Art 3d Philosophy and History

[StudioMartillo]

If a ten million dollar ad campaign will include art work created in daz studio or poser, what is owed and to whom

Ten million dollars is owed to the advertising agency.

the programs we use phone home

NOT!

How smart does a computer have to be to take a person completely out of mesh work and illustration or design completely..

No matter how 'smart' a computer is, it can't do anything it is not programmed to do.
And I for one am not going to write any program that removes all the graphics software from my computer.

 

[Hornet3d]

Wow, this great, How to respond to all of this or really any of it. Perhaps we should consider this, I have been doing work in 3D for over twenty years... I have never met anyone who has not been working in 3D in some way that has heard of programs like daz studio or poser. seems us 3D folks really know how to keep a secret...lol Now I used to think that 3D was really cutting edge when I first got interested, now I see signs of it not only dying, but being killed off. recent decisions about copyright and just how far it reaches is likely to kill 3D off before any of our work makes it into the Smithsonian or some famous art gallery somewhere, let alone be the go to programs for illustration.

This next week some of my work goes up for auction, it is a charity event so I'll make nothing, but it does beg the question, how far do copy rights go? How far should they go, Can or should mesh shapes be covered like some companies copyright the letters that make up their name... If a ten million dollar ad campaign will include art work created in daz studio or poser, what is owed and to whom. Then we have the biggie, the programs we use phone home, how much they phone home and just exactly what all they are phoning home is any ones guess... How smart does a computer have to be to take a person completely out of mesh work and illustration or design completely..

will 3D scans of famous paintings as well as textures make computerized DaVinci's available at Wallmart ?

I don't expect anyone to have the answers even though we are the ones shaping the future of 3D right now...comments?

Wow a lot of questions and some thought provoking ideas. I think a lot depends on where you and your standing, or lack of in the 3D world and the wider world. My art is produced for me but I do like it when others make comments but none of my renders is ever going to be displayed in a gallery so the idea that 3D work in general will not appear in a gallery does not bother me generally. I do wonder however if the file formats of .jpg, .png, .tif and the like will be around in fifty years times and wonder how many images will be lost forever if they do not.

While copyright is an issue there is also the moral aspect, such as I would never knowingly take credit for someone else's work. If I change the textures on something in a render I usually mention that if I upload the image so that no one will blame the original creator for the rubbish textures, just seems fair to me. Yet despite the big corporations hard line on copyright they are not against bending the rules themselves when the brand something they have not made and have just bought in from another manufacturer. There are cars out there with big brand names that have different badges but the whole rolling chassis is identical or have a brand name when the car vehicle was produced by another well known brand. May not be wrong but it is at least a little sneaky.

Doesn't stop with cars either, many of the cheaper mobile phone providers in the UK have no network they just buy bulk minutes on another company's network. The garages that sell a particular brand of petrol when what is in the tanks could be any brand more dependant on where the delivery driver was after his last delivery and who's storage place he is closest to. I have heard people say they never use petrol from a brand because it gives lower milage or smells when used in their car when, in truth, they have no way of knowing who's fuel they are using. So this world is full of instances where someone takes credit for someone else's work it is just most of us are not aware of just how common this is.

As to your biggie issue, again in my view, often down to the individual. I have only one program that phones home and only because I subscribe to that program, none of the others do which is one of the reasons I have stuck with Poser 2014. I have a mobile phone that I only ever switch on to make a call before switching it off again and I never use Facebook and Twitter. So I am a techno phobe or luddite, except I do have a couple of Amazon Echos (which many would never dream of having in their home as it might listen in when you don't want it to) which is linked to a Hive system and all my content and renders are backed up to the cloud. To me the gains and convenience I get from such technology outweigh the possible risks, but everyone would judge those risks and advantages differently.

As to Poser and DS being secrets, well the whole world of 3D are is a secret to many, few of my friends know what I do for a hobby and those that do don't know why I do.

So that is my personal thoughts, along way off the original topic but as you were the OP and I am responding to you I sort of felt free to air some thoughts.

