Wow - I may not have bought any of their stuff, but I definitely felt their presence all over the place! It IS sad to know they're leaving.

I have a feeling there will be fewer and fewer full-time content creators around - purse strings are pulled if it is not for a necessities like food (and even then there's wiggle room - 6-for-a-buck items vs 1 for $3) and shelter and medicine.

-Lew

That's a neat trick! I gotta remember that next time - so far I've given them a little extra support geometry and they don't bulge anymore.

Esther - thanks about the modeling!

Right now it's around 122MB with all the textures! That's not even counting the templates folder, and possibly a folder as a "thank you" pointed at my personal site to download which has PSD files so you can have a starting point (like for the monitors). I dunno if I've made something simply too big for most Poser users to manage, but from the sounds of some comments I've read around I might be pushing it - and I'm still not done, apparently. Argh!!

I thought I was close to finished, making the Poser version, and I realized there were some things I didn't duplicate like the railing stands - there was 1 for the entire railing around the arena.

I think until I can figure out the Monitor Assembly texture glitch I'm gonna upload a version that doesn't have it.

Going to go to bed now. Since I basically need to redo the Poser setup, I need to start over, and hopefully I'll have this up for the group to download and play with tomorrow night.

(in the voice of Marvin the Martian) Dee-lays, dee-lays...!

-Lew

Okay, I'm almost done!

Working out some texture issues (not because of UVMapping - those are great! - but something's going on with Poser itself. They worked perfectly in C4D, but one of the sections is going wonky in P8.

By Sunday I'll be sending links to download the newest version for people to play with, see where problems are, fixes needed, suggestions for "ya know what would be cool...?!" Stuff like that.

Thanks for sticking with the ride, sorry it's taken so long.

See ya Monday with another post!

-Lew ;-)

@ LostinSpaceman - why don't you just re-upload the image? It's yours, and you can do it any time. And it sounds like the issue has long since been resolved, so what's stopping you? (see - I'm shrugging again - oh, I guess none of you can see that - well, just letting you know it's happening)

And if you want to err on the side of caution as a just in case, check the nudity box.

Like I said before - regardless of how the TOS MIGHT be enforced/implemented, if any of my characters (not animals, so please, no one should even bother with that argument of "well, what about...?" just to have an argument) don't have clothes on - alien or not, human or not - I just check the box. Why not? It's a character without clothes, right (and one of mine is a teeny silhouette - can't even see anything)? Even if it's an alien with no genitalia whatsoever, it's a nekked alien which - by definition - is "nude".

Anyone who has you on their favorite list will still get the image. Anyone checking that gallery (who doesn't have the filter) will still be able to see it.

Just sayin' - re-upload the image. Sounds like you have had full staff support and have been waiting for THEM for quite some time.

@ Wabe - yeah, I get your policeman metaphor. Don't worry - it's not lost on me.

-Lew

Just came across this post - chiming in. And just to be clear - as these types of threads tend to get heated - imagine me with a very calm voice, and at most "shrugging". This isn't a rant - just typing off the top of my feeble head.

There is only 1 thread I can remember where I just went ballistic at someone (the guy was an activist, and oddly for this thread, targeting Rendo's nudity clause as they had an article about DaVinci on the front page, with one of his illustrations that had male nudity as the thumbnail). I realized I went too far and now ACTIVELY try NOT to.

So - your original numbers.

1 - Some parents took their photos into a lab to be printed - they were family photos, and some were "bathy" pictures. Every parent I know has taken them, including myself - giggling as you play with the kids. My parents took out MY bathy pics when I'd bring a date home just to get a laugh themselves, etc.

When the parents came to get them, they were arrested for "child pornography".

I have YET to meet a parent - or PERSON - who was NOT confused, baffled, and/or outraged by the fact that they were arrested. WTF?!?! But laws in the US (where Rendo is located) are twitchy about body parts - we have yet to get over our Puritan roots, it seems.

If "it" doesn't have clothes on, I figure I'll just click the nudity flag. Why not? This doesn't stop me from posting, and it doesn't mean people can't see my images. What it DOES mean is that someone who has a filter (like an account set up for a minor by their parent, etc.) won't see the images (remember that whole Puritan part?). Just clicking the nudity flag doesn't put me out - I honestly have yet to figure out the big deal. It's posted. It's in our galleries. Done. And checking a box doesn't make your image any less from an artistic POV IMO.

I also have so FEW images with nudity it's not a big deal for me - and yes, I fully realize this is why my opinion differs greatly. I usually do environments, still life stuff, etc., most of which don't have a figure, or if they did they'd be out of place being nude. More often than not it doesn't occur to me to "make a nude image". It's not a goal, but if it were, I'd just click it and go on to the next one.

2 - Unless it's SPAM, I don't care. Hell, one of mine's at the bottom of my post. I figure people have to sell their wares somehow, or wanna share a cool tool/brush/app/beer with other possibly like-minded people.

This gets sticky - yeah, I can see that. Where's the line - is there a specific way to define it to enforce it? I doubt it, so some things (which may be more or less subtle about it) are bound to bounce back and forth.

I'm just so laid back about it, though, that I honestly meant that unless it's SPAM I don't care.

3 - I had the exact same thought - especially as I bounce assets between C4D, Mudbox, Poser, and Vue, then Photoshop and possibly After Effects. CGSociety has this, why not Rendo?

