Songbird Remix's Product Preview Thread

[Ken Gilliland]

Bought the Macaws of the World as soon as I got the notification. Question: Which packs are the Green Wing Macaws and Hyacinth Macaws in or have you done those yet? I was thinking I saw them but I'm not sure where. I'll have a render to show you soon; I'll post it in the render thread rather than here since I think that's what I'm supposed to do.

The Macaws not included in "Macaws of the World" can be found in: Yucatan (Military Macaw), Amazon (Red & Green Macaw aka Green wing), TEE2 (Cuban Red Macaw), TEE3 (Spix's Macaw) and Cool & Usual v3 ((Hyacinth Macaw). All these volumes will eventually get updated.

Sorry to bother you again, I can't edit my earlier post. I found a slight error in the macaws pack. For Superfly, you need to set all effects maps to a gamma of 1.0 or else they won't render correctly because gamma correction is automatic in Superfly. This means bump, specular, and especially transparency maps. Once I corrected this, everything looks so much better and smoother.

I'll look into this and see what I can do. I don't do too much rendering in Superfly because I still prefer Firefly.

There are some things physical renderers do better like metals, water and glass. While the difference between 3DL and Iray is night and day, Firefly and Superfly are much closer. For what you get in improvements in Superfly (at least with most of my renders), the enhancements are barely noticeable and the use of displacement is troublesome... plus Firefly is faster.

 

[Dream9Studios]

The Macaws not included in "Macaws of the World" can be found in: Yucatan (Military Macaw), Amazon (Red & Green Macaw aka Green wing), TEE2 (Cuban Red Macaw), TEE3 (Spix's Macaw) and Cool & Usual v3 ((Hyacinth Macaw). All these volumes will eventually get updated.

I'll look into this and see what I can do. I don't do too much rendering in Superfly because I still prefer Firefly.

There are some things physical renderers do better like metals, water and glass. While the difference between 3DL and Iray is night and day, Firefly and Superfly are much closer. For what you get in improvements in Superfly (at least with most of my renders), the enhancements are barely noticeable and the use of displacement is troublesome... plus Firefly is faster.

Went ahead and bought the Cool & Unusual v3 for the Hyacinth Macaw and other cool birds in that pack! I'll be rendering more with your birds soon as I have many, many ideas sketched out in my notebook for them.

The problem I mentioned will also happen in Firefly if people turn on gamma correction in their render settings. So it's more a Poser 11 thing than specific to one render engine or another.

If you use the cycles materials, Superfly can look way better than Firefly. It uses lighting in a far more realistic way too. I have an old processor but a new graphics card so, for right now at least, Superfly is faster for me which is why I keep using it. I'm about to upgrade to a new processor so I may go back and forth between the two depending on the look I want. Superfly doesn't use displacement maps at all really. It just uses normals maps instead. I learned that the hard way when trying to make my human characters compatible for both render engines.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

I haven't tried cycles materials with my birds... I started looking at them, then Smith-Micro started to get shaky and the future of Poser was very much in question. Now that Renderosity has it... perhaps I'll look at cycles again.

 

[Harimau]

I have just purchased your Songbird ReMix Big Year 2 Stack from your Audubon's Birthday Sale as it contains SBRM Parrots Volume 1 as well as all the sets that contains your other extraneous parrots. I have also purchased SBRM Parrots Vol 2 - Macaws plus SBRM Australia Volume 3 and SBRM Cool & Unusual Volume 3 for the remaining parrots. Looking forward to your Cockatoo and Lovebird sets. By the way, how do I download the free downloads for parrots on your website? Also, it is a much welcomed bonus to find the 2 Toucan Sets in the Collection. Toucans with their big colourful bills are also among my favourites. Have you ever considered doing or do you have any intention of doing a couple of sets on their Old World counterparts, the Hornbills (there are roughly a similar number of species)? It will be nice if you do. They'll be a nice companion for the Toucan sets and though they are not related they are just as spectacular!

Lastly, if any one is interested in the relationships, diversification and evolution of Modern Birds (Modern Day Dinosaurs), I would recommend 'The Ascent of Birds' by John Reilly. It is, in my opinion, the best book of its kind available. It explains, among other things, how and why the falcons are more closely related to the parrots than to the hawks and eagles and why modern birds lose their penises, excepting the water fowls (e.g. ducks, geese and swans) and the ratites (e.g. emus, ostriches and their kin). These two groups are among the first to split from the main group and thus retain their "primitive" feature. Interestingly, chickens, close relatives of ducks, still have non functional vestigeal penises - they are in the process of losing them. This book is also highly readable as the chapters are presented as 'Stories' as each representative bird is discussed. A nice book to read if you are still self-isolating from CORVID 19.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

... By the way, how do I download the free downloads for parrots on your website? ...

All my free downloads are located in the "Store" section of my website. There are twelve sections, but the one you'll want to look at is the first one, "Bird 3D Models". Click the icon or "View details". All the products are listed by release date, so you'll have to do a little hunting.

For this example, let's say you bought the "Songbird ReMix Base Set". It is the first one listed. There's a bunch of information many people will find useful... for instance, the last time the product was updated by me, a button that loads the PDF manual for the product and, in some cases, even a promo movie. Clicking the icon or the Buy will sent you the Hivewire3D Store page... but the item you want is Downloads: Click List. Click the Caret and a list of freebies will appear. Click the one you want to download.

