Hey I'd love to join in on the fun too! Thanks. :)

I use Carrara 5 Pro to render all my poser related stuff. It works just fine and it's a hell of a lot easier (for me anyway), getting good results out of Carrara than it is out of Poser. I'm just much more comfortable with the way Carrara does things. My gallery has a bunch of Carrara renders for the curious. As a sidenote, though I will say that C5 Pro seems noticeably slower than C4 when dealing with my various scenes. C5 does have the edge in making it easier to import my Poser 6 content (I had to "trick" C4 to get it to import from Poser 6), just slower on my machine than C4 was. End results on both were quite good though.

Huh. I thought TPB had actually classified Aiko as "underaged" the last time around. Could be wrong though. IIRC they had made blanket decisions based on the default model being used for any particular image--which IMO was kinda....iffy logic. Taken to its extreme, you run into ridiculous situations (and don't think people won't try) like someone morphing V3 into a very childlike appearance and arguing "well the PTB said Vicky 3 was adult!" And god forbid someone morph Laura into an adult character and show her nude. Morph a figure into an alien and everyone accepts that it's an alien. Morph a "child" figure into an adult, and people still say it's wrong because it's a "child" figure. Never really understood that line of reasoning.

Nah, different guy. There is a resemblence though. That reminds me: just as a joke I did convince a friend that it was the same guy. Of course this is a person that's notoriously bad with recognizing people so it wasn't exactly an epic accomplishment. :)

You know, I've never actually tried to make Carrara choke...heheh, now I'm curious. I have been able to do a render with 4 mil figures in the past without Carrara crashing so I guess that's good. I do recall once having the app crash on me once when I started a render featuring two sanctum arts armors and a mil figure, along with various assorted scenery bits. It happened right at the start of the render, and the second time around seemed to go OK (if a bit slow). As I understand it however, SA products generally tend to be very resource intensive.

Well I have to admit this is a first for me...I've never actually read a thread started by someone that was actually unimpressed by one of Yamato's works. Nothing wrong with that of course--different strokes for different folks and all that--just never thought I'd actually see it happen.

Edit to add: Just saw the freebie product mentioned by the OP...and well...I'll just repeat the "different strokes for different folks" bit...it looks OK but I don't really see what gives it a "more anime feel." Also IMO in terms of visual appeal, the freebie product isn't really up to the same standard as the BelBel product.

Message edited on: 01/30/2006 00:40

GI will definitely slow down your renders, but I've found that the render times were still more than tolerable. And I agree with people who say that setting up your lights in Carrara are much easier and more intuitive than setting up in Poser. I personally never import lighting from my Poser scenes.

I for one am glad to know what's going on. I have zero interest in buying from a merchant that I know willfully stole another's work--and from what I'm reading now, he's done it before? Had I known that, I wouldn't have bought anything from him here. And like I said earlier, I feel badly for his partners because his actions have hurt them as well. Hasn't he recently joined up with the Pretty 3d team? And I know he's worked with Orion1167 on at least one product. Their reputations have been tarnished now because of this guy.

Can anyone provide a complete list of which products are on the "bad" list? I have one item in my purchase list that is a collaboration between U and Orion1167... Which brings me to another thought: you know, I feel really badly for the folks that he's partnered up with at various times. I'm giving the benefit of the doubt here and assuming that none of them knew what he was up to.

I like Hexagon. It's the first modelling app I "got" to any significant degree.

Personally I would have no problem purchasing an encoded product IF I thought the product was of a high enough quality to bother. Having purchased from BH's store before, I would say his stuff easily qualifies. That said I probably wouldn't buy an encoded character if it made existing clothing obsolete. If my existing digital wardrobe still worked with the new character (or worked without too much tweaking), then yeah, no problem.

Here's some renders from my gallery along with render times. This one rendered in about 2 hours: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=1003578&Start=1&Artist=GabrielK&ByArtist=Yes This one maybe an hour half IIRC (but it was rendered at a larger size, and the DoF blur took another minute or two): http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=560981&Start=46&Artist=GabrielK&ByArtist=Yes This one took about 45 minutes with a single spotlight and Global Illumination turned on. Actual rendered size was a bit larger than the gallery image: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=607708&Start=31&Artist=GabrielK&ByArtist=Yes I have had a few 3 (or more) hour renders, but usually they were either quite large, had a lot of transparencies, or had all the render setting cranked up to max values.

Carrara is a nice app. The majority of the images in my gallery (all of them in fact, until Poser 6 came out) are rendered in Carrara. For the price it's got quite a lot of nice features, and it's considered to be a relatively quick render engine as well. Version 5Pro is especially nice when it comes to integrating poser content. I still need to install the update patch on my copy though--I understand it fixes a few issues relating to importing Poser content in "native" mode (as opposed to Transposer).

Poser 6. Love it.

My join date is listed as August 22, 1999. Kind of scary to think it's been almost 7 years since I signed up here.