Once while frustrated, I made the "multiple app link" comment to my wife who is a programmer. Her FIRST thought was Rendo's history - thousands, if not millions, of images that would need to be re-linked. And if it goes bad, it would go REALLY bad.

Oh yeah... (eyes blink, then a frustrated look on face) Yeah, I guess that would suck to have many of your images, possibly all of them, suddenly go into digital limbo.

I post footage up at pond5 an they have a great system for how the footage was created, categories and genres, etc. so it's listed in every manner you can get out there for people to find. It was also created from the ground up to do this very thing.

IIRC, Rendo started out as a Poser community. When people started posting from different apps, they added that "you could check the app you used" kinda thing. Not BOTH, but which one you used - cuz I imagine at the time we didn't bounce back and forth as much as they tended not to play well together.

Fast forward 10 years and we have Vue xStream which is SUPPOSED to work INSIDE other apps - holy cow! Well, Rendo didn't think about that originally, and retrofitting would be a nightmare.

And yes, I fully agree that simply stating - "Dude... (wide-eyed, head slowly shakes) We can't safely make it work..." would be a fine statement to just make once and for all. You can't please everyone - don't try.

And I've said this before - and I know it gets some people up in arms, so sorry folks - but Rendo is privately owned. They can make whatever rule they want (only images with SHEEP are accepted - must have a sheep SOMEWHERE in the frame or it will be flagged and taken down!), and enforce whatever rules they have however they want. (I'm shrugging right now - see, I told you it's what I do)

You want "anything goes"? Have your own personal site, and use Rendo to bring traffic to it. As long as your images/content isn't illegal in and of itself, post what you got with no flags to be seen. Mine's $27 a month (a Blue-Ray movie), but you can have them MUCH cheaper.

Good luck. Don't leave. Take care-

-Lew
 

Congrats everyone - cool images!
-Lew

It never occurs to me to do that because what I mostly do is never lined up - from animals and kids moving all around to different model poses. When it comes to jewelry (locked down camera, just different lighting and reflections) I even just grab what I need and move it over - it'll still be off by a pixel to a handful of pixels, and be seated in a corner of the image when its done anyway.

I just drag all elements from various images that I need over to the comp and line them up/align them however they fall.

Good tidbit - forgot about it and for this it would go faster, yes.

-Lew

Glad you like it!
Lemme know if it works for you. Good luck and we'll talk to ya soon-
-Lew ;-)

I have FluidMask3 - great program. When I bring in TIFs of dogs that need to be cut out (against white), I then save as PNG and bring into PS for compositing.

When I bring them in they are noticeably lighter than the original TIFs and I have no idea why. Same thing you're talking about - colors are more muted, the blacks are decidedly NOT black.

Solution?

Bring the PNG AND the original TIF (in YOUR case, render a TIF version) into the comp, Line them up (I put the PNG on top of the TIF layer and change the mode to Difference - use the Move Tool and your keyboard's Arrow keys to line them up - how you'll know they're perfectly lined up is it will become perfectly black - meaning there is no "difference"), then Ctrl-click (Cmd-click for Mac) on the thumbnail of the PNG layer to Load the Selection, then Ctrl-j the TIF Layer to duplicate ONLY the exact same pixels of the PNG Layer.

Did that make sense?

Hope this helps - good luck!

-Lew

HA!
And yes, it should fall under parody.
-Lew

This should be a contest at Rendo - doctor some provided image and make it believable. In a very odd way I think that would be a hoot.

"Here's the original, now do 'this and this and this, fill in that, and replace that' to it and let's see how everyone does" kinda thing.

I honestly wanna take the original BP shot and do stuff to it just to see what I would have come up with.

;-)

Whoever did that really sucked at Photoshop! If you're gonna try and pull something like that, get your values right, don't have obvious repeating elements, change things on purpose, etc.

Yeah - WOW!
-Lew

...I have absolutely no idea...

If you look closely (and I DO mean eyes right up as close as you can focus - get a magnifying glass to be more apparent) at any printed magazine, you'll see the very pattern that is on the lower guy's jacket.

I think in reality it's just a darker color.

I haven't tried this, so this is just a guess, but I'd start with a mild toned color (they seem to have a very pale dull cyan - or this could also be the result of ink-bleed during cheap printing - don't discount that), and use Levels Adjustment Layers - clip the White, then invert the mask (at which point it should be solid BLACK). Then grab your paint brush and paint WHITE where you want the shading to be - big soft brush will give you the soft edges, like for their hands, and hard brushes will give you the surface shading of the lower guy's cheeks.

You can lower the opacity of your brush for painting to layer it as much as possible, and toggle back and forth between black and white to take away, add more, take away, add more - incrementally, and not 100% all at once.

You can also do multiple Levels Adjustment Layers - even with different colors added per channel - to build it even more, or for different areas of the image rather than 1 Layer for everything.

I hope this makes sense and helps - good luck and have fun!

-Lew

Although I think you are looking into more traditionally thought 3D animation (characters, machines, etc.) it's good to look through ALL the galleries to figure out things you like - you never know. It's a matter of deciding WHERE you wanna get your feet wet, get it?

But the Gnomon School is where I would go looking for training for animation. Then maybe digital-tutors.com as well - they have a subscription service

-Lew