damn

Sounds like an interesting discussion on how some pro artists did some work.

[quote="Triple F"]No easy way to introduce this subtly, so.

After contacting Ron Thornton, to find out who designed one of the ships on Babylon 5, one thing led to another, and a quick exercise in learning how to code up a web page turned into a unique reference site.  (5 years, 15 FX artists and one producer later).  Among those contacted included Steve Burg, Everett Burrell, Eric Chauvin and Kevin Kutchaver.

The site isn’t going to stay up forever, It was just a hobby, a one off, so I made it downloadable for anyone to keep – no strings, popups, adverts or anything else attached.  Just a lot of frank, revealing, wide ranging and occasionally funny interviews from a bunch of artists with enough Emmys between them to field a couple of football teams (that answer a lot of questions and bust a few myths) and a fair bit of previously unreleased concept art, like this.


It’s not so much about the show, but the artists, the art and the technology.  Steve Burg (who recently designed the Prometheus for the Ridley Scott movie) described what we talked about as the most in-depth examination of his methodology and approach to design ever carried out.  Which, considering Steve’s career, came as a bit of a surprise.  

This is a link to a facebook page highlighting the site.  

http://www.facebook.com/B5Scrolls



If you read the top post you’ll see why I joined FB and set it up, and why I’m pointing there.  It’s far from ideal (a lot of folks aren’t on facebook), but it was the best idea I could think of to let as many folk know as possible, before the site disappears.

If anyone is interested, ain’t on facebook and can’t see the two links to the site, then here’s a link to the site itself.  Though if you can ‘like’ that Facebook thing, that would be helpful.
http://www.themadgoner.com/B5/B5Scrolls/B5Scrolls.htm

Hope you enjoy the site.  It really is/was a one off. ; )[/quote]

Terre, the B5 Scrolls interviews are fascinating. Thank you for that! :D

Just wanted to say that I'm still around, but I'm consumed with college and finishing up this term @___@. I'll post when  can! <3

ladyfur said:

update on ssi:

i think this was which forum i posted it in, not sure...

they, get this, LOST my case.

as in, they have nothing from 1984 when i was first
disabled. lost, as in... they don't have anything.

ok, now... here is my only guess. in the 90's we
lived in new orleans for a spell, don't ask what
sort of spell, please. theoretically, if they sent
my paperwork there, assuming i was relocated...
and if they destroyed the micro fish, err, fische...
and then ten years later a big blustery gal named,
'katrina', came to town... them my records, if i'm
correct, would have been, to quote a 9th ward
nola forum poster of that year, 'unda four feet of
water, just like everybody else'. this is because
the records would have been paper printouts,
in the basement of the courthouse...

now, all speculations aside, i googled and found
that soc sec has lost a lot of records, not just mine.

now, all this means the case worker HAD to come
up with a way to keep me in the system, or likely
lose her job. so... that was why they treated me as
a NEW applicant, not somebody injured close to 30
freaking years ago! and, even given today's much
harder rules... they didn't argue.  so... i get the
great distinction of being one of the few disabled
who would qualify without a hearing. i'm supposed
to feel better. any clue why it made me cry?

now, i'm told, just see a counsellor every once in
a while and they can take reports that way, then
no more wierd 3 1/2 hour long tests...

i STILL can't remember half of what those tests had
asked, it's weeks now, and i'm still trying :( my
memory skills are going. so, why am i hurt? because
in 1984 was was put on perm. disab. for physical injury...
they now have changed the why part :( i'm way beyond
depressed here. i have a genius level iq but brain injury
and apparently they find that more important than back
injuries :(

ok, i vented...

i'm not venting anywhere else.

back to art now...
well, for me, writing...
i'm proofread up to ch. 501, have about 900 to compile and
proofread, and about 400 compliled and proofread after
those. i began in 2008 but did not compile, just wrote chapters
as individual files, until 2010... i know, i should have.
i am busy, to say the least... it's a lonnng saga.

