Well yes, one does have to wonder what that's all about. There's a specific Daz Studio forum so it's not like they don't have somewhere to stick it after all.. politely speaking of course. :) Have to agree with mateo on this, any chance the - what is it now? EIGHT people running the poser forum can shift these things to the DAZ forum so Poser can get it's own attention like? I mean, sheesh, If EIGHT people can't manage a 24 hour monitoring of the forum then perhaps the management should consider employing someone other than americans? huh?

There is an "alien" for poser available, it's similar in many respects but it's not Giger's alien. Currently I honestly can't remember who made it. It wasn't bad and I've used it in a couple of images in the past. Giger is horribly militant about his copyrights and they're fairly simple to enforce because of the unique nature of his art. But it boils down to the same thing with Battlemechs and Star Wars/Star Trek. You can get away with it for a certain amount of time but is it worth the risk? Paramount had a really serious embolism on fan sites and are still active in closing some down depending on the level of infringement of the franchise. Same with George Lucas, he's also very militant in protecting the franchise and while there's a wealthy of Star Wars resources in models and suchlike there's just as many who disappear overnight for whatever reason. The PowerLoader, Dropship, APC and various other articles from alien/aliens are available as 3D models in various places. It may be that it's just beneath notice at this time, it may be they don't care, it's impossible to say. While I would absolutely LOVE to have a good model of Giger's alien to play around with I wouldn't really expect anyone to produce one, free or for sale. Although, I think I could cheerfully kick anton somewhere painful for losing the files of his model. :)

Cookies are bad for the teeth. Milk? Well, after seeing what the UK dairy industry does I'm not convinced that's particularly good either. Wine is ok in small doses and apologies are only necessary when a wrong has been done. Other than that I see no reason to further comment as I agree with the majority of what you say. Except. It is, as you say a fine way to begin research by asking working artists. However, the larger majority of people on this and many other similarly oriented sites are not working artists but are hobbyists and as has been displayed over and over in the copyright forum and in the store itself have at best only a tenuous grasp of the subject of copyright law and licensing. This results in urban myths being bandied as truth and mistakes that bite people hard in the ass. There's nothing wrong with asking in these forums as there are people who will provide links and information that is relevant. There are also a large proportion of complete amateurs who give wrong advice without qualifying it. For instance a recent comment on this site that "if you alter an image enough it's yours". That's the sort of advice that people don't need because it's completely inaccurate. On sites where there are a large number of professional working artists one tends to get far more educated and experienced comments in return. On this site, while there are professionals here the larger majority of advice is questionable to say the least. Another memorable comment from one merchant was "It's free advertising, they'll pay me or I'll tell them to get lost". As you say, and I agree wholeheartedly with, it's a place to begin research but the key here is RESEARCH and not taking the word of a forumite who could well just be some pillock with a keyboard and a ditzy clue floating in a can of Mountain Dew. I think that's where the severity of my response comes from, seeing a lot of bad advice given to people on this and other similar sites by members and in some cases the staff themselves pretending to speak from knowledge where they have none. In a litigious age like the one we live in today, it's a mine field to play with "advice" from a forum and assume that it's accurate or even good advice. Unfortunately also, a rather large number of people don't want to find out, they don't want to do the research, they just want a work-around and to sell for money. As a result we get infringements and flame wars and merchants' careers destroyed. All for the lack of a little thought and research. On that note. Merry whatever it is you celebrate if anything at all. Or is that what "Season's Greetings" means? Ahh, whatever. A joyous time to all.

