Where there is something to be won, some people might cheat and if people have to judge who wins them self, some might make several accounts etc. But I doubt its a huge problem if the prizes are moderate. Cheating for a book or some drawing supplies etc. must be a low number. Besides that you can lock a vote to an IP address, so people wouldn't be able to cast more than a single vote from the same IP or they would either need a VPN or several internet connections to do it. So they could either spend their vote to down vote someone or give themselves the highest score. And again how desperate are people when the prizes ain't more than they are and its meant to be for fun. Also if you have to send out the prizes you have the address so it would be easy to see if two accounts share the same one.

Also you have the risk of someone noticing that an entry is stolen, so its a lot of trouble to go through to win I would say, and as you say should someone cheat so be it, its not the end up the world compared to having an active site. So setting up the technical things correct, no one would really have to "play" cop. Most people have no clue how to or interest in cheating in something like that, unless its obviously easy how to do it. So I wouldn't be to worried about it, if you lock to the IP address or do a little research of how other sites with voting does it, I would imagine that it could be easily solved.

Sure no problem :)

A main idea behind competitions are prizes, don't know if you have that? But that could make people more interested. If that is outside your budget, you could always try to contact some shops, like artistic bookstores, maybe some that sell pencils, brushes or whatever that could be relevant for people on your site and ask if they would be interested in offering a prize against some free promotion on your site, it could be a good idea for them as well, to get people from your site to maybe shop with them for a very low cost, I mean if its a book for instant and they get introduced to maybe 500 potential customers, it only requires one person to buy something from them and they have made a good deal. Also they are just as desperate for new "members" as you are. Anyway might be worth considering and it will not cost you anything and if you are lucky you could get them to make a link to you. :D

diogenese19348 posted at 1:47PM Sun, 19 August 2018 - #4335023

I'm in my 60's, by younger I didn't mean 20 year olds I should have been a bit more specific. Anyway the site I am working with is www.daggerbay.com. If you have the time, I would love to hear suggestions about how we can improve it. You will need to make an account to get to see everything, but the site is free. We aren't there to make money, we are there to learn and socialize. We have bling you can buy to award pictures or comments you like, the proceeds for that are enough to pay server costs and it is purely voluntary. As I was saying though, contest sites in general are dying, which is why we are trying to branch out.

I thought you meant young people, fair enough, I guess you just meant new people? :D

I took a look at you site and I think it looks good as a first impression, I didn't register because I don't think that is necessary as your first impression with the site is as an unregistered person. Once people have decided to register its usually easier to keep them as they have already gone through the trouble of signing up in the first place so something have caught there interest. Where it would be relevant to look "deeper" into the content in such regard is if you can see you are loosing registered members or if the number of visits to the site is declining. So for instant if you can see from the statistic (Google analytics or something similar) that on average a member visit the site 2-3 times a week over a given period of lets say 3 month and comparing that to a 3 month period later on and you can see that the average number of visit times have fallen to maybe 1-2 times every two week or something. Then it would be interesting to take a look at the deeper content of site.

First of all, what you are facing have nothing to do with you being a contest site and whether they are popular or not, I think, But obviously you are never going to get as many visits or members as Youtube etc. As artists sites are for a very specific group of people, like people into gardening stuff won't really draw the attention from the majority of people, but there is still quite a few people interested in all the topics that you have on the site, at least more than enough to make good competitions. And at least from what I can see there ain't really a huge amount of sites doing things like this, so that is good news for you.

The issue you are facing is pretty much the same as any other site, which is visibility and is a never ending battle for any website and is how to marketing yourself, When you speak of online marketing you are primarily talking about what is known as SEM (Search engine marketing) The most important one at least in my opinion, is what is known as SEO (Search engine optimization) and is basically how to get your site found and placed good in a search engine search result. Being the first search result to pop up in a Google search is going to get maybe 100% more visits (Just using a fictive number) than the last result on that page for instant, as you flip through each search page, it rapidly goes down as result starts to be less relevant and knowing from how people use search results, if you are on page 3-4 you are practical invisible to that search term.

