Excellent Post Dan. I'll call you on Monday. If your significant problem is the EULA, let's eliminate your EULA concerns, and go! Hugs and kisses, Larry

On the issue of the specific party that repurposed DAZ/Zygote geometry, no we cannot discuss who this was. It was a company, not an individual artist that you might know in the community. We had our day in court and lost. We are actually prohibited from any specific reference to this company by name in relation to the matter. I can only say that it happened. Hopefully they don't do things like this any more. Larry

Jack -- I don't see a need for you to defend yourself here. You've helped us in the past during our Beta period as I've stated. It helped us to improve the product. I brought up your specific bug reports to re-emphasize that we have, and still do, address every serious bug or problem that is brought to our attention in a helpful format. You've obviously had reason to be frustrated and I'd be glad to help problems go away with changes we can make. You've expressed this enough here that I think it's time we talk one on one. If you'd like to talk to me personally about the past, you know how to contact me privately and I'd be happy to discuss specific problems that you may have had with us or with any of our employees specifically. There's no need for that in this forum. I think it's innappropriate. I see no reason to undo previous NDAs. I think we've tried to address specific attacks to our reputation here, and if you have a real interest in helping Curious Labs, than you can express your deeper complaints to me in email or on the phone. I'd be happy to spend the time with you. Larry

Jack K -- I honestly want to get to the bottom of your fury and hope you can suggest some specific things that you'd like to see improved in the near future. Let's be constructive. I asked our QA what bugs you reported during our beta process. You logged bugs #7, #8 and #141. Bug #7 was an installation problems that caused Poser to not launch. Bug #8 verified that you got it working. We then fixed several installation problems to help prevent the situation. Bug #141 was called "Render Engine went Poop". This involved two things to our knowledge: a crash which was fixed, and a problem in our explanation of how to set up reflections. We took your frustration of the unfinished material room to heart, and we added HTML help windows to the material room (and other rooms) to help explain the basic setup of Ray Traced reflections because the steps involved were not obvious. We agreed with you and spent days on addressing it. We weren't planning on HTML help windows until your feedback. You helped us to improve the product. Jack, that's all the specific files and problems that you reported to us during the Beta period that I am aware of. Specifically, what would you like to see Curious Labs do to improve things in the coming months ? Do you want to help on this, or is your mission here simply to try to damage our reputation ? Seriously. We are actively working on addressing any issues which cause people grief. We take the EULA conversation seriously as I've said. Our last quote from a lawyer was that it would cost us $10,000 to redraft it with a specialist. As I said, we are looking into a clarification that we will post once it is finished that will make our intended stance clearer, and still protect us and our partners from theft of content -- which unfortunately has happened already to Zygote's content. The geometries were re-triangulated and resold as another commercial package and we couldn't stop it because our earlier EULA wasn't clear in a judge's opinion. Larry

I will look into the C4D on OSX concept. Thanks for the push. We have some technology pieces ready for OSX, so this may be doable in the near future. Of course Poser 4 Pro will never be on OSX. That will have to wait for Poser 5. We do try to stay involved in the forums. Several of our people post often actually. I get scared usually :) We are also trying to direct issues of bug fixes to the beta forum so that it is easier for us to keep up and provide good feedback. That's why Renderosity set up the SR2Beta forum. Thanks for the kind responses and being part of this crazy thing. Larry