 

[Carey]

Any one besides me notice the two tyre pricing at renderousity? There are items for sale there that have one price for use and another price for full commercial rights to a mesh. Least that is the way I surmise it is supposed to work. many copyright agreements read that the model may not be modified in any way, course nobody pays any attention to that and we modify the texture maps as we see fit... I did notice that poser pro 2012 let actually modify a mesh and then did away with it in poser pro 2014. Now as for our apps phoning home, I didn't mean all apps report back to the makers of that program. I simply mean most of us can't afford the really heavy security it takes to have a secure home computer... Not that it really means anything, but my mac is set up to not only track access, but every program must ask me for internet access.. Now I know this is a real hot button subject so I am not going to name programs nor where the information goes or what it is used for. Besides I am making tin foil hats as fast as I can, but I can't keep up with orders..lol

Many people are truly amazed with what I can do in 3D, that is a good thing right? maybe, maybe not... After all, programs like blender or daz studio aren't part of any high school art program and maybe it is time that they were....The thing is many of us either found 3D on our own or as part of higher education and I think that is really a shame.. there is a lot of natural talent that is getting really late starts in 3D..

I don't see myself as the op here already this has gone in more directions then I ever thought it would and my thoughts and opinions hold no more weight here then what any one else writes here, I did see some tendencies here though I don't really care for, some people want to state things like they got what they wrote straight from the burning bush so to say. I see this as a place of exploration and to learn more about the history of 3D, above all lets have fun together...

 

[Rae134]

Hey Carey, the 2 pricings you normally see at Rendo, is pricing for normal people and pricing for people who purchase "Prime" membership. They normally have a second listing for "Extended Licence" for commercial (not all items have an EL), of course you can change textures etc for anything you want, you may not be able to sell those textures depending on the licence etc.

 

[James R.]

Regarding the "thou shalt not modify" thing...

"The Buyer shall not copy, modify, reverse compile, or reverse engineer the Product, or sell, sublicense, rent, or transfer the Product to any third party."

Standard license from a major website. Comes with every model they sell.

If I use the Poser morph brush to change the model in some way... add battle damage to an army tank, sculpt a character's face, etc.... or I use Poser's grouping tool to "cut out" a window on a car or house... does this fall under the "shall not copy, modify" category? Poser also creates copies of meshes that have been manipulated in one of its Rooms...so is Poser breaking the rules?

I ask because I am deeply concerned...because I kitbash things. Just as I did when I was a kid, with plastic model kits. I take them apart and reassemble them into my own weird creations. This is more than just making my own textures, which I do as well.

I don't sell these frankenstein creations. I don't distribute or share them at all. But the possibility exists that I might sell a render with one of these things in it.

So... am I breaking the rules?

Frankly...I'd hate to live in a CG world where I was only "allowed" to render things as-is. That would truly suck.

 

[Rae134]

I don't think you're breaking any rules James R, everyone does this to some degree. I think your bit

the Product to any third party

is the key word, you can't sell/give away the altered texture/mesh. Renders are fine to sell unless the product says "not for commercial use" (which usually are freebies, not from sites like Daz. And anything copywrited, for example, something like "Superman" because its copywrite is owned by DC)

 

[StudioMartillo]

I simply mean most of us can't afford the really heavy security it takes to have a secure home computer

The best security is absolutely free. Just don't connect your workstation to the internet.
I have a notebook that is my internet terminal. It's cheap and if it gets infested I can just junk it.
Anything I download gets scanned on the terminal before I move it to my jump drive.
Anything I upload gets moved from the jump drive to the local drive while the terminal has it's Wi-Fi turned off.
The jump drive is (almost, sometimes I forget) never plugged in while the terminal has a connection.
So software that requires an internet connection cannot be used on my workstation.
No problem there. I don't need to be a slave to big brother to have fun and I don't have to do anything else.

 

[StudioMartillo]

After all, programs like blender or daz studio aren't part of any high school art program and maybe it is time that they were

You sure? I suspect that Blender might be, but I haven't checked all the high school art programs.
Anyway, secondary school age students can get free software as easy as you can and the Blender website provides documentation.
Although it seems the docs are a bit behind the app. The way it's developed that would be natural.
Intelligent, Creative and Motivated individuals of any age don't need the 'show me where to click' kind of instruction predominant in high schools anyway.
A good user's manual and internet Tutorial Videos provide plenty of resources for learning.