The second most common way is to pay for it, which is through Google Adwords, which is how Google makes all their money, people pay to be found :D

Obviously the tricky part is SEO and is also the most difficult, because it doesn't only involve your own site and how it is designed, but also how other sites refer to you. So imagine that a lot of artistic sites had links to your site, then that would boost your importance for a lot of terms relevant to artists, such as paintings, drawings, art etc.

Secondly search engines scan all websites content trying to figure out what they are about so they can categorize them, if you have analytics, you can probably see somewhere that you were visited by a "bot" or "spider" as they are called. So they go through all the code of your website (where they are allowed) and find keywords, both from written stuff, image descriptions and so forth and then it tries to figure out what its about and how relevant it is to those words. This is a lot more complicated than I make it sound here as Google is not really interested in telling how exactly they are doing this and how they weight each thing. Which is done so people can't exploit it. Some might remember back in the days where you had those websites known as link farms, which were basically just websites which contained a lot of links and people could pay to get their link there and it would improve their relevance. You don't really see these sites anymore, as its would not really give people the stuff they were after, so Google as far as I know, changed how it worked and quickly these link farms (Which were a pain in the ass :D) died off.

But in your case, you can test this both manually and there are some tools that can help you track down keywords for your site, its a good way to get a "virtual" view of how your site is actually viewed by the search engines.

Doing it manually you can make a list of keywords or terms that you think is the most relevant or important ones for your site, lets say "Artistic competition site" were what you would consider being the absolute best description for your site, so you type that into Google and press search, if everything goes well, you would be on the first page, most likely not on the top, but even being on the first page would be a very good start. Now I tried doing that search and your site is not there, which is not surprising. So to make a quick comparison you could type "Daggerbay or Dagger bay" in Google and you would pop up as the first result (Because your url is "Daggerbay.com", which makes sense. However its becomes very clear why that is not very useful, because unless people search a lot for that, they wont find you. Being the first result on a term like "Art" is worth a whole lot more than a very specific name. And that is pretty much why SEO is really difficult and not something to ignore, you want to be visible you have to really spend time and energy on optimizing for this.

The online tools available that you can use, can give you a list of keywords and how relevant they are on your site, its a good way to get a quick overview.

So after all this introduction :D

If we look at the front page of your site:

Dagger Bay is a collection of online areas where the worlds best artists compete daily in creative competitions. We run creative competitions of all types, including Effects (otherwise known as photoshop or photochop), Photography, Illustration, Writing and 3-D. Our purpose first and foremost is to have fun but new members are encouraged to become familiar with our site's FAQs before wading in. If you have questions beyond this, feel free to send a PM to one of the Quartermasters (moderators), or post your question to an appropriate thread in the forums.

This is roughly all the visible text and in general there is not a lot of text on the site, which might be good for us as humans as we might not care to read so much, but its not really good for the "Bots" because they will have a hard time finding important terms. So they might not really know what the site is about, even if you use words like Photography a few times, to the bot this site could just as well be about moderators and how to moderate a website for instance as that word is also there. That is why getting other art sites to link to you is important, because Google will take that into account, so another site with a high placement on the word "Art" will affect your rating as well on that word, especially if your site is about art as well.

So what you could do, would be to add some text maybe explaining the background or history of photography where its relevant, im not talking about simply spamming the site with random non sense. But you know that people that might be interested in your site, might also have an interest in some history behind it, tutorials etc. Also your images could probably also be optimized, making sure that keywords are added to the link description,

To show you what I mean, I took an image from your site and compared it to Shutterstock:

So the top one is yours and the last one is Stutterstock obviously. If you look at line starting with Data-pic in your link, this is the name of the image, so its called so random stuff like A7aea.... etc. Which tells nothing about the image, meaning the "Bots" and humans will just see this as non sense, where as Stutterstock have added there words to the image and you can basically from the description guess what the image is about.

Since your site have a lot of images, it would make sense to do something similar, so they help promo it.