My best instincts tell me not respond here. My coworkers tell me not to. But there are comments here that seem to represent a mission to cause harm to our company or to DAZ. I'm sorry people get caught up in this kind of speculation. There are no lingering hidden secrets that I know of. There are no hidden EULA agendas. The people working at Curious Labs take the communities' statements very seriously. These are not evil mysterious people wondering who to take advantage of next. These are incredibly hard working people who truly care about their product and are struggling through hard times in the economy like everyone else. We're sorry if some of you choose not to believe this. We'll do our best to change your mind. Curious Labs is perfectly willing to work with DAZ and has been and continues to sell DAZ content on our store. We have ongoing discussions to help get their models more compatible with Poser 5 advanced features. We've been up front with DAZ on everything we've been working on at all times in our development. We've told them exactly what features we've been working on, and what models we've been building. DAZ has decided, since January, not to support Poser 5 for legal reasons of their own invention -- long before our EULA even existed. How is this the fault of Curious Labs ? And how does this make anyone in the community happy ? We modified our EULA to protect theft from others as I've explained before. We have been investigating our EULA with a lawyer to see if there are ways we can simplify and clarify because of the way some people want to read it. If it's possible, we will do it. But we have no hidden agenda with our EULA. We've stated it many times. When DAZ/Zygote's own models were stolen by another company, WE lost in front of a judge trying to defend their geometry because we didn't have specific clauses in our EULA. We changed our EULA to help the community and DAZ -- and we get it turned around against us. It's really a shame because we have absolutely no ill intent whatsover. Geometries built by you are copyrightable and sellable. We say it every time we're asked, you don't want to believe it Jack. Textures made by you - copyrightable and sellable. Morphs, Copyrightable and sellable. Animation sets, copyrightable and sellable. One company steals models shipped with our application and we can't stop them without a EULA. Copyright settings in our appication? Can't be done. If we (or the courts) allowed that, you wouldn't be able to sell a clothing figure that worked with a DAZ(or other) model because that group (or other) could claim they own the proportions, or some joint angle, and you can't sell something to work with their model. That's why we changed the EULA. It had nothing to do with us versus DAZ. We had no idea they were working on software when the EULA was written. It was written to maintain free trade for supporting figures and prevent theft of stolen geometry and textures -- not prohibit free trade. And it was written under legal advice. Content Paradise is designed to be a system to help make it easier for people to find available content through multiple content vendors and for content creators to more easily get their work found. We are excited about it, and once you experience it you will be too. We hope to bring this live very soon. Why in the world would we want to inhibit sales of content ? The brokering partners we have coming in to it are thrilled to be part of it -- and there are many of them -- Renderosity, BBay, Turbo Squid, and others. We're doing everything we can to help make availability of community created content easier and faster. We would have loved to have had DAZ be part of this, and still do. We think the community would benefit from this heavily. Our percentage from this system will barely pay for the costs to maintain it in our estimation. We did it because we believe it will make using Poser a richer experience -- and it will greatly help many users who have no idea of the wealth of content that is available on forums like renderosity. It will open up markets for content creators that they didn't know existed. Over the years, we have probably spent more than $200,000 for content/production services from DAZ/Zygote. And we didn't even own the full rights to the content generated. The same models we paid to have built for Poser were then repackaged and sold for competing applications. We weren't mad. That was what we got for the deal we made. We would like to see Michael and Victoria supported in our face room. At the time people refer to, we had no one available to do the work, and all of our staff was swamped with what they had to do. The truth is it was going to cost us money to support an engineering effort to support their products and their sales at that time -- a time in which they were already under way to make their own Poser-like software. We must be screwheads to suggest that we get paid for several months of work (amounts are exagerrated as to what they would have been since no suggestion of price was offered from DAZ). In reality, it wasn't of serious enough interest to DAZ at the time to even suggest a price, and we hadn't worked it all out technically yet on our end. They had already made up their mind in January. We have continuing and open discussions with DAZ. We'd like to see compatible formats and complementary features in all models and applications produced by both companies -- and everyone else. I believe DAZ would like that as well. There is plenty of room for everyone to have the tools and models they want to use to create their artwork. We are not choosing to shut DAZ out of Poser 5. We have offered to clarify any EULA problems they may have. If they want to support Poser 5, we're more than happy to support them on it -- even if they are writing software as well. We work to support 3DMax and Lightwave and Cinema4D and Maya (yes we have more work to do on these to bring them up to the level of Poser 5 -- we know and we ARE working on it). And yes, we are working on a Mac OSX as well. We spend a lot of time in our engineering efforts, and in our QA, to make sure the DAZ models are supported inside Poser. If those are some of the models you like to use, we will do our best to make sure Poser handles them correctly. Service Release 2 Beta 2 of Poser 5 should hopefully go out tomorrow. It has additional fixes for compatibility with DAZ and other models (in addition to rendering speedups, memory reductions, and other stability improvements). We do not have support for Michael and Victoria in the face room for Poser 5 yet. We are discussing this technically with DAZ now and would love to see it happen and have put forth offers to help make it happen. We're all for it. It's not a two day task. We are also sorry to see negative Poser 5 statements. We are busting our butts right now to correct some problems -- many of which went undiscovered through our 80 beta users. The final SR2 update will improve many things including great improvements in the new renderer. We have been addressing the specific operating system crashes on some machine and have fixed every case we've been told of and could reproduce. I think people are enjoying being negative right now while snipers run loose and the stock market crashes, but Poser 5.0 has many streamlined features and fantastic new capabilities that people are just discovering. We believe it to be a great product, and so do many users. We may have made some unfortunate choices in default settings (including a much higher resolution figure, full tracking, and skip frames off) which gave people the impression of sluggishness, but in fact Poser 5 has the same or better interactive speed as Poser 4, and all of the old rendering options are available if compatibility with the past is needed. There were specific cases that were causing the new renderer to bogg down and allocate too much memory. The SR2 update will improve many of these. Enough said. Enjoy, Larry Weinberg

