Oh Geez Omen555, Can you spare us the righteous indignation please? The TOS of this site has always been available for all to read. The TOS IS the constitution and bill of rights for this site. If you can't live by them then you don't need to be here. This IS NOT a first amendment issue. This site WAS NOT created to be a "Complaint and Debate Soapbox" for you or anyone else, so stop acting like your rights have been violated. Membership to this site is a PRIVILEDGE that is allowed by the OWNERS of this site. There have never been, nor will there ever be free elections to select the leaders of this imaginary country you have created in your mind. Believe it or not, most members here just want to post their art, talk and learn about art, sell and/or give away their creations. The majority of us couldn't care less about hearing you cry about how your rights were violated. If you don't like the way it is, move on. Just don't expect anything to come from a "coupe d'etat" of a few disgruntled members who only live to complain anyway. Personally I'm glad the C&D forum is gone. There are plenty of forum sites out there devoted to just complaints and debate like agoraphobia.com, you might try one of those if all you are looking for is a fight.

DimensionX, I have to agree with OZGOD, at least in part. The critique was on the money, and the "opinion" offered did not read as an insult to me. Before you get all righteously indignant you should realize that you have a long way to go as a 3D artist. If you can't handle an honest critique of your work then just disable the comments and ratings. If all you expect is to be adulated and slathered with compliments after posting every new picture, you are deluding yourself. Your piece was simply not that good. There are a lot of people here who always post positive comments to make newbies feel good about themselves. In my opinion this does more harm than good as it overinflates their egos and teaches them nothing. Do you know how many pieces I've posted here that barely get single comment? Check out my gallery sometime and see for yourself. Consider yourself lucky you get any critique at all and leave it at that. Just because you got one bad review is no justification to ban or punish the person who said it. We are all entitled to our opinions and nothing can be done about that, nor should it.

Stormrage wrote: "...Again.. NO ONE SAID IT WAS LEGALLY BINDING..." Prizm Break wrote: "...This form of copyright is legal and binding..." Uhm...you were saying? It sucks being wrong. I know, I've been there before but not this time. ;-) No hard feelings from me Stormrage. I know you didn't say it, but it was said and you were backing it up with great zeal earlier in this thread. In case you forgot, I started this thread to help people with an actual copyright infringement. When Prizm mis-stated the facts I tried to help again by stating the real facts and you guys fought me tooth and nail. Now I'm the bad guy? I'm shaking MY head now. In the future, will someone please remind me to stop helping people? Thank you.

Thank you kieraw for clearing that up. I couldn't have said it better myself Stormrage wrote: "Shaking head.. Ask a hundred lawyers and each one will give you a different answer Alleycat." Now this is just not true Storm and it is epidemic of a general mistrust of professionals in this country. I have to say as the son of a lawyer that it kind of pisses me off too. All lawyers have something that you do not, THEY WENT TO LAW SCHOOL AND PASSED THE BAR EXAM! Geez at least give them some credit for the hard work it takes to become an officer of the court. Next you're going to tell me that all you need to perform surgery is a dirty pair of work gloves and a dull knife? Let me ask you this; Let's say I copied all your artwork and did like you said and mailed it to myself BEFORE you could mail it to yourself. Would I now hold the copyrights to all your work simply because I mailed a letter to myself before you could? OF COURSE NOT! Because a self addressed postmarked letter IS NOT A LEGALLY BINDING COPYRIGHT! Guys I hope you at least believe kieraw and AMEX now that you can see it in writing. But if you prefer to "roll your eyes" at me and say I'm a liar or stupid, hey feel free to live in ignorance the rest of your life. Mail yourself all the letters you want and when you go to court and the judge just laughs at you and "rolls his eyes", you'll know I was right. Now please stop perpetuating this stupid myth, you are not helping anyone by spreading falsehoods. It's hard enough to protect our work without you gving people false information. To find out more about copyrights visit the US Copyrights Office web site at: http://lcweb.loc.gov/copyright/ and get the facts, not the mythology.

Mailing it may establish a date, but an envelope can always be opened after postmarking and resealed effectively without anyone knowing. Hence it is not a document that will hold up in a court of law. You don't prove copyrights by "reasonable doubt", you prove them with solid proof, like a registered copyright. You guys can debate this all you like, but my dad was a lawyer and I also asked a lawyer friend about this recently and she just laughed. It is a myth, plain and simple. Mailing a song, or a piece of art to yourself is NOT A VALID COPYRIGHT. You're doing people a disservice by insisting this is true when it is not.

reflections = render time. I suppose you could "do it with mirrors" but the ray tracing cost would be horrendous.

