with cardboard and wire... with our bare hands. Cardboard? You could afford Cardboard!...you lucky lucky lucky ba...d..When I where a lad our wire was rusty and barbed! It was 26 hours a day down t' pit just to earn for a 1/2 hour timeshare in a C64 :) Seriously though, just because our toys are more high tech doesn't mean we have to stop being creative or innovative. If anything this stuff offers so much more opportunity and choice. Though question is do we want to? Especially if I look at what the GF's teenager grandkid and their friends have at their fingertips, tablets, smartphones, etc. Yet all many do is spend their time trolling each other on faceb*llocks. She finds it's amazing someone could create something from nothing in an evening. Purely because she never sees it. To her content is something that you take not make. Equally she's surprised when I don't 'get' the idea that fighting friends online is normal behavior. Her argument is everyone does it, so it's OK to behave like that. So does that make us a minority or are we just old farts stuck in the past?

yes

NextPoser developement will be Poser Senior, with Poser 4 look and feel but larger buttons and spinners. Bonus content, specially developed for this version:

• rollator walking aid animated prop (folds, wheels steer and spin, and brake handle)

• poses for use with rollator animated prop

• wheelchair

• rocking chair

• Grandma and granddad character (Posete/Dork based) with dedicated smart props: reading glasses, false teeth and hearing aid.

• grandma character comes with 'extra sag' FBM. 

• granddad character genital has no 'erect' dial. You need the bluepill plug-in for that. 

This Poser version comes with a lifetime warranty. License is strictly personal and can not be passed on to your inheritors.

All you forgot is the dynamic diaper and the casket prop.

Quote - NextPoser developement will be Poser Senior, with Poser 4 look and feel but larger buttons and spinners. 

And smart pop-ups. If the mouse hasn't moved in a while you get a pop-up which reminds you what you were doing, like "You were going to put shoes on her.... SHOES!! ...there we go". 

Quote - I wish I still had some of my 16-bit Spectrum artwork from....oooh, 1982?

Quote - Must've been a pretty damn unique Speccy, then.  Mine was 8 bit.

Paul means 16 colour - there was one bit per colour, and a brightness bit, hence four bit colour. Of course there were only 15 colours in reality, since bright black is indistinguishable from dark black. :)

More limiting, each 8 x 8 pixel square could have only two colours used within its boundaries: one for ink, and one for paper. That's how we managed to get a huge 256x192 pixel display into only 6,912 bytes of video RAM.

Tell that to the kids. :-)

Hey, hey, hey! Not all nostalgia derives from advanced age. Sometimes when you get what you wish for, you find out it's a massive bore. While I wouldn't go back to my first car on a bet, because the new toys really are features, sometimes software takes too much control. Just look at Vista. Having a modeling/rendering platform do too much for you is like running a script to play games. It's not a challenge. It's not fun.

I had (actually still have) the U.S. version, the Timex-Sinclair 2068 - also have the PC emulator. Ink and Paper, great intuitive naming and a great BASIC for the time. After the 2068, I has an Atari ST. In't interesting to consider what might have happened if Apple had licensed their OS. Wintel might have been Mactorola.

I was working at a research institute in the late 1970s and we needed to plot some data in 3 dimensions. The solution was to use a sand tray with round beads mounted on sticks and stuck into the sand to represent data points. That was really low tech 3d.

"The solution was to use a sand tray with round beads mounted on sticks and stuck into the sand to represent data points."

Clever idea! In a similar vein, people used to employ punched cards and knitting needles to create a crude database.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Needle_card

http://www.computerhistory.org/collections/accession/102647065

It's interesting to think about the manual processes that were transformed by even those old 8 bit PCs - and not all that long ago. If we returned to typewriters and index cards, we could probably have full employment :-)

I do miss making real 3d models.

As a kid I had a pretty good "speed modelling" technique worked out, using scrap cardboard and masking tape.

Hmmm... soon, it'll be time to start that real-life Dalek model I think... eh Sam?

...well, I say soon. I mean in maybe three years time at the earliest.

A 16-bit spectrum was two spectrums side by side. He he.

As I recall it was theoretically possible to make them talk to each other, wired together instead of to their respective tape machines, with a bit of machine code and some good keyboard press timing... Spectrum grid computing ;-)

We've still an ST and speccy, not sure if they still work. But the GF's C64 does. Complete with 5 3/4 inch external drive! lmckenzie- if you like that stuff you might like these chaps... http://www.computerconservationsociety.org/ The MOSI in Manchester is well worth a visit, has steam trains as well at weekends. monkeycloud - you still can :) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Doctor-Who-3-D-Model-Making/dp/1405902787 Along with dalek theres a TARDIS, K-9, and Cyberman head.

"lmckenzie- if you like that stuff you might like these chaps..."

Cool, if I ever get on that side of the pond, somewhere else to visit besides Baker Street and James Herriot country :-)

Man that was good reading... 

Geep: No bad taco; just a bit of incubation. I like it when people reflect on what was, and what may be. 

I promise you, I have no nostalgia for the days when I had to plow through a massive ASCII file to fix a joint gone apeshit. On the other hand, I do hold the highest regard and appreciation for those who really pushed the envelope. I miss many of them - even the ones I verbally pounded on the hardest.

I still play around in this realm as the mood strikes me.