Erm Nope... but then I'm far too mellow at the moment to flip any flops anywhere. :)

especially anyone who's login begins with a Q... It's a bit reckless to assume that no one else knows anything about a given subject just because you don't Not at all. In the larger majority of cases I was quite correct. I am not a lawyer and neither were any of those posting up until that point. And as you (HonorMac) imply, you're not either. So no, I wasn't being reckless but simply stating a point that was apparently clear at that time. If you wish to take issue with my claiming that nobody was a lawyer when in fact they were feel free to post or mail me details of your or others qualifications and which bar you're or they are registered with and I'll be happy to post a public apology. That applies to anyone supplying information in this thread who actually IS a lawyer. Until then anything posted IS pure speculation and without coherent and determined research remains speculation and conjecture based upon interpretation. Also, the links I provided were examples and as a base for further research, as I suggested in my post, NOT as firm and hard proof of anything. The simple thing that is overlooked by the larger majority of people when suffering the "wow cool" factor is whether or not there are any legal precedents, or information pertaining to the subject at hand, and the surprising retisence of people to research or understand a point. That you (HonorMac) appear to show some understanding of the subject is neither here nor there. Without proof of qualification I, and others can only take your posting as conjecture based upon your interpretation and beliefs. Much as mine was. Further research and solid legal advice is still needed by those who would profit from and advertise by using, celebrities. Need a nap? Hardly, but thanks for the concern though. :)

My site is down, has been since middle of this year. The hosting server moved home and I didn't bring the site back up because of people distributing my models as their own. Great that you have permission, sorry to be so medieval about it but there's been rather a lot of nonsense lately as I'm sure you'll know. As regards the mesh smoothing that's causing that "bending" of the model, I'll be happy to help you sort that out if you're interested. Email is Questor@shalako.demon.co.uk if you have any questions.

sigh Do remember to ask permission from the original creator. :) And I do hope you didn't grab that off my old site, as I do have permission to distribute it. Nice work if you did it. The crushing and bending of the mesh as displayed in the image can be beaten fairly easily (and the version I released earlier this year was fixed accordingly), but it does take a bit of extra work. Makes the thing look a heck of a lot better without all that organic nonsense that poser adds to meshes. :)

Looks like their server got hacked, not the first time this has happened to someone. Pathetic little creeps that do this.

As regards making morphs for Vickie 2 you need to contact Daz3D and check with them, though they do have some information on their site in regards to this. You can (AFAIK) distribute morphs made with vickie's face provided they have been squished or encoded. I think Russel's RTE Encoder (freestuff here or at PoserPros) does this and there's probably something else that you can use as well. If you run a search in this forum on Morph squishing that should result in some information on how to do it. If you use Mr. Doe's face morphs and make an entirely new face you will need the permission of Mr. Doe in order to distribute that face because your face is based on his morphs, therefore without his permission you would be infringeing on Mr. Doe's work unless permission was given either in the text file or by Mr. Doe. However, if you use a MOR pose for Mr. Doe's morphs then you can distribute that pose file as it only contains dial information and would not infringe on Mr. Doe's work because people would need Mr Doe's face morphs for the MOR pose to work. In all circumstances though it's always best to ask the original creator first before doing anything.

Ooh, now that's a good point 12rounds. I can see how that might be useful. Looking for a series of vertex settings that match the variation used in the object file. That would be relatively simple. Heck a dos batch file could run for that so it shouldn't be difficult to set up a Visual Basic or other script to do the same thing. Thanks for giving me a clue there. It wouldn't matter what the morph setting was to identify the signature as the vertex/vertice markers would be there anyway. Thanks. Finally I get a clue, how cool is that? :) Lyrra. Traveller used to share his morphs freely, a hell of a lot of morphs as well. So there's nothing wrong with sharing morphs freely and working for hours on something to give it away. (personally I've been doing that for years). But, I do agree with you completely about people who think they should be allowed to make money on things that are made available as "Funstuff" - and I don't mean in images/animations but by selling the item in a store. It was IIRC the fact that people were using Traveller's morphs to make for-sale charcters that cheesed him off in the first place, and not just him. Now he sells a cd of his morphs with commercial permission, a great "free" resource was lost due to the selfish ignorance of a few. Thankfully that resource at least did stay, albeit in another form and I don't begrudge Traveller a single penny of what he asks. There's nothing at all wrong with working for hours on something that you then share freely with other users of the program, there's a hell of a lot wrong with people who want to make money selling that product because they're too damn lazy to do their own original work. Considering how often some people are ripped off I find it amazing that they still stay and make things for the software. One other thing though, what Anton has posted here doesn't just help for vertex editing, it can be adapted for a variety of purposes although adapting this for image protection could be difficult. There is a piece of software available that encodes a signature layer into an image, much in the method that 12rounds mentions. It was developed some time ago and I do recall a free download that enables encoding into an image - not watermarking, it's an actual encryption. So texture maps could be likewise protected with that encoding (though obviously not the entire image and every pixel. As we've seen people will even steal small sections of texture maps.

