Getting back to the subject of thumbnails, gallery images, and banning...

First, although it may sound harsh: if you don't like Renderosity's rules, post somewhere else. Personally, I like DeviantArt: they don't require a thumbnail, so you can post an image without worrying if the thumbnail will be "bad".

Second, I don't think the original poster is saying the rules don't apply to him. Like many other artists, I think he's questioning why the nudity-rule applies to an image which he thinks doesn't have any nudity in it.
To use a previous example, it would be like walking into a house with a "no cigarettes" rule but carrying a cigarette box in your purse. The rule is obviously in place because the people in the house don't want smoking, but they still tell the visitor with the cigarette box to get out, even though the visitor wouldn't be smoking in their house.

I had a similar issue with an image back in February: the figure was clothed in lingerie, but someone, somehow could sort-of see nudity through the clothing. By my calculation, the "nudity" in the thumbnail was probably around 10 pixels in size. But, again, rules are rules and I shouldn't have uploaded a thumbnail with nudity.
My image was flagged, I was told to upload a new thumbnail image, and that a mark would be placed on my member record.

Although people may not get banned for accidentally posting a thumbnail with nudity, I've always wondered how many "marks" it takes to get banned. I've been a member here for literally 10 years (I joined in March 2000), so I sometimes wonder if all of my "marks" will eventually add up.
Will the "bad thumbnail" I posted in 2001 still count against me? What about a "bad forum post" I may have posted in 2002? Maybe the image I posted in 2010 will be enough to finally get me banned.

Seriously, though, I sometimes wonder if posting artistic nude images is even worth risking a "mark". Since February, I've made sure that none of my gallery images even come to showing any kind of nudity: the figures are either fully clothed or the image is a head-shot/ portrait.

Attached Link: Modular Brick Mini Spaceship 3

It was fun to build with real LEGO bricks 30 years ago when I was a kid and it was almost as fun to build as a digital model.

Quote - Nicely made. I can imagine it going wrong and spewing out million dollar bills from JHoagland's freebie elsewhere in this forum.

I was just about to say that. :lol:

In fact, if you insert your Black American Express card, I'm sure you would get a million dollar bill.
(I can't believe it's been six years since I made this credit card prop!)

Poser 8's dependence on Flash turned me off as well... not to mention the tiny thumbnail icons, keyboard shortcuts not working, the removal of the super-fast Poser 4 Renderer, etc...

Quote - Lots of programs we use every day depend on so-called "external software", some of which are add-on Microsoft components (e.g. .NET)

Just because lots of programs do it doesn't make it correct. The problem is that the software becomes dependent on the external software. Suppose Adobe updates Flash to fix a "known bug" and Poser stops working- is this the user's fault for not downloading today's version of Flash? Or is it Poser's fault for requiring Flash? If Poser just stops working, will the user know to update Flash or will he get frustrated with Poser?
And if Flash 8 works fine for every other application (including viewing videos at YouTube and Hulu), why do I need Flash 11.5 Beta in order to use Poser?

And like other people have said, Flash does have some security holes, and when you base your software on someone else's, you inherit those same security holes.

As for the iPod and Flash, there are numerous discussions about the "real reason" on tech sites, Apple sites, Flash sites, etc. But one of the conclusions is that Flash allows developers to create applications which run within a browser, which Apple can't control. And since Apple is selling applications, they don't want anything free to compete with their marketplace.
There are also arguments about how Flash applications can have their own interface, which takes away from Apple's "elegant" UI.

If it helps, feel free to use my hide/ show hands and hide/ show feet poses as a starting point.

Attached Link: Making a Refrigerator Figure, Part 2

Step 1 is building the model in Lightwave, but this page covers:
-Removing 1 and 2 point polygons before exporting
-Separating Materials and Groups (body parts) for modelling programs that don't export Group information
-Building the Hierarchy/ phi file
-UV Mapping/ why you should split the vertices
-Turning Bend off
-Setting the joint centers
-Editting the cr2 file to lock the joints

I've been to a few art shows and sold a number of framed pieces of my artwork.
I've also applied to a good number of art festivals (in the Digital Artwork category) and was turned down because they had so many applications. I don't know how they allocate spaces to each category. Were the Digital Artwork spaces were filled by better artists? Or were the spaces taken up by traditional-media artists and the art festival didn't have the space for digital artists?
Or did the art festival not want to "branch out" by accepting Digital Artwork?

I think the real question isn't whether someone has made money with their art, but what steps did they take to get there.
Anyone can list their art for sale, sell one piece, and say they "made money", but I want to know how the artist who made an image which "looked like a beginner" (as you said) can get a gallery showing and charge $2000 for his art? The gallery wouldn't put that price on the piece if they didn't think it was worth that amount.
Who did they talk to, to get into the gallery? Or was the artist approached by the gallery? What did the artist do to come to the attention of the gallery?

I wasn't sure what kind of reaction I would get, but this is not exactly what I expected.

There are entire websites devoted to making fun of silly/ odd/ strange customer-service questions, where readers are encouraged to laugh at the customers. It's considered "humor" to laugh at the new people who don't know how to plug in a network cable to get on the Internet or who think the CD-tray is a cup-holder.
For example, look through the "Computer Stupidies" section on Rinkworks.

Yet when I write a blog focusing on Poser and product-specific questions, people say it's not nice.

Quote - Meanwhile, there are grammar and spelling errors in the responses and blog.