I began this little journey on an AMD Pentium-equivalent (forgot the model), a whopping 256MB of RAM, a and a Rage Pro 128 card, latched in turn onto a heavy-assed 17" (then 25") CRT SVGA monitor. I had just wandered in from the gaming MOD world (Weapons Factory for Quake 2, 3, and the just-released Unreal Tournament), looking for ideas to spruce up the maps and meshes with. I'd toyed with Poser a little, but nothing serious. 

It's been a long, strange trip, no? 

So... where we going, campers?

Prolly to he!! .. if we don't mend our ways. :lol:

P.S. Why do it take you 10 months to answer a post, Pengie, is your CPU really THAT slow? :lol::lol::lol::lol:

Nah - I'm just that lazy. :)

Oooo, an honest answer.

Thanks.

:lol:

Back before Computers a tube of red oil paint would cost $50 just one tube of red $50.
Add all the other tubes of paint $5.00 to $50.00 ,paintbrushes ,linseed oil ,turpentine ,canvas  .
Smelled bad also.and you could get lead poisoning.
every oil painting I had at least $300.00 in it if not $500.00.

Air brushing you had to have a nosiy air compressor at least $500.00,air brush around $200.00 and a gas mask.to limmit ya poisoning.even with the gas mask the smell got stuck in ya head for days and ya would spit all the colors.

Scupting with real world clay ya need a very hot furnious $3000.00.
only works when the Humidaty is right.
Moldes are a nightmare.

had to have a lot of room for Oils,AirBrush,Sculpting.

I had a hard time converting to CGI cause the real world way of doing things was what I was use to.But I didn't go back to the old ways.
Now I can't imagine painting with oils or making a mold.

I still think copy past is the best invention of all times ;)

I could deal with all the mess and expense and noise, but i'm never going back to a medium without an undo :p

Years ago living in a shared bedsitter built a darkroom from secondhand, borrowed and gifted kit. Processed B&W film from a second hand zenit that weighed a ton. Total PITA to work with but all I could afford. Last year at a show spent there was mobile darkroom doing photograms, and it was magical to rediscover the joy of seeing the image appear on paper. Plus the smell of the chemicals took us back. Same show shot 700-800 images on digital and coming home on the train could look at them on a laptop. While the darkroom stood out as the photo fun of the day, I wouldn't want to use that on a daily level. But wouldn't be averse for the odd hour of "slow photography" purely for fun.

I like being spoiled :-) but I've been around long enough to remember the good old days. I'm old enough to have used AutoCad 1. Even before that I remember matrix printers that couldn't even print images and I had to write my own software to get the printer printing images I had drawn on my MSX.

I've got plenty of friends who's eyes grow big and jaws drop when they see what I do create from scratch with a computer. They've got all the high tech toys but have no clue what to do with them. That's the other side of the story, lot's of people have all the toys, but do not even realize what they could all do with it, beside playing some games and using office, email and surf the web.

I like how I don't have wait for days for a render anymore. I can now render something of so much higher quality in poser in so much less time these days, in a matter of an hour or so. This weekend I gave a presentation. I used some of my old renders from years ago (the oldest one was from 2004) and some of my new stuff, what I different. I had to smile when I did see the old ones, they still look pretty good, but compared what I can do these days, they look a bit outdated. The audience didn't seem to notice it though, they loved all of the images in the presentation and were impressed. Yep.... the old stuff from years ago still can impress the modern crowd :-)..... but I do remember how hard it was then to get an image perfect and of good quality and how much more easy it is to achieve what I want these days.

So, I appreciate being spoiled!

Quote -Back before Computers a tube of red oil paint would cost $50 just one tube of red $50.
Add all the other tubes of paint $5.00 to $50.00 ,paintbrushes ,linseed oil ,turpentine ,canvas  .
Smelled bad also.and you could get lead poisoning.
every oil painting I had at least $300.00 in it if not $500.00.

Wait - when and where? I was able to rack up a complete kit (canvas-boards, a respectable array of brushes, a huge fistful of colors, etc) for less than $150 back in 1985(-ish.) I skipped oils mostly becuase I hated the drying times. I started as a pre-teen kid, and by the time I was in high school, I was able to stretch and gesso my own canvases (which saved a ton of money).

I miss it sometimes; not enough to get my Bob Ross on, but I miss it. I miss drawing, too. As a teenaged kid, I was perfectly happy with a ream of copier paper snitched from school, a fistful of pencils, a big-assed eraser, and something to sharpen the pencils with. 

Fast forward to today, where I found myself bitching and swearing at my expensive-as-hell laptop because a morph I was tweaking about with caused a mesh-wrinkle in some poor mesh's sternum. Spent a solid hour smoothing that damned thing out. Wound up laughing at the whole episode in retrospect.

I think tomorrow I'm going to swipe a couple of sheets of paper, a pencil, and take that with me out on lunch break...

You can goggle oil paints and red oil paints to see prices.
For exsample.not sayin these are the paints I used.
Gamblin Artist's Oil Colors Cadmium Red Medium 150 ml.
Gamblin 24-Color 150ml Artist Grade Oil Paint Display Assortment.
Diffrent paints and brushes have diffrent prices like Blender & Max.
They have stuff to make acrylics dry slow and oils dry fast .
So acrylics acts like oils & oils acts like acrylics. LOL.

Guess we all get nostalgic & sentimental about the old days.
But CGI is a good medium.glitches n all.I've broken key boards n wore curse words out.

I spent all my years in scool setting in the back drawing comics & album covers.
When I got in to CGI ,wished I'd learnt to read thou.
Spent my first year of CGI learning to read manuels and CGI terminology.