Ok never mind, all of a sudden after a paniced hour of searching and sweating the images poped up. Whew. Backing up all the omages now.

I want to know what happened to 90% of the images in my gallery. I've been a member since 2000 and almost all of my images are gone. There was no warning to back up your gallery and since the theft of my notebook PC many of the images in my gallery I only had up in my gallery!!!!!!

Someone want to explain this. LIKE NOW!!!!!

Ahhh you mean the great wall of china effect. Thinking of the tools available in vue it seems problematic from several aspects.

Building the wall could possible be done using the altitude tool in the editor this makes the bottom follow the terrain contour bht height of the wall will vary.

It is easire although not a walk in the park in Lightwave where you have tools like conform to background that can aid in such things.

In Lighrwave you would create a polygon ribbon representing the wall on X,Y coorfinates. You would have the terrain in a seperate layer then you would conform the poly ribbon to the background (the layer the terrain mesh is in) This would make the ribbon follow the terrain on the Y axis. Then you would extrude the poly ribbon to the height you want above the terrain and BAM you have a wall that follow the terrain hills and valleys exactly and allways remain the same height above the surface.

Message edited on: 03/23/2006 00:46

OK all neat explainations. Except Right now I am only using Vue to create a terrain for export to Lightwave. After creating the terrain and clicking OK I then go to file export object and the terrain exports as a LWO object just fine. Just a different rout to the same end. The weird thing is. that I create the procedural terrain. Click OK. Select the terrain from the list and select edit. BAM the terrain is different in the editor. I do NOTHING except those three steps. No resize, no move no nothing. Just Create, Click OK, Reopen in editor. Suppose that I just have to be happy with the one shot at it deal. Never leave the editor until the terrain is exactly like I want it as it seems there is no going back after the OK Tab is clicked.

You can not compare game engines and development software. Vue Maya Lightwave and the rest, are creation programs. When you do a softbody simulation in those programs the software ahs to modify the base scene file it's self. Not just move or paint objects that are already defined. It is creating and modifying the environment, not just playing back and environment. It's like comparing apples and oranges. Just ask one of those systems to prepare a file that can exported for print and see just how well it responds. Even in this day and age people forget that the graphics engine has Nothing to do with render times. Rendering is done by the cpu, and since #D creation apps have to do a whole lot more than just display already created, textured and lit objects they will never be as fast as HW based graphics cards. #D creation apps do everything in SW. THen send the final result to the display card. While it would be possible to have a HW intensive 3D creation package it would be single task oriented and unflexible as HW is not nearly as modifyable or flexible as a SW based system.

I dunno about the back room of other forums but there are some good free models hidden away throughout rosity in the forum back room. The Lightwave forum back room has some neat stuff if your app can import .lwo