 

[Hornet3d]

Any one besides me notice the two tyre pricing at renderousity? There are items for sale there that have one price for use and another price for full commercial rights to a mesh. Least that is the way I surmise it is supposed to work. many copyright agreements read that the model may not be modified in any way, course nobody pays any attention to that and we modify the texture maps as we see fit... I did notice that poser pro 2012 let actually modify a mesh and then did away with it in poser pro 2014. Now as for our apps phoning home, I didn't mean all apps report back to the makers of that program. I simply mean most of us can't afford the really heavy security it takes to have a secure home computer... Not that it really means anything, but my mac is set up to not only track access, but every program must ask me for internet access.. Now I know this is a real hot button subject so I am not going to name programs nor where the information goes or what it is used for. Besides I am making tin foil hats as fast as I can, but I can't keep up with orders..lol

Many people are truly amazed with what I can do in 3D, that is a good thing right? maybe, maybe not... After all, programs like blender or daz studio aren't part of any high school art program and maybe it is time that they were....The thing is many of us either found 3D on our own or as part of higher education and I think that is really a shame.. there is a lot of natural talent that is getting really late starts in 3D..

I don't see myself as the op here already this has gone in more directions then I ever thought it would and my thoughts and opinions hold no more weight here then what any one else writes here, I did see some tendencies here though I don't really care for, some people want to state things like they got what they wrote straight from the burning bush so to say. I see this as a place of exploration and to learn more about the history of 3D, above all lets have fun together...

I mis-understood your phone home reference and understand now what you were referring to. I do my best to keep my computer safe and have one disconnected from the Internet. I also used to do all the updates until the updates were used as a backdoor to move Windows 7 users to Windows 10, now all updates are blocked on all my machines. I do pay for virus protection and keep the definitions current but, after all that, if I get done I sort of accept it as part of the world we live in. For example I have had by Credits cards defrauded five times in the last two years and I am now at the point that I use a card I top up with funds before I use it, that way I can only lose the balance on the card. I expect this card will get done like the rest but at least I have limited the damage, other than that fraud is the price I pay for buying over the Internet and my runtimes would be a lot smaller if I stopped buying in this manner.

Coming back to your point of 3D both in the past and the future I am amazed how the 3D are community has moved on in the 14 odd years I have been playing with 3D. Happily most, but not all, changes have been for the better but the history still interests me. I expect the changes in the next 14 years to be greater and it really is exciting to see where it might go. On a personal note the one aspect that sometimes troubles me is that I have a small fortune invested in my runtimes which will be totally lost after my days of rendering are finally over for ever.

One final point, if you ever see anything I write that sounds as though I have been talking to the burning bush feel free to pick me up on it. Not only would I be in the wrong but I totally accept you would get better information talking to the burning bush than me any day, come to think of it that goes for any bush, burning or not.

 

[McGyver]

One final point, if you ever see anything I write that sounds as though I have been talking to the burning bush feel free to pick me up on it. Not only would I be in the wrong but I totally accept you would get better information talking to the burning bush than me any day, come to think of it that goes for any bush, burning or not.

I've never thought you were talking to bushes too...
I shout at burning bushes... Mostly because I'm the one that set them on fire in the first place...
Stupid lousy bush trying to trip me and mess up my nice gorilla costume...

 

[Carey]

Maybe it would be fun to share our own personnel history in 3D. I think my own history is both fun and funny. I was a 2d commercial artist for many years, my first dip into 3d came with my first 512 meg ATI 3d video card.. The program was Merlin VR. After hours untold I managed to model a cow horn, well it resembled a cow horn..some what....lol I was into the program Autodesk Animator and onion skinning my fool head off. After a year and a half I had a thirty second cartoon of a dog chasing a ball.I had the good luck to run into a fellow working in advertising and they turned me onto poser 3. brought my first 3D models from Lyne. I found Daz and spent a small fortune there, made a movie in both Bryce 4.0 and some program that I believe was called terraformer. I then discovered that the internet was not quite ready for video, really it was fact I use going through a phone line...I also came up missing. If I was not at work I was on line, no one could reach me. I spent some time designing game levels and game characters for personal use bought Carrara 2.0 with the promise I would get the3.0 update free. somewhere in there was a side trip into ulead 3D products and simply 3D... bought true space and got no where with any of it, tried out light wave too somewhere in there.. Last but least I bought hexagon. bought blender off ebay because my internet connection was too slow to down load it. Blender drove me nuts.. Now hexagon made sense to me, I still couldn't make anything worth keeping, but for some reason I kept coming back to it. First thing I did was work to bring in a house I made in Ray dream studio, ( don't ask me whenI Bought the program). Ray dream had a big problem, everything you made in the program had a huge polygon count... It was to be several years before I actually created any thing in hexagon. Still got my first real 3D drawing to show any one that I could get tricked into going into my computer room...lol

 

[Miss B]

You modeled that Carey? That would be a nice beach house.

 

[Hornet3d]

My history...err..well long and boring but if you have nothing better to do, read on.