I'd be interesting in hearing what kinds of spelling errors you found in the blog. I originally wrote it in Word and then I pasted it into WordPress. I use Firefox, which has its own spell-checker and I used WordPress' spell-checker as well. The only words the spell-checkers didn't like were proper names such as PayPal and Renderosity. ;)
Yes, there are some grammar errors, such as sentence fragments, but those were left in to keep the paragraph flowing.

To answer the other question, yes, many websites (and PayPal itself) have FAQ pages and instructions. My point in the blog is that too many people simply fire off a complaining e-mail rather than looking for (or reading) FAQ's and instructions.

And don't forgot to flip all the polygons that LeoCAD reverses or your models may have weird rendering artifacts. ;)

Not to take the thread off-topic, but here are some modular brick/ Lego-style models for Poser:
Vanishing Point
FWHS Designs

Sorry, but no Godzilla model yet.

While getting a product before everyone else is fun, the "early adopters" are usually the ones who get burned or laughed at. Has everyone forgotten about the iPhone? People lined up outside stores to buy it! Yet a few months later, Apple increased the iPhone's memory, gave it better wireless coverage and dropped the price.

A similar issue happened with Poser: a little while after P5 came out, Amazon put it on sale for $99. Sure, people had to wait months (or maybe a year) after it first came out, but $99 was over half off the normal price.

Plus, there are numerous stories, especially about Microsoft and Windows, recommending that people wait until SR1 or SR2 to make sure most of the bugs are fixed.

I'm not saying people shouldn't buy a product when it first comes out, but be watchful for extra sales promotions later on. Do you really need Poser 8 right now? Or can you wait until SR2 is merged into the installer or until Smith Micro or Amazon runs a sale?

As for magazine reviews, I agree that I don't fully trust them either. Like some of the posters have said, magazines need advertising revenue to survive, so will they really risk angering someone like Smith Micro or Adobe by giving their software a bad review?
Okay, maybe some magazines have a "neutral" policy and tell their advertisers that software might be given a poor review, but in this economy, I wonder how many magazines bend this rule just so advertisers will continue advertising.

I'm also suspicious of 3D World's fairly good review of Poser 8 when there's a full-page ad for Smith Micro/ Poser 8 a few pages before the review. I'm not saying the ad influenced the reviewer, but if I were the editor, I would make sure there were no ads from Smith Micro in that issue just to make sure readers don't get suspicious.

The only magazine reviews I trust are from Consumer Reports: they don't run ads at all, so there's not even a hint that they're being influenced by advertisers.

Quote - 2. WHERE THE -BLEEP- is my P4 render engine???????  Am I nuts, or does the included paperwork in my DVD case show a distinct lack of the P4 engine tab on the rendering options?

I think your review was critical, well-thought out, and nicely written, so I think that shows you're definitely not nuts.

But, yes, SM did remove the P4 render engine from P8. The official reason is that it's not supported by their new architecture. I'm pretty sure this means they don't want to spend any more development time trying to re-write the P4 renderer so it works with 64-bit operating systems.

To answer the question about why people are missing the P4 renderer: because it renders a scene in a fraction of the time it takes to render it using the Firefly renderer, simply because the P4 renderer doesn't show the procedure-node shader effects.
Even when I set Poser 7 to the most optimized Firefly settings, a scene still takes 2 to 3 times longer to render. Now, sure, for finished artwork, I want Poser to take its time and render everything nicely. But when I just want to see how the scene looks, I don't want to wait 15 minutes when the P4 renderer will give a good preview of the scene in about 30 seconds. I don't need ray-traced reflections and depth-mapped shadows when I'm looking to see if the character's eyes are looking the right way or if a pose is causing a person's arm to poke through the shirt.

Yes, I can fiddle with the bucket size and rendering threads and ray-traced bounces and so on, but for simple, fast previews, the P4 renderer can't be beat.

It's sad to hear that they're no longer sending out thick, printed manuals, but I think this is typical of the entire software industry. How many other programs ship in small jewel cases instead of big boxes? This reduces shelf space in stores, reduces the shipping weight of the product, and lowers the cost of the product since all those manuals don't have to be printed.

And I wonder if the SM techs finally listened to all the complaints in the forums where people said they only used the Poser manual as a doorstop.
Let's face it: most people will post a message in the Poser Forum instead of opening the manual. And after the initial replies of "read the manual", they'll get answers to their questions that aren't even covered in the manual.

Nope, it's not just you. ;)

I have a similar problem: whenever I load an existing scene file, the contents are displayed in the lower-right hand section of the document window. Going into the Material Room then back into the Pose Room doesn't help. Needless to say, this makes every existing scene file unusable in P8.

I started a ticket about this issue on the SM bugtracker site a few days ago, but I don't know if it's fixed in the new hotfix or not.

I second the request: can we see some screen shots of render settings? How many lights do you have in the scene? What are the light settings?
Obviously, these settings may not work for everyone, but it'll give a good starting point.

And most importantly, what are your system specs? Are you rendering a beautiful scene at 100% quality, but it takes 10 hours on a 64-bit, quad-processor system with 32G of RAM?

The reason I ask for some sample render settings is that last night I tried to render a scene using indirect lighting using one light, a V2 figure, the ground plane, and set to 750x750 pixels.
After 30 minutes, the entire Poser 8 screen was "white", which is the way Windows says "This program isn't responding to requests to redraw it".
By comparison, a global-illuminated scene in Lightwave, at Enhanced-Medium setting, and 1000x1000 pixels is almost finished in 20 minutes... and I can see the render progress as it happens.

Granted, I know this is the first version of Poser to attempt real GI lighting, so I wonder if my settings are too high... or if my computer is too old to handle all the calculations that Poser is doing.