I have to add that as a former Revenue Manger for a very large hotel company (where room rates are adjusted similarly to 3D content), doubling the Prime price is one of the most counterproductive revenue strategies I have ever seen - especially when most vendors don't participate in the Prime coupon, and Prime benefits are routinely posted up to a month late (or more). Renderosity is giving the shamefully unethical Daz Store a Christmas gift they could only have dreamed about - a suicidal move by their competition, for no good reason.

I just got blindsided by this when my Prime membership expired yesterday. It is now $54.95 - nearly TWICE the price in previous years. This is just infuriating, I can't afford that.

Et tu, Renderosity?

To all the friends I made in the Prime forums and such, I hope we can find a way to still stay in touch.

Thumbnails for content are overrated anyway. Just keep clicking on all of the dead icons you see and eventually you'll find what you're looking for, without all of that pesky information, guidance, visual cues and SMART content slowing your workflow down.

That helps a lot - I was able to grab some extra goodies that I otherwise would have missed! Thank you very much!!

Thank you Jenn!

PayPal has problems out the wazoo regardless of which online store you're buying from - stuck/hanging authorizations, overriding shipping address with old addresses, taking weeks for refunds, mysteriously preventing orders, etc. It works fabulously most of the time, but those times when it doesn't work are really frustrating. That's a PayPal issue though. I despise scammers, and I have seen nothing "scammy" about Renderosity. Technical problems happen all the time online. It isn't appropriate to label Renderosity a "scam" because of honest technical problems that they'll happily remedy when advised of them. Whenever I've had a problem I message them, and they get it fixed in a reasonable time (a few days or less).

If you want scams, look at one of the other really, really, really, really, really big stores that sells Daz products, which will remain nameless here. Creating manipulative devices, using psychological warfare, exploiting customers' innumeracy, failing to deliver what was promised, encouraging multiple purchases of the same item, arbitrarily taking back "free gifts", offering daily "sales" whose pricing schemes require deep study to comprehend, refusing to allow customers to warn fellow customers of crappy/broken products with a ratings & review system, and censoring anyone who will tell others about this is the very core of their business model. I'll take an occasional PayPal blowout at an honest site over that black hole of business ethics any day.

What I've seen so far blows. It is dreadful. Yet another self-serving fad being primed by the oblivious who are leading the blind.

30 years ago I started graduate school in Computer Science with an emphasis in Artificial Intelligence. It took around one semester for me to realize that 1) academia is a cult, and a truly sick and twisted one at that, 2) the student loan racketeering industry is committing a crime against humanity, 3) the world-famous professor I had moved 1,000 miles to study under was hiding in a million dollar lab off campus and never even taught classes. (I finally met him for the first time at a Halloween party three years after I left college), and 4) "artificial intelligence" was anything but. It's just a longer, faster computer program that follows instructions, just like any other software.

But if you're trapped in an evolutionary point of view you will never acknowledge that the human spirit exists, let alone that it is impossible to model that spirit. And so, you think you can model the way humans *think*. Never gonna happen.

AI "art" suffers from the same problem. It is not and cannot be inspired. And so it blows. Simply dreadful. Anyone who fears that computers which can't even boot up properly without random errors are going to take over the world, or create meaningful "art", are trapped inside their own Fantasyland. The deranged people who are CREATING the junk AI software are the ones who will take over the world, not the computers or software. (Pssst, wanna know a secret? "The Terminator" was just a movie. It wasn't real. Don't tell anyone.).

AI art is this generation's version of Yoko Ono - people with no talent trying to hijack "art" by claiming that what they are doing is so clever and avant-garde that mere mortals like you and I can't understand or appreciate it. But the truth is, it just sucks.