I can't remember the when or how I discovered 3D art. I think if I remember rightly I saw a review of one of the early Poser versions and saw the artist mannequin and wonder why anyone would pay that much for a program that was a virtual mannequin. Sometime later I found Daz, as someone who had tried drawing and failed dismally, I liked the idea and thought I would give it a go. I don't know what version it was but it would have been around 1998. After a week of frustration the closest I got to anything identifiable was a figure with great big triangles for feet and a completely black oblong when I rendered. These days I know the zaggies were because I had 'broken' the joints and I suspect the black panel was due to a wall between the camera and the figure. I gave up in a huff but still kept peeking at the Daz web site and looking at the galleries which to me were tantalising glimpses of what the program was capable of but totally out of my grasp.

A few years later I was travelling and remembered buying one of the very first digital cameras at an airport. I think is was a Casio and had was 0.3 mpixels which led me into image manipulation and, as I was still looking at Daz web site led me once more to give it another go. I think after another two weeks I had created a render of Victoria 2 which looked almost human wearing some shredded clothes. More to the point I had leant a little more about cameras and lights but clearly had not understood this thing called poke through. This, qualified, success was enough for me to look deeper and I discovered some great forums and people that lead me through the minefield of the world of 3D art. I was also at the point I knew just enough what questions to ask. Sadly such forums seem to have either died or morphed into something very different. It may be my selective memory but I don't remember there being the flamewars or the hidden agendas, or maybe they were there but I had not yet discovered them, as was the case in so much of the 3D art world.

I have no recollection on why I jumped from Daz into Poser an even less understanding of how I came to spend what would have been a vast sum of money for me to buy a version of Poser, but I did. It was the last few months of Poser 4 and then I upgraded to Poser 5, 6 and 8. My book shelf still has copies of the secrets of Poser 5 and the Practical Poser 6 and 7 while for Poser 8 I moved on a DVD training course version. Along the way I picked up Vue, Hexagon, Carrera (another book) and much later Blender and Silo (yet another book). Today the tools I use regularly are Poser Pro 2014, Vue studio 2014/2015 and occasionally Silo.

Most of my learning was through the forums supported with the text books I have mentioned. Around the time the forum started to decline, for me at least, Fugazi1968 started his superb tutorials on modelling (hence Silo) and, along with ironman13, Poser tutorials. I doubt I have leant everything from those tutorials but they did expand my skill set to a very large degree.

Looking back I cannot believe I now have a limited understanding on the advanced material tab in Poser when even the simple tab was a no go area. I did have a knowledge of Paint Shop Pro, thanks to my lifelong interest in photography, but I never dreamed I would be using multi layers to blend commercial skin textures to create something a little more personal.

So it has been a long and sometimes frustrating journey with many faltering steps along the way. Maybe not surprising when I never expected to to be a journey in the first place and certainly not one that had lasted over 20 years from its shaky beginning. On the whole it has been a bundle of fun with the exception of a year or so ago when I began to dislike the way the community appeared to be going and I had all but made up my mind to walk away from 3D art entirely. Luckily there was one lifeline left and the was Hivewire and the wonderful community that has grown up here. If it had not been for the support and kind words given to me by this forum I seriously doubt I would still be opening up Poser on an almost daily basis. I am so grateful for that support as I am now enjoying my 'art' once more and I really do not know where I would have found a replacement hobby that I enjoyed this much.

 

[Carey]

You modeled that Carey? That would be a nice beach house.

yepper, this was built in Ray dream studio and it's polygon count is out of this world, actually this was modeled after our old farm house, my uncle used to ride his horse around on the porch...lol

 

[Miss B]

~LOL~ Well that wraparound porch is what made me think of a beach house, as many of the houses out in the Hamptons here on Long Island, and in the New Jersey Shore beach areas, look very much like that.

 

[StudioMartillo]

I put a link in a previous post about some history. It's a kind of sneaky link though.
Looking at my website you see a lot of music instruments. They are all modeled for V4/M4.
But I'll bet some people remember a whole previous series of music instruments I modeled for A3/H3.
One of the items, an acoustic guitar was very popular and downloaded over 1000 times.
That stuff is no longer available.
I got started with AutoCAD 3 when I was designing signal processing equipment for recording and broadcast.
I did the entire design, electronic circuit design, PC board layout and chassis design.
So AutoCAD was used for the PC board layout and chassis. Usually rack mount chassis, but some desk top too.
I had a HUGE 25MB hard drive!