Look at all the celebrety look-a-likes among 12" action figures from Dragon and the like. Which are all licensed. Look, will you please stop speculating and research the subject. I'm not a lawyer, neither are any of you. Speculation is more likely to get someone into a world of hurt rather than find a loophole none of you have a clue exists. It's a simple matter to research the subject and gain an understanding of the law in this respect. Vinyl models of film, anime, whatever are licensed. Models and effigies of famous persons are licensed. The reason is because the "image" of famous people is their livelihood. They make buckets of money on their face and name. They will protect that to considerable extremes. Tom Cruise is unbelievably militant in this respect (as an example). Just one slip, one person mails the estate/agent and asks and whomever is ripping their image and name is in a world of hurt. Poser or not it doesn't matter. Worse is the fact that poser is so heavily associated with porn. Don't think just because Renderosity is a funky little site in Tenessee and Poser is a hobby program that stars, movie houses, SFX companies haven't heard of it. Poser IS used in media production and pre-visualisation for movie sequences. These people may or may not be aware of the stores and the sites related to it. Never assume anything. Research it, seek REAL legal advice, don't "think" you can get around it because it's "just Poser". That way lies a crippling law suit. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but certainly in the future sometime. And if you don't think that's likely I suggest you again research that around some of the news sites where stars, actors, media companies and other personages HAVE sued itsy bitsy little ordinary people for everything they own. Royalties matter almost as much to these people. On that note I'm done with this thread. It's a simple matter to research a subject, if you people want to keep babbling here pretending to know what you're talking about that's fine. Go ahead. If you get away with it more power to you. If you don't. Well, ignorance is not an excuse in the eyes of the law.

shakes head Never mind, I'm somehow not being clear on my question but it's too late to bother with making it nice and simple. Thanks for the tip here, it is extremely useful and a good starting point for other forms of protection, and hopefully a lot of the morph/prop makers around will consider what you've suggested here to protect themselves from the happy wan***s that think they deserve a free lunch.

blast, forgot to uncheck the dopey reply thing. Happy whatever it is you celebrate. :)

It doesn't matter if they're called look-alike or not, that's a myth. Professional "look-alikes" have to be licensed as well. It's still effectively illegal without a license. Only charicatures are protected under fair use laws as a result of comedy/parody. However, have fun. Have a blast, do whatever. That's the trend.

No you misunderstand me Anton, I don't mean for you to tell people how to look for your morphs, but rather to explain how to "rapidly" search through the morphs of a character to check for their own. Watermarking is one thing, but if there's (as I've seen in a couple) 50 or 60 morphs included in a character, some of them around the same object (eyes, nose, chin) it would help to have a clue to search rapidly than to dig through each morph at length in an editor to see if the "watermark" is there. I wouldn't dream of asking you how to look for your morphs. Just an idea how to do it quickly rather than the apparent hours it might otherwise take. Not huffy at all, sorry if my prose seems rather short, it's been like that for years. Just how I am I'm afraid. :) On that, thank you. I DO read threads, in their entirety. However keeping camera angles, details and info on "where" a person has watermarked a morph is ok for that morph, when you have a large collection of them, or, as is often the case, a large collection centred on certain body parts it becomes unweildy. Also when it's included with other similar morphs one ends up hunting through a whole bunch of the same thing. I think I get what your saying. "Only need to check one part - where the watermark is" but you hint that there's a fast way to do that. I'm curious what that fast way is. Also, I don't see that the thread has degenerated at all, but that's your opinion.