That's it! All of the freebies listed under certain products require the product it is listed under... my standalone freebies are here

Thank-you for the support you given me and my products

 

[sandman_max]

Ken, I may have missed it since I've been blasting thru all 75 pages trying to catch up, but have the Peacocks been updated yet?

 

[Alisa]

I'm not Ken, but yes, they have. If you look on the product pages, it will be pretty clear if a product is updated.

New ones should say in the product information that they support Iray, Superfly, 3Delight and Firefly.

Older products that haven't been updated yet will likely say things like "Consolidated Poser 6 and DAZ Studio 4.5 Bird Character Presets (.pz2/.duf) " under the Format section in the Description and/or be listed as for much earlier versions of Poser and DAZ Studio (like Poser 6+ and DAZ Studio 3.1+ )

 

[JOdel]

Do you mean updated to fix a glitch? The Peacocks are a new set altogether.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

I guess I have the same confusion with peacocks. It's a newer product... was there a reason in should be updated?

 

[Flint_Hawk]

In thread-
Product Updates - Main Notification
On October 15, 2019, Alisa said-

12035 Songbird ReMix Peafowl of the World
Store page: Songbird Remix Peafowl of the World - A Ken Gilliland Creation at HiveWire 3D

Updates: 10-14-2019 (in store 10-15-2019)
Improved Guineafowl Model with dozens of new morphs
Fix for the Peahen Walk pose which didn't pose correctly if limits were turned off.

Maybe this is what is being referred to?

 

[Ken Gilliland]

... Updates: 10-14-2019 (in store 10-15-2019)
Improved Guineafowl Model with dozens of new morphs
Fix for the Peahen Walk pose which didn't pose correctly if limits were turned off.

Maybe this is what is being referred to?

that's right, I did adjust the Guineafowl model when creating Gamebirds v2. The Peacock set has three models; one for the male peacock (Peacock model), one for the female (Peahen model) and one for the Congo Peacock (aka Guineafowl model)

 

[Miss B]

I'm not Ken, but yes, they have. If you look on the product pages, it will be pretty clear if a product is updated.

I just checked Alisa, and yes you posted about it in the Updates thread (see Flint's post just above this), BUT there are no comments on the Peafowl of the World product page that it has been updated. You may want to check into that.

 

[Alisa]

As noted above, it was a separate product when released. The update was to improve it.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

My bad... I forgot to add that update on my website

 

[Stezza]

All my free downloads are located in the "Store" section of my website. There are twelve sections, but the one you'll want to look at is the first one, "Bird 3D Models". Click the icon or "View details". All the products are listed by release date, so you'll have to do a little hunting.

For this example, let's say you bought the "Songbird ReMix Base Set". It is the first one listed. There's a bunch of information many people will find useful... for instance, the last time the product was updated by me, a button that loads the PDF manual for the product and, in some cases, even a promo movie. Clicking the icon or the Buy will sent you the Hivewire3D Store page... but the item you want is Downloads: Click List. Click the Caret and a list of freebies will appear. Click the one you want to download.

That's it! All of the freebies listed under certain products require the product it is listed under... my standalone freebies are here

Thank-you for the support you given me and my products

@Ken Gilliland you may need to update the links
these three give me a 404 not found ~ I didn't try any others.

 

[Miss B]

As noted above, it was a separate product when released. The update was to improve it.

Aha, OK, that makes sense.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

Yup, Hivewire's been renaming some of my extra long titles on their webpages from "songbird-remix-..." to "sbrm-..."
Thanks, for pointing that out, they've been updated

 

[Ken Gilliland]

Aha, OK, that makes sense.

Yes, that's right... what happens is that when I develop a model I try initially to foresee all the possible birds I can use the model for and create the morphs for them ahead of time for future volumes. Sometimes, I achieve that and sometimes there are birds that need something more. In the Guineafowl model's case, I needed to add the turkey-like throat morphs to make Guans. I also decided some existing morphs could be better too, thus that update.

I did a similiar thing with the Gamebird v1 update and the new V3: Pigeon & Doves. I decided I really liked what I did with the new parrot models wing (adding a transparency to the main part of wing) but doing so required me to update the geometry to turn part of the model from the "plumage" material to "Trans1", thus there was an update on the updated Gamebird set. I can't believe that such a simple change like that could improve the model that much

These are some of the experiments I talked about in this thread; learning what works and doesn't before I convert the base SBRM model and the remaining half of my bird library. I obviously want to get that right on the first try.

 

[Harimau]

I have just purchased the two peafowl sets before your sale ends. I hope that you will do the rest of the Phasianinae subfamily of pheasants, peafowl, jungle fowl and their kin, or at least the Polyplectron and Argusianus species sometime in the future. They are, in my opinion, among the most colourful and spectacular group of birds in existence. While I am not really a fan of raptors, I grabbed a copy of your Eagles of the World because they are the most impressive and powerful of all birds.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

I have just purchased the two peafowl sets before your sale ends. I hope that you will do the rest of the Phasianinae subfamily of pheasants, peafowl, jungle fowl and their kin, or at least the Polyplectron and Argusianus species sometime in the future. They are, in my opinion, among the most colourful and spectacular group of birds in existence. While I am not really a fan of raptors, I grabbed a copy of your Eagles of the World because they are the most impressive and powerful of all birds.

You probably saw that Gamebirds v2 has some of what you want, like the Hainan Peacock-Pheasant and Koklass Pheasant. I'll eventually return to these, as well as the Sage-Grouse/Prairie Chicken (which I already have the model completed for), but first I really need to plow through the updates of existing products.