OK so to make this short and quick Ladyfur, my parents, after ten years of court battles and endless drama finally got custody of their three grandkids away from their abusive biological father, he sexually, physically and mentally abused those kids. As such, they have been ssi babies almost from the first day they were born. My 13 year old niece, at three months old, was diagnosed with shaken baby syndrome, she went limp from the neck down. would not eat, and almost couldn't breathe. As a result, she spent 9 months in a hospital, which my mom stayed by her side 24/7. She now has curvature of the spine, her right side is growing faster than her left side, and her left diaphragm doesn't work. She will never live a normal life ever.

So here recently, ssi declared my niece's case was up for elimination. My mom has fought with ssi for the past 6 months, trying to keep my niece on it. My mom is a retired nurse and former CASA worker, she is very aware of how serious my niece's case is. So she took her in for an interview with the ssi case worker. In front of my niece, he asked my mom if, on top of being physically disabled, if she has shown any signs of mental retardation. RIGHT IN FRONT OF MY NIECE!

Now I've read a lot of things about ssi here recently, most of which is they're trying to eliminate over 300,000 current cases to save money. I understand that there a lot of people riding the high and mighty off ssi and food stamps and unemployment, but seriously, are ALL government social workers just out of touch with reality or are they just willfully ignorant? I'm glad someone else is riled up about this!

Notice for those who visit Daz but havn't been there recently: That extended corner is about to be turned. THe change will be next Wednesday. At least they arn't unrolling a new site on a Friday.
http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=190542&start=0&postdays=0&postorder=asc&highlight=

@CF: what Nan and Terre said. Yes, the system needs cleaning up, but it does because those who really can't help themselves don't get enough support!

grumble grumble bureaucracy, and it's not even that bad!

terre: thanks, hugs back.
suro: that's what i said, and more.
celtic: HFS! and that is my polite response.
my god, this is insane! but a friend of mine,
actually my second bf from back in hs whom
i still chat with, said he wouldn't care what
they called him if he was disabled. crazy,
schitzo, even psyco, just show him dead
presidents' pictures. it's about survival.
apparently they would rather deal with
mental issues than crippling pain like i
have and like your family has, and i can't
fathom this at all. talk about insane.

cole porter said it best:

'somethin's gotta' give!'

good luck!

celtic: don't get me started about government. or congress,
who should be called, 'regress', for all they can get done
these days!

oh,

HEADS UP!

DAZ posted the CHANGES TO P.C. CLUB on the commons
today. read it and weep, folks. in just the time it took for
there to be about 6 pages of posts or less, at least 14 or
more people posted that they were cancelling p.c. club
over the changes.

no more paypal. no saving unused potions of vouchers
to use later. (think WIC, you use it all at the grocery store
that day or you lose what's left, no change given back,
like they do to the single mamas). i'm not in the p.c.
thingy so i didn't understand the PA references...
it's all there in glorious soon to be gone forum posts...

oh, and if you want to save your join date and post count
number... paste them on a text file because they will be
reset to 0 and join date reset as well. there is supposed to
be a new TOS but nobody seems to have read it yet...

i salute the brave dazzites who posted their less than thrilled
with this !!@#$$% change, but don't be surprised if their
posts go the way of all flesh SOON...

too bad. daz was a really nice site... when it had artzone.

Ladyfur, can you give a link to that Plat Club thread you were talking about?

Nanobot said:

AngelusPrime said:

Welp, guess all questions were answered better than I ever could have, no need for me to answer anything, :) Glad you got your info, suro, ^_^

How's everyone?

After reading all that? My stomach hurts and I'm going to have nightmares for weeks. Other than that, just fine. You?

I've always found apocalyptic "What if...?" theories and ideas to be quite fascinating to be honest, so it was a good read, :-P 

I seem to be in a minority here, but for now I'm still sticking with Daz's software. I'm too enamoured with Genesis at the moment to put myself through another learning curve. The problem with D/S 4 is that it was such a major rehaul and huge change from 3. However, most of the things that people complain about, like the content manager system can be bypassed and you can pretty much get back to the D/S 3 working method but with some nifty new features, like the autofit. Another thing that gets a lot of complaints, but which I personally love.

As to the PC, I'll wait and see and do a cost calc after a few months rather than have a knee jerk reaction. The overall net cost taking into account the product discounts, might still cancel out any negative effect from the voucher thingy.