With my background in software engineering this is one of the first things I noticed about Daz Studio when I began using it around Thanksgiving 2021. I mentioned it in at least one of my YouTube videos as well, and I have pointed out the misspelled/duplicate folders to vendors. No standardization, no standards for content pages or documentation, inconsistencies everywhere, effectively no instructions or communications between developers and end users. Many products don't even work after using Daz's own installers, Daz suddenly takes away the "free gift" content they previously gave you and then try to sell it to you, and the largest content folder in Daz Studio is "Lost & Found" - useless junk, which you paid good money for. Daz Studio is just a hodgepodge of fun "stuff" from a bunch of confusing and overlapping generations that is enticing enough to lure people to the Daz Store, where every manipulative sales tactic in the book is used to drain customers' bank accounts, with endless "sales" that ultimately still costs far more than the content is worth. I enjoy creating renders with Daz, but it is a deliberate failure as creativity platform. The free software was never meant to benefit users. It was created to sell content, and nothing more. If it wasn't for non-Daz sites like Renderosity I would have dumped it a long time ago. Daz should be ashamed that a homeless customer knows more about running a competent professional business, more about software engineering, and more about business ethics, than they do. But Daz just doesn't care.

I check the Gifts section once in a while, but that doesn't show tips. I've never seen that I've gotten any tips. They should really have that as Sitemail, or at least a notification. I feel like radioactive pond scum for not thanking you for the first tip - I had no idea!

Come to think of it, I hope I didn't miss anyone else's gifts too (So sorry, and THANK YOU! if I did)...

Oh, I totally missed the first one then. My email is such a Spamfest, I only get in there when I'm looking for something specific. But thank you again in any event!

Oh wow, that's very nice of you - thanks for the tip Rick! I probably would never have noticed that since it displays in an area I never look at, and it doesn't tell you who it came from. That was a great surprise!

Oh, how I wish YouTube had an "ignore" function, so I wouldn't get flooded with recommendations for the countless mindless and pointless 5 million view videos that YouTube pushes on people as "trending" (which is the only thing that makes them "trend" in the first place, in a practice that used to be called 'racketeering'). You know - Mr. Beast's multi-million dollar-earning "philanthropic" videos, simply awful pop star music videos, junk science, mainstream news media propaganda, stories about celebrities who mean nothing to me, gamers playing video games and yelling at their screens, and endless media talking heads who are obsessed well beyond the point of mental illness with just one particular individual (a former U.S. President), and so on. One "ignore" feature would instantly eliminate all that pain and social engineering - which is precisely why YouTube refuses to offer it.

Ah, thank you. I'll give that a try!

I do have backups of the "gifts" that Daz took away. But technically, Daz now considers me to not own them. For example, in Daz Central, the only option for those products is "Uninstall" (since they're already installed). Every other item I have installed has the "Open" option. Daz actually SOLD me one of those "gifts" (Dolly) before I realized what they had done. So that one shows up normally like any other product.

I'll have to try Autumn Cottage again. I think vendors sometimes make minor changes, so you never know what version you're downloading. I might just have a version that doesn't work. I have a bedroom also that gives me a missing file error for the dresser only, yet everyone else says that works fine for them. Gotta love the consistency.

As for your items from the year 1601 -  I think you have the King James versions.

His eyelids appear unnaturally swollen in the first photo. So check several photos of him before spending too much time on that "sleepy" look - it may not be necessary.

What jumps out at me is his overall Irish or Scottish look. He has that classic "Bay City Rollers" face. So you might use something like this as a starting point:

https://www.daz3d.com/people-of-earth-faces-of-europe-genesis-8-male

I did that modeling a real-world female who had a Scottish maiden name, using the Scottish Female Face as a starting point, and it came out surprisingly good with some tweaking of the morphs against reference photos.

For the same reason I would find some reference photos of his profile online, since the size/shape of the jaw and nose can be defining characteristics for Irish/Scottish faces.

Likewise, his teeth are unique. So if you'll render him open-mouthed I'd spend some time trying to match the teeth and gums.

Lastly, try not to let his facial hair distract you - focus on the shape of his face, and you can easily add that facial hair when the face morphs are done.

Good luck!

Paul