To end this already very long post :D

SEO is a long and constant process and simply changing and adding stuff like tutorials, some history or whatever, will not instantly give you better results, it takes time but eventually it will pay off, you just have to keep it in the back of your head whenever you do something with the website and how you can optimize whatever content you add to it. If you want faster results, you have to do it manually, like making collaborations with other sites, making sure that for instant when you are on Renderosity that you have a link in you profile linking to your site (Look at ambientshade, like that), which would be no problem as you are not competing with them. But not because it gives you "SEO" points, because that is most likely blocked on Renderosity, but because there might be people here that think it could be fun to check you out. And you do that on other forums where you are active. Its not going to bring a 1000 new people, but everything helps.

Also I haven't worked with SEO for a long time, so keep in mind that some of the stuff I might have written is not relevant today, Search engines constantly changes to how important varies things are, etc. But in general I think what I wrote here is a good basic way of looking at it.

diogenese19348 posted at 2:56AM Sun, 19 August 2018 - #4334949

Now that raises an interesting issue. I work with an art contest site, and we are running into exactly the same issue - our members are getting old, and we are having problems attracting new members. I'm about tearing what's left of my hair out trying to figure out what younger artists are doing these days. And I'm talking all the branches - illustration, photo manipulation, photography (which appears to be the one bright spot), comics. So a reasonable question is what are they doing, where do they congregate, and how do you get them engaged in anything? Yes, I think the Poser community is getting older and smaller. I'm not sure DAZ is fairing any better there. I am seeing larger activity in some of the tablet apps. And I am talking people doing art for recreation, not people trying to make a living off it. Any thoughts?

I think as other have already mentioned is correct. But also the general behavior on the internet plays a role, things have to go fast which I think is very important and forums are not really fast :). Looking at my own way of learning things or when I need information about a 3D issue. 80% of the time I will find a youtube video showing me exactly how to do it or something very close, watch that and move on. Rest I find in text form.

Since we don't really know what site you are referring to, its difficult to comment on what could be done, because I think there is more to it, than simply figuring out where the "young" people are hiding, it could be a lot of things, the website itself might be a reason.

It might not even be worth spending time worrying about the "young" people, but rather look at what would make the site interesting to a particular group of people such as artists for example. What would attract them? As an example lets take people that are interested in comics, what would attract them? Maybe it could be good tutorials and information for making comics, how to draw, how to design pages, storytelling and so on. Maybe make the website very optimized and well designed for quickly sharing and reading comics or make it so they can publish them and get feedback on them like a gallery and so on in a cool way. Lets use Renderosity as an example, its not very well designed for sharing comics as no effort have been made towards making it work well for that, which is perfectly fine as its not really what they are about. However it not unrealistic to assume that some people that makes comics might come here on a regular basis to pick up some stuff for projects, which they then post on more comic friendly sites.

So maybe that's a better way of thinking about it. So rather than focusing on a specific age group, focus on their interest. We all try to find the very best information whenever we seek them, regardless of age and those sites which contain the best information will also over time be those that makes it and the rest will vanish. I don't really think its a lot difference than comparing it to doing a search on Google or Bing and we assume that every time you search on Bing you get poor search result, but google find it all the time . It will only take a very few experiences like that before you will never use Bing again and its the same with information on a website. If you have had good experience and found good information on a website you will go there.

TheDarkerSideOfArt posted at 11:20AM Sat, 18 August 2018 - #4334950

3D-Mobster let me go on the Zbrush forums right now and post links and screen shots and type how Zbrush should be scared about something new 3D coat is coming out with..and continue to ramble on and on about it (and aurick or one of the other mods knows damn well im anti Zbrush...but im not )...first I'd probably be laughed off the forums..then it will be removed (maybe even along with me) in a heart beat. Its whatever. its kinda trolling depending on how it was presented and or posted.

I think that is one of the big differences between Poser/Daz communities and 3D communities, because I don't think that doing something like in your example is something that they find very relevant or very useful thing to do in the first place, its hard to explain, but as I have mentioned before people are not bound to a single program like a lot of people seems to be in the Poser/Daz community, where they feel like they have to defend a program at all costs. So maybe such post would be removed as it would be considered trolling or some might react to it, but honestly I think most people there would simply turn their eyes at such post. I think the closest you get to something like that is probably someone interested in knowing the difference between two programs.