Sorry to say it but the "poor man's copyright", ie: mailing it to yourself is not a legally binding copyright. That's really just a myth. Before you get all bent out of shape about it, I checked with my lawyer and it's the truth. Copyrights are really automatic, ie: you own the rights to whatever you create (as long as it's not a copy of someone else's work). The problem is proving it in a court of law. Your copyright is only as strong as your willingness to defend it. Registering your art work as a "collection" is your cheapest, safest bet. This way you have confirmation from the government that you have "registered" your copyright. You still have to spend your own money to defend your copyright in court. The feds aren't going to do it for you.

Good point Stormrage. Programs like Photoshop actually allow you to embed your copyright info right into the code of the jpg file. That way when it is opened in a program like JPEGView a little copyright window pops open. It makes it harder for someone to get away with stealing your art, but unfortunatley it won't help if someone copies and pastes the image into a new file and uses a smudge of clone tool to cover your signature. The best thing is to take as many of these steps as you can and hopefully catch the culprit in the act. For example; Some guy was showing a picture of mine around trying to get some paying work online. The woman he showed it to saw my copyright and signature and said "that's not your name". He then tried to act like it was really his but I was "the company he worked for". The woman he was trying to scam saw my web address on my image, went to my site and contacted me via email while she still had the guy on ICQ. I told her he was a liar and a thief and she put me "in touch" with him via ICQ and boy did he get an screenfull from me. Some people just have no scruples or shame and actually feel "entitled" to steal your art because you posted it. It takes all kinds huh?

Read the thread above Ken. There are actually 4 parts to the eye. if you delete part of it you lose the thing that makes it look like a real eye and you are left with flat looking Poser4 dork eyes. This is one of those cases when "simple is NOT better". Sometimes complex and difficult yields better results than doing everything the "easy way".

All day and night huh? I remember when I got Bryce2 in '96. I spent all summer inside. ;-)

I can understand the frustration you feel. I am not a big fan of these kinds of sites even when they are run legally. So, if you don't get the satisfaction you seek you can contact Linda MacNew at mrscyber@emcs.net , she is the owner of hotspotcity.com and they are the company that hosts the site desktopcollector.com. I was at least able to get a dialogue going with Nic, but I cced all correspondance to Linda. So if you write to nic@desktopcollector.com (that's his personal email address) make sure you CC or better yet BCC (which is blind copy) Linda as well. This way she will have a record of your complaint if it is ignored by Nic. Remember that she owns the servers and she will be the one who removes the site if it comes to that. She can be held liable for any copyright infringements and she has more to lose than Nic does. Once again I have to say that you really should not post images large enough to be used as high res wallpaper. I never post anything here or in my gallery that is over 800x600 pixels, and all my work has copyright notice printed across the bottom of the image. Most people can't even view images that are over 1025 pixels in their browsers without scrolling. On a site like 'osity it is really a horrendous waste of bandwidth to post something that large. Even though I render at a much higher resolution I save those for printing and if someone tries to steal my smaller image I can always prove it is mine by showing the huge original file. Don't make yourself a victim by offering poster size versions of your work for free. Just a little common sense lesson.

Like I said, they were under the impression that the real artists had sent the work. They know better now so there can't be any more excuses. I was the first one to speak rationally to them, everyone else was yelling at them. We'll see if there are any more complaints after this, and Royo's agency should contact them. At least now they are acknowledging that art was stolen and that's a step in the right direction. I intend to keep an eye on this.

You can do it either way, it doesn't much matter. I like to work my foreground first then fill in what I need in the background. Some experimentation is required to get the right combination of effects but it will save you a whole lot of RAM.

If all you want is "dappled lighting" you can add some lights with a dapple filter of your own creation. Sometimes with 3D apps you just have to "fake it" rather than expect the virtual world to behave like the real one. As far as RAM goes, I let Bryce5 play with 600MBs, but then I have 896 MB installed. The technique I was showing you at least allows you to use 2D faces for the "deep" part and real trees, that may dapple light, in the foreground. Believe it or not light does pass through the transparent parts of the 2D faces and casts shadows.

go to 3dplants.com and buy the "Delvin Forest" CD. It has every kind of tree in mesh formats.