I've returned to Renderosity recently after some years.

I am sad to see so much AI art dominating the galleries, as in years past pictures that looked really good were always the product of a gifted artist who had clearly spent a lot of time on them. One artist who's name escapes me would render a figure in Poser and then re-paint the image into its final form - they looked amazing.

I was never in that league so it doesn't affect me, but feel sorry for talented artists who might now have their skills constantly questioned from now on - did you really do that yourself or was it AI generated like all those other pictures? 

Where will the next generation of commercial artists come from? If commercial artists disappear, will artwork stop evolving because the AI generators are based on what has been created by humans up till the present day?

Is it me, but does AI artwork always have a certain look to them?

I'm still a keen V4 user.

When DAZ initially dropped support for Poser, I was reluctant to move to DS because my experience of it and other DAZ software such as Hexagon and Bryce was of a fragile and unreliable program. I regularly lost work and data to Hexagon. Then was a rapid succession of replacement figure generations which seemed designed to force yet more re-purchasing.

For the most part V4 feels more than good enough. I rarely do really close up pictures, so what ever technical benefits there might be wouldn't be seen anyway.

Kimberly,

Usually the Outlook.com web interface, otherwise the Apple Mail app on my iPad (connected to Outlook.com)

I check my Junk folder everyday just in case I get an email outside of my contacts list, but Renderosity is on my 'safe' list anyway.

Mark

I've not had emails from Renderosity for quite a while - I assumed it was part of the recent changes. Out of the blue, favourite artist notifications started recently, but still get no newsletters / sales promotions. My account settings are set to Yes.

@chanur56. Thanks for that, I can see that one now. I'm sure dropping emails is a mistake on Renderosity's part. Most of my purchases came from those promo emails, especially from the range of product images within the message, not just the headline product at the top.

Mark

I had to read your reply twice just to make sure I'd not made a mistake - wow, unbelievable :-(

Mark

Thanks for the very prompt reply.

What about the promotions, coupon codes and newsletters that got me visiting the site and buying stuff ?

Have these stopped now ? I don't see these in the Activity Feed.

Mark

I turn the machine off at night, so it's had several chances to fix the problem that way. I tried removing the Destroyed City prop but that didn't fix the problem.

It could be that the problem was there for a while, but I didn't notice.

Thanks for replying.

I've checked my settings and they are set to 'Deep', I've also hit refresh a few times to no avail.

Another thing that might kill the idea is the Pi has an ARM processor, whereas most apps like Bryce are x86 executables.

As a former Bryce and Hexagon user, I'm left wondering if this is a double edged sword. Giving away software that previously sold for over $400 devalues it and sets the expectation that if you hold out long enough the software will be given away.

It was problems with stability and feature stagnation that drove me away from Bryce and Hexagon. If the sofware is just a loss leader for content, there is less incentive in improving the features and quality of the software as it doesn't generate healthy revenue in its own right.

Top marks, that was it!

Many thanks. 

Gory details are here:

msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa366778(VS.85).aspx#physical_memory_limits_windows_7

I would go for nVidia rather than ATI, they play better with Vue and find they are often recommended for other software too.

Make sure you use the latest video drivers, I always make sure they are WHQL certified as well.

Disk imaging software might help (e.g. Ghost), which can make a snapshot of the machines hard disk in its entirety.

As a Windows 7 user, the first thing I did when I got the software 'just so' on my new machine was to buy a bus powered WD drive and use the WIndows 7 image backup to make such a snapshot.

Needless to say, the first thing I did was to test that image to see if it could restore the machine back to the snapshot point, and then the disk went into the fire safe along with my normal backups.

In theory if the worst happened, I could put a new disk in there, restore the machine from the Dell setup disk (my machine is an Alienware), then restore over that with the image disk to get the machine back to its former glory with all the software installed, activated and configured.

After that, it would be the small matter of restoring all my personal data back on top of the image :-(