The atmospheric lighting will add on to the current lighting. It adds up as you step through space. You'll probably get better results just lowering the atmosphere color value to make it darker in the atmosphere node, or by setting the density to a lower number. You can also plug a 3D texture (like turbulence) in to the color input of the atmosphere node. This helps a lot. Scale up the turbulence to scales of 8 looks pretty good. Currently, all lights in the scene will add in to atmosphere, so too many lights will quickly blow out the scene. You can adjust rendering time of atmosphere by taking larger steps through the space (stepsize). If step sizes get too large, you'll start seeing banding. Then you can add noise to it (1 or 2) to make that better. This can speed up atmosphere. But, in general, for many renders, the atmosphere computes relatively quickly (for what it's doing). Larry

I believe there will be some improvements in the face room regarding textures in the SR2 patch, but I think some of the texture variations capabilities are based around 512 textures. I need to get more information from the people who are responsible for that part of the code before I can answer well. As for better blending of the body, I'm not sure what the real solution can be. There could be any texture applied to the body. We do a blending to whatever texture is there, but we don't change anything below the neck intentionally. That was left for people to tweak once a new head texture got generated. This could be something to look to improve on in the future and add as an option (to attempt to auto adjust the body texture).

This will be fixed (now) in the Service Release 2 patch that should be available in some form this coming week. It wasn't an issue of telling the content creators. It was a bug in the code that we weren't aware of until revealed in this thread. It was never intended to be a limitation of the textures. One comment on the 3000x3000 texture size. This is a pretty large texture, and if you don't need this for a large render, you should make textures smaller than this. A 3000x3000 texture (without texture filtering) will require more than 100 megabytes of memory to hold it. And there may need to be two copies temporarily. With summed area texture filtering, this may double again. So if you have many textures, and all are 3000x3000, you will be getting very large renders. This was why we added the maximum texture size tweak in the render options. This way you can lower them all down in one shot while doing draft renders.

Thanks everybody. You have, indeed uncovered a real -- and easy to fix bug here! This has nothing to do with Bryce, but with some shared code with the preview display that shouldn't have been processing the render textures. It has nothing to do with the renderer itself. Until we release Service Release 2(coming very soon!) you should create power of 2 textures and set your maximum texture resolution in the render options high enough. This will be set right in SR2. Thanks for the detailed detective work -- and sorry about the bug. Larry

thanks for dropping that on us!

Just so you know, we are investigating with Pace now to find out why the old Interlok copy protection drivers may work better than the new drivers for some Win 98 and Me. It again may be incompatibility with some Hp printer drivers. Registering first before installing the current SR1 may help. I had you install the old tkpd file, but forgot the ilinet.dll to go with it. So that may explain this blue screen if it wanted to register. We'll verify here and post the old drivers in a complete form.

No one is accusing anyone here. We need to put this information out so honest people don't run into problems. If the known crack is ever installed -- even just to check out the application -- it will cause problems that may permanently disable the ability for Interlok to run correctly on that system until the disk is reformatted completely. We have experienced this when trying to use our patch on the known crack. I'm sure you purchased your copy of Poser if you say you did. The screen shown here is exactly what we saw on a machine that once had the crack installed.