I went to substance painter forum to take a look and this is just a random page on their forum:

If you look at what people are interested in, you don't see threads like "This program is much better", "Substance painter is dead", but topics like pipelines, some random stuff etc. Some of the threads you can see have been locked, which simply means that they have been moved to other parts of the forums, so they are purely locked in this section. But the general impression you get from these forums are people looking for answers of how to integrate or solve something within whatever workflow or pipeline they are using.

So to me its just as much the attitude of some people compared to other sites, keep in mind that there are lots of program like substance painter out there, a whole lot more than just Daz/Poser, so there is all the reasons for people to do exactly the same as in the Daz/Poser communities.

New users are always good can't argue about that. And yeah Poser doesn't need "never before seen" features, however I do think that "Slutmatic 3000 female mesh" as you call it (which i think is a bad way people are talking about them) is needed for Poser and is crucial. Speaking for my self I know im not currently able to create characters of such standard. So to add any form of character to a scene I rely on Poser and Daz to do it. And it is what in the end is carrying these programs content wise, remove the characters and all the props would go away as well or at least the majority.

I do agree that long terms goals are needed, but think they would be fine if it aimed towards easy to use characters.....But with a secondary goal of getting Poser better integrated with the rest of the 3D workflows that people use. Which today is much more varied, meaning people use lots of different programs for specific things, such as fluid in Realflow, sculpting in Zbrush, texturing in Mari, UV in another and animating in a third. There would be lots of room for Poser in this workflow if it simply supplied easy to pose characters, creatures etc. Probably not in a professional environment, but for all of us semi professionals or what to say and for artist just wanting to express themselves etc.

The idea of making a single can do everything application is dead or is very difficult to do today. Those already on the market like Autodesk and Blender etc. Is well into this. So rather focus on doing something very well and spend time integrating into the rest of the workflow is a much better way and as I see it the only way forward, because its the workflow of most 3d artist, so I don't think its a clever move when Daz (If thats true) delete post to Iclone etc. Or when Renderosity some time ago, didn't want people to post links to freebies etc. its complete opposite to how people work with these things and to me a strategy clearly developed by a business person rather than an artist.

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"The vendors are the only collective entity currently keeping the Poser alive, so be nice to them. SM could be nice to them too, by giving them better support (yes, the Fitting Room, yadda... I don't mean that thing, I mean better documentation, better support from company staff, better promotional visibility, maybe a tool or two to automate the inbound workflow...)"

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This is true to both applications Daz and Poser, regardless of what they can do. Both are 100% content driven, if you removed that from them, I doubt anyone would use them for anything, its not easier to rig in these programs than in others, Posing might to some degree or at least for some people be easier. But nothing that would make you decide to use them over another 3D application.

I prefer to use Poser because it does what I need it too for the most part and there is a huge amount of stuff in Poser I never use. Same goes for Daz it have more features than Poser, but when all comes down to it, most of these are most likely useful for content developers or advanced users, for people that just want to use a character and setup a scene, tell a story, create an image. I think there is very little gained in Daz extra features compared to Poser, its not worse but not better either. If people believe that Daz or Poser is what will take their stuff to the next level, they couldn't be more wrong, in my opinion. Hardly any professional artist will try to throw out a perfect image from a 3D application, unless there is no other choice. Trying to hit perfect lighting, rendering out effects etc. simply take way to long. So for still images most will use a program like Photoshop and for movies or animations its some sort of program like nuke, after effects etc. And that's the only way to really move the "rough", meaning the Poser, Daz render to the next level if you ask me. Obviously being good at these programs, can help you make things faster and get a better initial image to work on, but that's pretty much it.

Personally for me, if I had time to really start being creative and make art, I would spend by far the most time learning Photoshop and getting good at that, compared to either Poser and Daz. So I don't necessarily see Daz amount of features as a huge benefit in that regard and also why I don't think Poser is dead by any means, but simply that Poser should focus on what helps people to get to that initial state, obviously as you say support content creators with tools, but they dont have to try to match or copy Daz features. I would rather that they spend a lot of time getting Poser better integrated with the other big 3D applications, such as Blender, 3ds max, Maya etc. That would create a much better future for them, rather than trying to match or compete with Daz,,just go their own way. And of course be sure to supply Poser with top notch 3d characters!! So they don't have to play by Daz rules.