 

[McGyver]

Sweet holy halibuts... Ray Dream Studio...
I had Infini-D...
That was long before Ray Dream and Infini-D got jiggy and gave birth to Carrara.
I think I had Ray Dream too, but I never really used it...
I got Infini-D and Bryce from work... We got it for a project but the client changed their mind about what they wanted so my friend who owned the place gave it to me because he wasn't going to use it.
I used to get a lot of software from work in those days.
Bryce was what got me into modeling non-prototype stuff... AKA: non-boring stuff... Initially I loved Bryce's surreal look and alien landscaping abilities.
I had lots of fun making weird Boolean spacecraft and alien artifacts.
That was seriously a lot better then messing with Ashlar's Vellum, which is what we used at work.

 

[James R.]

My first personal experience with digital art was on the Commodore Amiga my high school art teacher had, my senior year. It was pretty slick. It had a tablet and pen, and a colour camera hooked up to it so you could digitize and manipulate things. Scan, recolour, draw...it was amazing for the era. I remember saying to my teacher that I wished the system was portable because it would be cool to have a digital camera I could carry around (I was also taking Photography at the time).



I got my first workable personal computer in 1992 and immediately wanted to do similar kinds of things. Hahaha NOPE. Not on a 386SX 16 with 1MB of RAM and a 512k video chip.
But it didn't stop me from trying, using whatever shareware I could find. (Does anyone remember shareware kiosks? Put a dollar or two in, get a floppy disk with a program?)



It was frustrating, but I did what I could with the tools I had. Eventually I got a better computer with Paintshop Pro, then Photoshop...

Then I had kids ... my first true 3D creations.

But I didn't have the opportunity to dip my toes in the 3D computer graphics pool until late 2001 or 2002, with Bryce, which I enjoyed playing with for a while. But it was soooooo glacially slow to render on my computer that I found it a pain to use. I wanted to make things, but it was just too inconveniently slow.



Then life got busy again, I got into photography, and I forgot about 3D until late 2005 when I was given a Poser CD. I don't remember if it was version 5 or 6.



Uh. Yeah.

And here we are today.

 

[Carey]

My first personal experience with digital art was on the Commodore Amiga my high school art teacher had, my senior year. It was pretty slick. It had a tablet and pen, and a colour camera hooked up to it so you could digitize and manipulate things. Scan, recolour, draw...it was amazing for the era. I remember saying to my teacher that I wished the system was portable because it would be cool to have a digital camera I could carry around (I was also taking Photography at the time).

View attachment 31644

I got my first workable personal computer in 1992 and immediately wanted to do similar kinds of things. Hahaha NOPE. Not on a 386SX 16 with 1MB of RAM and a 512k video chip.
But it didn't stop me from trying, using whatever shareware I could find. (Does anyone remember shareware kiosks? Put a dollar or two in, get a floppy disk with a program?)

View attachment 31648

It was frustrating, but I did what I could with the tools I had. Eventually I got a better computer with Paintshop Pro, then Photoshop...

Then I had kids ... my first true 3D creations.

But I didn't have the opportunity to dip my toes in the 3D computer graphics pool until late 2001 or 2002, with Bryce, which I enjoyed playing with for a while. But it was soooooo glacially slow to render on my computer that I found it a pain to use. I wanted to make things, but it was just too inconveniently slow.

View attachment 31638 View attachment 31639

Then life got busy again, I got into photography, and I forgot about 3D until late 2005 when I was given a Poser CD. I don't remember if it was version 5 or 6.

View attachment 31649

Uh. Yeah.

And here we are today.

yes, the amiga was amazing, anyone out there remember the computers that used punch cards? that was my first computer!!!! eh, well the army kind of owned it, I was just allowed to toot the whistle a little bit...lol

my friend had an amiga from a tv station auction that had video toaster on it yum, yum, yum...lol, That is partly a joke, you know toaster, ah never mind...

James was very glad to find out you like sex, I am impressed but while I didn't state there were any rules per say, I think I inferred that this was about programs, not really a problem though... in fact I am just sort of picking fun with you...lol

I did a couple of animations in paint shop pro 5 I think, got a sort of version of it for mac right now, too many art programs?, never...lol

 

[Miss B]

I updated PSP through version 9, but never went further, as I had already started playing with Photoshop.

I still have PSP 7 installed, and use it for quick things like screenshots and such. I don't use it anymore for postwork on my 3D renders, or playing in FilterForge to create textures.