Despite what I said when I moved to Carrara (not gonna be around much, etc.), I did continue to come around this place and it's still in the links bar on top because I consider the people in this place my extended family and I like you more than the Carrara community (which is virtually non-existant).

Now I've noticed this place has started to be deader than a date with a goth. At first I thought it was just the summer period, people going out on vacation and so on. Secondly I blamed myself for drawing most of the usual and active posters (i.e. Mahray, xenic, ek-art, phil drawbridge, etc) away to RenderGods. And thirdly I blamed the migration of users to other apps such as Carrara, linked to the growth of DAZ's Bryce forum as the premier place for the app.

It's probably a combination of those three things. Certainly, when it comes to RenderGods, we do talk about this place and the artists here a lot. My original thought was to integrate and even replace the god-awful site chat, at least for the Bryce Forum, with the one we already have. At least in terms of viewership and so on, we've acheived more in the 2 years we've worked on it than most of the better times the site chat has had-read: we have 7-20 active people in there constantly.

At any rate, Phil, xenic and I discussed the matter and decided as the three owners of RenderGods, that we'll try to relocate some of our time and work in order to try to help out this forum. Non-believers should not be too cynical about this attempt, as our concerted efforts have acheived some pretty amazing things on this site (such as getting all of Flak's images into the Hot20 at one point, as a gesture of appreciation to his incredible art). Ergo whenever we make freebies for Carrara we will port them over to Bryce as well. We have other plans involving linking off of our sites to this place and giving it as much positive spin as possible. As we discussed it, it became apparent that we all owe quite a lot to you guys and to Agent Smith. We never considered ourselves different or separate from this place, but rather RenderGods a natural extension of the forum and the site in general.

So that's that, your thoughts would be appreciated. For myself, I continue to offer free hosting for your projects through digitallights.net (formerly freewriters.ca). Brycers get first dibs no matter what :)

mihnea