BTW AP did you ever try out D/S4 or M5?

Looks like they're ready to launch, but the software isn't!

I've tried him, but maybe not enough. I just still don't see anything super spectacular from him that I can't already do with M4... maybe slightly better proportions? But the anatomy is still off to me... And yes, he doesn't suffer from the bubble shoulder syndrome like M4 does, but that doesn't help much if the clothing still has it. Now, as for the clothing? I just really, REALLY don't like how most of the Genesis clothing I've seen has that vacuum packed look, even more so than Gen4 clothing. It sorta works for Sci Fi stuff, but just not for casual type things, which I still stick my boys into every so often. M5 textures? Grab a couple of the Gen4 Elite textures and voila, same effect. That Elite hair? Neftis has come up with better stuff lately. The morphs? Eh. I mostly dial my own. Genesis still does not convince me for humans. Creatures? Sure, I'll try those, but the humans are just not appealing to me.

http://forum.daz3d.com/viewtopic.php?t=190680

that is ann's hard work to show what it will look like.
she did a good job at making screenshots. i won't give
my opinion on how i think the new site looks.

what is DID notice was the new TOS

they are mm, omm, ptl, and pseudo disneyfying it.
no flags. none. this means daz now is safe for 2 year
olds and is no longer an adult user site. if you look
into the background of its new owner and see who
he has supported, you will see why. just call the new site
as n. carolina annex, as far as i can tell so far...

it will be interesting to see the fallout from this one.

apparently currently there's a secet forum that you
need a decoder ring and a secret handshake and password
frat pledge thing to get into so... unless any of you has one,
i can't report on the discussions taking place in that frat house,
sorry.

thank god for freedom of speech on private sites!

their new tos just gave the mods a feeding frenzy in the making.

thank god i do not render or i'd be devastated. losing artzone
was bad enough. it's obviously not ever coming back. oh, well.
i'm sure poser will be happy to get the ones driven away... or
vue, or... i'm guessing there are others, right?

i am ever so grateful to be part french in my heritage.

kind of sad what they turned daz into, but... dust in the wind, right?
ok, 3d rendered dust with high contrast shadows and point lights...

See, that's why I think the general idea behind Genesis is ok, I mean, I go back to the possibility of fully clothing a digitigrade reptilian alien cat from outer space. That's cool! Our aliens and monsters can finally have clothing! BUT it utterly fails in the human category. I have lost count of how many "females" I've seen that have the chest shape of a male, no waist and just two half circles that pass for breasts, and how many "males" with female hips, literal man-boobs and saline injected balloons passing for muscles. And don't get me started on how wrong I find having a child morph as part of the whole human package.

Hi, Raet! Oh boy, stuck, huh? You have company. I've done *some* artification this week, but nothing to show for it, really. A few nice poses, maybe. 

Been too stressed out this week to really concentrate. Busy today doing errands, and more of same tomorrow. Ugh, I'm exhausted.

I have to disagree with the comments about Genesis. Yes it starts out as a kind of amorphous figure but there are separate dials for female shape and male shape; and they do give you different proportions. I spent quite a bit of time comparing the basic male shape to the M5 shape, and for a male figure, M5 gives a whole better body, particularly on the back muscles. All of the add on musculature packs and the basic M5 are as close as to anatomically correct so I'm not getting why you're saying the anatomy is off. It looks pretty good to me and I studied anatomy as part of my therapy courses and look at a lot of different bodies as a Pilates teacher. Of course if people don't understand how the biceps (for instance) actually work and dial it up at the wrong time, it's going to look off, but that's not the fault of the product. Same goes for if they don't dial in the basic fe/male and just start from the amorphous figure. Personally I like being able to mix up the male/female dials on the heads. Especially at the moment when I'm needing to create some feminine looking guys for the project I'm working on.

The posing also follows mimics real body movement much more accurately and there are a lot of very useful inbuilt posing dials which if you know how the body moves, make posing a real treat, simple and easy.

