Because of the increasing changes in my health situation I wanted to let all my friends and customers know what my plans are for my future commercial projects (and freebies! :)

It is nothing life threatening, but it is now becoming very limiting physically for me to work at the computer for long periods of time, and work in particular ways. I have Fibromyalgia and with my age, it is catching up with me. I used to be SO active with hiking around Zoos and visiting farms with my photography (both for personal, commercial portraits and resource collecting) and now I am lucky when I can get across a couple of streets to our local pond/park to enjoy the wild life there.... frustrating to say the least!

One major problem with Fibromyalgia (FM for short) is the tendency to get "frozen shoulders" from any sort of repetitive motion. That came on with web building a few of years ago. I have been in therapy and getting shoulder joint cortisone shots off and on for years, and still have to take great care of the amount of time I spend and how I use my shoulders and arms. I have lost some range of motion in my arms/shoulders and if I push too hard, I will loose more. Surgery is not an option and often does not even "take".

This is the major reason I simply cannot continue to do the intense work it takes to make original models. If I go slow, and work less I can continue with my first love - that being "morphing and mapping". You may have noticed I have been doing that for a while now. My latest project of Millennium Horse Textures (that include some new morphs from me, the gift of Jan's morphs included with permission as well as added goodies from Tiny and SnowFire Graphics! :) is taking quite a long time. I love horses and I am working to include some really different textures.... (I want to do 3-4 more textures, then I will start on the MATs). I think the weather affects me too, and it has been the coldest wettest "Sunny California" winter in YEARS.....

I have to apologize to the folks that were hoping I would make an original llama model and some others that I had previously announced I would do. Unless a real medical break through happens, it is just unlikely. I am doing everything I can to continue to do morph/map projects and I also NEED to play with the GIGs of wonderful products I have bought over the years..... so when I am "allowed" just so many hours a day on the computer, sometimes my muse really needs to take a break and do art for fun, to relax. I have been pushing myself to only do the horse maps lately, with so many looking forward to them..... so this is one reason I felt it would be good to let folks know how things are going for me.

The FM syndrome affects everyone differently which is why it is just now being accepted as "real" to doctors, while they still do not know too much about it, or what to do for it. I plan on gathering some information and posting it on my own personal web site for my own use and for others who might have all these oddball symptoms and never understood what is going on. Growing up with odd pains, odd reactions to medications, going through all sorts of tests that were "negative" has been difficult, but I managed fairly well until my age caught up, and I no longer have hormones to help my body cope.

I plan to continue to take care of my web sites, our Vista Internet Product store site, product support, and continue to make my morphs/texture freebies for a very long time. I just may be a lot slower (I am so late in updating our wonderful store gallery web site, and I do apologize for that too!!) at these things. I am generally only "gone from the net" for one or two days at most, so if you write to any of my e mails you will understand why, if I am a day or two late to respond.

I do have some exciting news about a new product that is in very early stages of beta testing! I hope to have a Poser 5 HAIRY rabbit - a set of my wild rabbits and a set of my domestic rabbits all "furry" and ready to go in the near future (near future is relative, depending on when I get the horse maps done, get the rabbit hair finalized, MATs made, etc.) I have some wonderful friends helping me create, learn and beta test this new product.... I was lucky to be in on the beta testing of Tiny's Hairy DAZ mil house cat - which turned out so lovely and has been sent to DAZ.

Very special friends of mine who are able to understand the "hair room" of P5 (which is still new to me!!) got my rabbit started. I was thrilled with the idea that a poser animal could finally be truly hairy, fluffy, and not need any post brushing "right out of the box" ! :) The minute the two sets are completed (and I have every confidence that they will work out, once some small issues are worked out) they will be in our store.

These rabbits will NOT require the original sets. It has just been discovered that when you do the hair process that the original obj is generated (connected to the hair) and has to be included with the character. So you can purchase these sets as add on sets or instead of my other sets. This is another reason that ONLY my own original models can be made into hairy versions. I probably will not have hairy versions of the very short haired animals, such as my Impala, Gazelles, Reindeer, Elk, Moose - unless a different "very short hair" technique is discovered. The hopefuls are the sheep, goats, and rodents of various types. It will take time to try each type.

I MIGHT additionally have separate Ready Pose (my model sets that do not require poser) sets of these Hairy animals for Vue, if the mapping will translate. At this early stage, the hairy rabbit will go into vue, but the mapping is still being tested there. I have not been able to get the hair parts of the the rabbit to go into Bryce 5, via an obj import or the DAZ plug in, at all. At the very least, the hairy animals will work in Poser 5 (and I assume Poser 6 - I have ordered 6 already) in two ways... to render in a scene using a backdrop set or to use as a "copy and paste" with it's poser alpha channel. I have found that the alpha channel in Poser 5 will get 99.9% of the hairs when you copy and paste with it to place the rabbit on a background in a paint program. Perhaps with Poser 6's ability to "shadow capture" the alpha will be more precise, but that remains to be seen.

After the hairy rabbits, I have hopes for other mammal models of mine to become hairy, fuzzy, or whatever! At this point, my "hairy beta team" LOL continues to explore the "hairy possibilities"... and as those work out, we will give sneak peeks, and announcements. As always my prices will be very reasonable.

Meanwhile I will continue with some very special morph and photo-real Texture sets, of models from my store, DAZ, and others. Thankfully all the years I spent with my camera, and all the funds I spent buying the rights to photos, plus the generous sharing of photos from friends, I have a huge resource stockpile to work from.

Thanks for listening,

Lyne
Lyne's Creations
Vista Internet Products

Life Requires Assembly and we all know how THAT goes!