Obviously if you like the look of a render then its useful :) But there is nothing in Superfly that prevent you from achieving a certain style, it doesn't have to be "realistic", which it seems to be referred to. But when you talk about realism in regard to PBR its about how it handles light and not so much about the look of the image, where you in Firefly have to fake it. I agree that you can get some good renders out of it, if you take your time. But being able to make materials and knowing that regardless of light settings, that being night, day, red light, blue light etc. It will look correct. Where as you in Firefly can risk that a scene looks very good with some lighting, then you change it and everything suddenly starts to look wrong, so what you have to do is start tweaking and adjusting all thoughts of things to make it look correct. PBR due to how it works solves all that for you, which is a huge time saver. Also you can take any PBR textures and throw them into another PBR and it will look almost identical with very little work, depending on the engine, so suddenly you get a lot of flexibility with your assets.

But there is nothing in Superfly, that prevent you from making some cartoon textures and throwing them on your character, the important thing is how it handles light and that you never get more than you throw in, and at least in my opinion, its doesn't really matter what style you are after, unless your aim is something like that obviously, the better the lighting the more interesting your image is. You have to remember that colors are simply reflections of light, so if the light is bad or wrong it will affect the image. And as computers get faster and faster so will rendering be. And I myself don't have a fast computer either, but I would imagine that people that have fast ones Superfly is godsend for Poser.

I think some of your points are good, but I don't agree with it being a problem with people clinging to V4 and Dawn, these just happens to be what, I at least, would call the native characters for Poser. But there are lots of characters even for these meshes, morphs etc. That can turn either of them into something that you wouldn't even be able to recognize as being either of them. In that regards there are no difference between characters whether that's a Genesis or not. Its just as easy to spot those, whenever very little have been done to change them. Which at least to me is no problem, designing or even morphing an existing character into something new is a huge task with textures and everything. Expecting the average Daz or Poser user to do this is a bit unrealistic. My guess is that a lot of people that have knowledge of other 3D programs, like Zbrush etc. Will often use either V4, Genesis or some other base mesh when designing new characters. This is obvious one of the benefits of having such knowledge, but again such things might not be to important to some people to do, maybe they don't have the time, some might be new etc. There can be a million reasons. Its no secret that some people are better than others, its just a fact, but no one started being a master artist, it takes a lot of practice.

I do agree with you however, that it seems that some might not really want to move on from Firefly, which I think is sad, as it truly have no future in Poser in my opinion, except maybe as a Preview render. It is going to be slaughtered by Superfly (PBR) unless SM for whatever reason are desperate in trying to keep it alive. The only useful thing about it, is that Poser can't export Superfly materials correctly so you can import them into other solutions like 3ds max, at least I haven't figured it out. But the moment that is possible, Firefly for me at least is officially dead, which I think is a good idea. There are simply to many benefits to PBR. Also you have to remember that there is basically no difference between Superfly and Iray in the sense of their purpose, both are PBR render engines, but there are differences in certain settings etc. But overall they are the same. So nothing prevent you from doing just as good renders in Superfly as in Iray. Now Poser lack some of the tools that you will find in Daz, such as bloom control, HDRI controls, better fog, dust, smoke control etc. But with a little knowledge of PS or Gimp you can easily add stuff like this and in most cases its most likely preferred anyway to reduce render times and add flexibility.

Im not sure if there exist a Superfly texture for V4? Adding that would bring V4 on track with Genesis in that department. Obviously you wont have the mesh details from Genesis, which is both good and bad depending on what you have to use your character for. But there is as far as I can see nothing that prevent someone from making a real PBR skin texture for V4 or Dawn.

In regards to poke-throughs, at least for me I only experience that with Conforming cloth. The moment you "pressure" poses, most conforming cloth simply give up, which is why I only use dynamic cloth. Where you will only in my experience have it where skin collide, such as backside of the leg if its bend, the armpits etc. Which is minor issues compared to dealing with conforming cloth poke throughs.

Also P11 you can copy morphs from the character to the cloth, which for the most part, if the cloth is made to deal with it, will for the most part work very well only with minor adjustments.