I did a quick comparison of the three figures. I disagree about the pecs, as it is possible to adjust the shape, volume
and depth. The deltoids could be better and the shoulder blades, whilst you can adjust for definition, don't go far enough. Personally I like the fact that you can get a more realistic 'normal' person's shape. I don't want a steroid hulk. All of the muscle can be individually adjusted though, so improvements can be made on this quick test version of M5 to suit. I think the problem is that people just want to load and render. M5 is meant to represent an anatomically correct male, not an anatomically correct body builder. Just like in RL his muscles need to be developed. I see a lot of guys who have flat/concave upper pecs :)
On the back view M5 is on the left

dylazuna said:

I did a quick comparison of the three figures. I disagree about the pecs, as it is possible to adjust the shape, volume and depth.

An excellent ability. Unfortunately, nobody who's posting images of the character on the DAZ forums seems to be aware of it.

dylazuna said:

The deltoids could be better and the shoulder blades, whilst you can adjust for definition, don't go far enough.

The deltoids could be a LOT better, but there we are.

dylazuna said:

Personally I like the fact that you can get a more realistic 'normal' person's shape. I don't want a steroid hulk.

Well, you have to understand something: I am TREMENDOUSLY picky when it comes to realistic models. While I do not view what I have seen of M5 so far as passing my personal criteria, I have NO intention of trying to dissuade you from using the character.

As I said many times before on the DAZ forums, it doesn't really matter WHICH character you use - pick one, stick with it, and tweak it until it looks the way you want.

The problem is the majority of users simply want a "make art" button - click and it's pretty. But there simply are no perfectly realistic commercially available models for either Poser or Studio. All have flaws of some sort of another, it's inherent in the concept of a digital model, and part of it is the time invested in creation. Since every iteration of Victoria and Michael have essentially been "let's start over from scratch" rather than "let's improve what we've got", there simply is no version of Vickie or Mike that has more than a year or two of work invested into it. This is why they simply don't compare to the kind of results I get out of my modded Posette, a character I've been tweaking now for over eight years. And, when I look at her, I still see room for improvement.

In my opinion, the only thing that looks exactly like a real human is a photograph of a real human. Everything else, at best, is an emulation. Thus, pick one figure you like, and stick with it, tweaking it until it looks perfect in your eyes.

But, the moment someone says to you "Hey, Dylazuna, this product from X company/vendor is perfectly realistic straight out of the box," hold up your hand and shout "I call bullshit." Because it literally can't be true. The only thing that's perfectly realistic is reality.

Unfortunately, I don't know of any commercially-available male figures that to my eye are highly realistic. As far as female figures, however: There are two commercially-available female figures I consider to be damn good. The first, for a "supermodel or action heroine" look would be Blackhearts "Girl Next Door - Anastasia." Tremendously striking character, and very realistic. Not perfect, no, but still quite excellent. For a character who looks like a real woman (I.E. not a supermodel, just an ordinary gal) and has superior bends, look for Antonia Polygon over at RDNA.

Of all the female figures available, however, those are the only two commercially-available figures that pass my personal muster. So, that kind of shows you how picky I am. ;-)

Xaa, question about Anastasia. Do you have her? If so, how well does she take expressions? Some of the packs I've seen at Rendo look... odd. I really do like her shape though. Very athletic and fit, and her face is pretty.

I, for one, have not renewed my PC membership.  I have enough crap to keep me busy for a year or so; between programs, tutorials, a few things I decided to actually purchase here and there- I have no need or want to keep giving them more cash.  I did finally break out the DS4 Pro and piddled for a little bit, and I agree with Jim on the anatomic issues with the Gen model- using the basic male/female or M5/V5 "models". 

I did render one out, and at least the render engine was quicker than the DS3 A I have- same light set up on both.  Even with the hair.  Test run here is Gen with M5. D3 morphs, Muscularity and base morphs, David skin, Twilya for V4 for the hair and Nano's Scandalous shirt she made with the base textures.  The program, after conforming, worked well enough that minor adjustments were needed only on the shirt and none on the hair to get them to fit the Gen model.

I will use all of my programs to keep my options open, however I still have a lot to learn on each.  In the end, what gives me the end result I want will be used be it Studio, Carrara, Bryce, or Poser Pro.  XD  

O_O

Oh, I know she's not for V4. I still really like her face.

Happy Mother's Day!