I guess if youve never ad a dongle fail during a critical project, or spent a couple of hours figureing out, installing and configurig a license server, or made a commitment on a project figuring that you had the correct 3D meshes in hand to finish the job only to find that the particular mesh would not open up in the SW or SW version you have. Well then, I guess you would not know what this threat is about. I have had the joy of two of the instances above, License servers can give even the most laid back person a migrane. And having a hardware key go on vacation during a time critical project can raise the blood pressure of a whole lot of people really fast. Think about it, you have a single application network server, and that server has the host 3D application on it. 8 workstations run the software loaded on the network server. The dongle drops dead which is on the network server. Your 8 artists logon open the application and wham, error message "Hardware Key Not Found" Even if the server had a catastrophic failure you could load up the sw on one of the work stations and get by until the server was fixed, But without the dongle you are SOL. Gotta wait for a replacement from the manufacturer, which depending where you live, time of year, phase of the moon and what some guy in Indiana had for breakfast could take a very long time. Meanwhile you have at least 8 people sitting around twiddling their thumbs because they can't do thier work. Why? becaues of paranoia over what is basically a non issue. No one here is advocating stealing 3ds Max or Maya or anyother sw. People steal cars mainly to sell the parts and enrich themselves. But in the case of pirated high end 3D graphics packages to 99% of the users the SW has Zero monetary value. Since the majority of the pirated stuff is freely available out on the net. If the pirates were making money off of the stuff well then there would be a case but on the whole they do not make one single dime. Nor do I figure 99% of the users of such software make any money off of it. The primary market that high end packages (Vue Infinite, Lightwave, 3DS MAX, Maya, Softimage etc) are industry professionals, schools, Ad agencies, Effects houses, and Gaming developers. These businesses Must be able to rely on the software and have to have support else they risk blowing deadlines, not being able to deliver etc. They can not risk using pirated sw. So who else out there would want the stuff bad enough to steal it, no one that is who. This stuff is pirated mainley as a rebellion against $10,000 software packages. Although I have not a clue where the pirates get the origional copies from at those prices, I mean some one somewhere had to actually buy the CD's before it could be pirated. So what happens? The very people and businesses who have to rely on the software, have it easy to use and maintain. For the software to be reliable, it is them that get bit in the Butt when a hardware key drops dead, or the license server goes into fits, or hours of paid labor have to go into installing and configuring the LC server or a whole host of other issues just because the developers are paranoid of someone stealing thier stuff. In the case of High end graphics software and 3D meshes I just can't figure out against whom they are trying to protect against? Who? The 15 year old computer geek wishing to crank out some Sci Fi Fan art? Is that what all this is about? Perhaps it is to protect against the underground porn producers! Yea that's it! A whole ton of money out there being made in animated 3D sex! Getting back to reality though, IMHO the main reason for all this security is aimed against undeveloped or impoverished countries,where even businesses would not have software if there were no pirated versions. Hey when your business is lucky to pull in 10K a year you can not afford to pay 5K for software and still be able to pay your employees. But that is a whole different animal involving governments, politics, corruption and greed. Again, I am not referencing MS XP, or any other gen purpose SW. That is a whole other issue. If indeed it is done to curb sales losses in places like china or bangladesh, well then that is idiotic unless you price your stuff so businesses in those countries can afford it. Or have thier governments tighten up thier anti piracy laws. Oops, I think we have stumbled on the real reason we have to put up with impossible protection schemes. Yhe dirty little secret,it is really all about foreign markets and market penetration in those markets. 3D graphical software is a relatively small community. I mean in the developed world there are not that many new Ad agencies and graphics houses starting up. The real place with any hope of market expansion is in developing countries. But then that is a whole other discussion.

Bottom line is that 99% users of pirated graphics design software are not professionals. And there are not many non professionals out there that would pay $1000 bucks or more for 3D software. Professionals are by far the majority customers of high end 3D applications and when you are making money with the tools you can afford to pay for them.

Think that graphics tinkerers are the majority customers of $8,000 apps like Maya and the like? No companies buy software at those prices so any pirated copies out there are being used by people who would have never paid that kind of money for the product anyways.

No lost sales there. Operating systems games and other sw designed mainly to be used at home or the novice are a different story and piracy there can lead to big losses. But the conversation here is about graphics packages that typically start at $500 and go up from there. Professionals can not afford to use pirated software first because the lack of support costs them money and second their reputation would be toast in the indusrty if they ever were caught. Imagine the impact if say ILM was caught with pirated copies of some software.

So as everyone agrees that antipiracy measures are completely ineffective, and that high end graphical tools are not really suffering any losses due to some pirated copies out there, I can not see the often laborious schemes in place to thwart piracy. Another person that posted here is correct, in some cases it is easier to install the pirated version of a SW than the actual legal copy of the product. 2 years ago I was working on a time critical project, and Wham in the middle the dongle decided to drop dead. The manufacturer said it would be a week to 10 days to get a new one, which would have completely blown the deadline. A temporary install of a copy found on the internet saved the day. To my surprise the dongle actually arrived on day 4 but that was still two days past deadline.

We have always had at least two spare dongles on hand after that incident. I gues I am lucky the company I work for insists that I have a copy on my home machine so I can do some last minute work. (Actually I talked them into that one) so I have someone else paying for the versions I use at home. Otherwise I certainly would not be able to afford dropping the price of a car on graphics software.

So as far a professional graphics SW goes anti piracy protection schemes are a solution for a non issue. It is enough that you are denied any access to updates, support or other content from the manufacturers web site unless you register with a valid SN or CD key.

Message edited on: 01/03/2006 02:29

Message edited on: 01/03/2006 02:32

Message edited on: 01/03/2006 02:38

Thanks guys, I will post in their forum, I have already sent them an email. I can beat my self in the head for deleteing what I thought was a duplicate directory.

Cool spider thingies

Some hints on nimda, after running norton AV or remove utility. Do the following search your HD for *.emf files. The only place you should see them is in your MS shared directory And MS office directories, and there is a couple of templates with that extension. Any of these file found in other directories should be deleted. Second search your temorary internet file folders for *.vbs files also delete any of these.

Well look for it in the Poser Free Stuff in the next day or so!!!!!!!

Damn, that does not sound good as it needs a degree of smoothing, else the rounded corners on the wings will become jagged and the wheels not be smooth. But this is Way too much.