So at least to me, I think that the Poser and Daz workflow is slowly getting more advanced, the time where people just had to click "Conform to.." is not as easy with good results as people were used to, maybe because expectations have also gone up. So Firefly renders are not as impressive anymore and if you do PBR renders, you don't want some clunky cloth to ruin it etc.

DreaminGirl posted at 3:38AM Fri, 17 August 2018 - #4334856

What if Autodesk bought Poser, that would be something! ?

Autodesk have their Character generator, however not sure how advance it is and its not a standalone app like Poser etc. And im not even sure how much they are developing on it.

Here is a quick overview:

Autodesk character generator

tparo posted at 3:15AM Fri, 17 August 2018 - #4334836

Boni posted at 12:58PM Thu, 16 August 2018 - #4334816

Question ... should this be moved to DAZ? It sure shifted to being about DAZ rather than Poser. No matter where the future of Poser goes, it doesn't have to end up being a discussion about DAZ (I respect DAZ3d, I just prefer Poser). No one has outright caused a software war here, but it does look like it's getting towards the baiting stage. Please be careful.

Daz 3D is the company, Daz Studio is the software, Poser is the software, Smith Micro the company, as is your statement is a bit confusing. If you move the thread I presume you mean to the Daz Studio forum here at Renderosity; would it really fit as it is more about Poser than DS, I realise that you would really like DS and its users to disappear from the rendo site but you might find that as a large part of this market place now caters to them revenue might drop dramatically if that happened.

I think you are misunderstanding what Boni is talking about if you read what she wrote once again. The original title of the thread is "Is Poser development dead?" Yet people starts to discuss the future of Daz versus other software packages, so it is a bit off topic.

However more as a general question and not aimed at you tparo, I personally don't care and don't think any thread should be closed unless people are being offensive. But im surprised every time I read these thread where Daz and Poser is mentioned together, that some people always seems to be offended, whether that's a user or Renderosity having to "threaten" to lock threads? I don't get it, is it truly impossible for people to share their views regarding different software solutions in a constructive way, without having them at each other throat instantly? I find it hard to believe, but also a sort of funny and immature in a sad way, at the same time. :D

Agree I don't see why Daz should buy Poser, also I don't hope they will, because pretty sure they would kill it off and not develop it. Besides that I don't think it would make a whole lot of sense from a business point of view. Daz3d live from selling products not there software so being able to sell products for Poser would make a whole lot more sense. They shouldn't really care who buys them and in which program they are used if you ask me.

Besides that, if Poser keep adding features and integrate well with Blender and other 3D programs and their communities, it will do very well I think, making Poser more of an supplement to the pipeline of making 3D. Being very good at something and rely on other programs which are good at other things and simply making them work well together could be a very realistic and potentially strong path to take in the future for Poser I think, should they choose to do it. Blender is not some sort of "cheap" half made 3D program, it is really advanced and on pair with the other solutions out there.

If I have understood it correct, its because Poser doesn't support OpenCL which is what AMD (old ATI) uses. And doesn't have anything to do with whether you use an AMD or Intel processor right?

Nails60 posted at 1:22PM Tue, 07 August 2018 - #4334303

I believe it is being suggested that you consider using cpu rendering instead of gpu rendering for Superfly. The point being since rendering Superfly is the only time poser puts heavy demands on the gpu, if you do a mixture of sf and ff renders, you might be better off economising on the graphics card and looking for a better processor.

Yes :) CPU rendering have some benefits such as no memory limit, so you are more likely to be able to render a big scene than you are with a GPU, unless you get one with a lot of memory, like 6 or 8 GB at least that would be my biggest concern.

I haven't been able to find some good tests, comparing CPU vs GPU rendering, meaning how good a graphic card would you need to match a certain CPU and what are the price differences etc. In both cases you have to be sure that the rest of the computer can also handle a new CPU or graphic card so other things might have to be upgraded as well.

But anyway I don't know what is best, but was merely something to consider :)

Not sure if this is what you mean, but if you select the cloth and go to the properties tab, try to check all the check boxes under "When conforming..." and see if that is what you mean.