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Welcome to the Community Forums at HiveWire 3D! Please note that the user name you choose for our forum will be displayed to the public. Our store was closed as January 4, 2021. You can find HiveWire 3D and Lisa's Botanicals products, as well as many of our Contributing Artists, at Renderosity. This thread lists where many are now selling their products. Renderosity is generously putting products which were purchased at HiveWire 3D and are now sold at their store into customer accounts by gifting them. This is not an overnight process so please be patient, if you have already emailed them about this. If you have NOT emailed them, please see the 2nd post in this thread for instructions on what you need to do
Content Paradise is shutting down
- Thread starter Ken1171
- Start date
I have contacted SMS concerning the store's inability to allow vendors to download their own product files and media. Today they have replied, claiming the store indeed doesn't allow that, but that they will try to add the feature before CP closes up. I don't know about other vendors, but I had a disk failure back in 2013 where I have lost the equivalent of 3 years of my project files, to include some products I sell at the CP store. It was kind of CP to offer the chance for vendors to get their files back, and I hope they will do it in a timely manner (not the night before CP shuts down).
McG.
Enthusiast
Hi folks! Been a while since I visited here. It is not because I dislike any of you or HiveWire itself. I have mentioned before the ONLY reason I haven't stocked up on all the HiveWire people and critters is that I already have a pretty big stock of the DAZ Gen4 and Genesis 2 stuff. Yeah I got DSON Interpreter sorted fine for both PP 2014 and PP 11.1 I do miss you guys and all the fun, honest fun, we all had in times and places past. I also miss the cool stuff you vendors all came up with. SO, Greetings All!
Now, the hard part about our slice of this now large industry is not so much the content. It's the software we have available to us that can USE said content.
DAZ3D shot Poser Users in the gut. And for killing someone, it's just the worst way to go. You linger on for hours, even days, before your final, painful, gurgling gasp for air. Hey was that descriptive or what?! LOL!
I've seen established here the concern of what happens to a 3D software package surviveability with no content for it to use. That's the lingering death part I fear. SM didn't want the store when they bought up Poser. I feel that CP lasted much longer than I anticipated. SM never really did ANYTHING to help the User out. If I didn't enjoy USING Poser so much I think I'd beat them to a pulp with it. SM, IMHO, are a vile lot toward their Users (customer abuse?).
Yeah well, negatives. When they exist, they are impossible to ignore, and must be worked through. Chris>Owner, I do hope you see this and allow the group to actually work through the very real issues we are looking at right this very moment.
BE Optimistic all you want to. Even in light of closures and the (Uh OH!) issues throughout the community, the software we choose to use is still working. Poser may or may not be updated again. Or even upgraded. I still have my Poser versions archived for safety in more than one place. And I hope that SM doesn't shut Poser itself down, but that is what DAZ3D wants to see and has steered our little slice o pizza right in that direction.
With all that said, I still have some 600 items in my wishlist at DAZ, and just under 400 items in my wishlist at Renderosity. It's sad I don't really have any here. I'll work on that one.
So, even if SM does flush Poser, I will still use it, as I simply do not use DS at all. So the real question for me is, if I want new content, where do I get it?
Now, the hard part about our slice of this now large industry is not so much the content. It's the software we have available to us that can USE said content.
DAZ3D shot Poser Users in the gut. And for killing someone, it's just the worst way to go. You linger on for hours, even days, before your final, painful, gurgling gasp for air. Hey was that descriptive or what?! LOL!
I've seen established here the concern of what happens to a 3D software package surviveability with no content for it to use. That's the lingering death part I fear. SM didn't want the store when they bought up Poser. I feel that CP lasted much longer than I anticipated. SM never really did ANYTHING to help the User out. If I didn't enjoy USING Poser so much I think I'd beat them to a pulp with it. SM, IMHO, are a vile lot toward their Users (customer abuse?).
Yeah well, negatives. When they exist, they are impossible to ignore, and must be worked through. Chris>Owner, I do hope you see this and allow the group to actually work through the very real issues we are looking at right this very moment.
BE Optimistic all you want to. Even in light of closures and the (Uh OH!) issues throughout the community, the software we choose to use is still working. Poser may or may not be updated again. Or even upgraded. I still have my Poser versions archived for safety in more than one place. And I hope that SM doesn't shut Poser itself down, but that is what DAZ3D wants to see and has steered our little slice o pizza right in that direction.
With all that said, I still have some 600 items in my wishlist at DAZ, and just under 400 items in my wishlist at Renderosity. It's sad I don't really have any here. I'll work on that one.
So, even if SM does flush Poser, I will still use it, as I simply do not use DS at all. So the real question for me is, if I want new content, where do I get it?
I remember getting extremely mad and frustrated trying to deal with SMS tech support, but things got easier after I became a beta-tester, because then I could finally bypass the middle men and deal directly with the dev team. However, what SMS has been lacking in all these years has been a strong PR to connect Poser with the public. I mean, how can SMS make the right choices if we don't talk? The result has been people getting mad at the SMS forums, sometimes with unreasonable expectations due to the gap between Poser development and the public who uses it. Between one release and the next, SMS has historically kept people in darkness, never knowing what's going on. There has been a serious lack of communication with the community. Chuck Taylor has tried to overcome it during the short period he was the Poser product manager, which in good part has contributed to making Poser 11 the best version ever released, but that period was short-lived. We are all back to being left in the dark, which leads to speculation and pessimism, which leads to the Dark Side.
McG.
Enthusiast
I have seen a few names in the poser credits that I know. But they don't talk about what they did to get there. NDA I suppose. But S-M excels at alienating itself from the people that PAY them. Their tech support? I can name him but won't. Dealing with him has gone from bad (when I bought POSER PRO and MODO 201 together at *DAZ3D* of all things. 2006? To ridiculously insane when recently asking things about PP 11, after buying and installing it. It runs FOUR copies of CEFCLIENT.EXE as well as POSER.EXE. I believe they all are for the Library, and someone had the lame idea to spew that stuff OUT of Poser itself. I'm still angry at (unnamed someone) for their responses concerning the crashing issues. They do not support our use of DSON and Genesis 2 Figures. Yes I'm still mad.
I think CEF is an open source API used by the new HTML5 library to communicate with Poser. Sometimes it glitches and causes high CPU usage when idle. Sometimes it loses connection with Poser, and there is no way to bring it back, so I have to restart Poser. At least it doesn't happen all the time.
eclark1894
Visionary
I always kept back up files anyway. Just in case someone had a problem and no way to get a download. I had a problem like that a few years back, and John Hoagland helped me out with a couple of his products. So when I started selling and doing freebies, I always keep a back up on my hard drive.
eclark1894
Visionary
Well, I've got a whole directory of Poser content to counter the argument that there's no content for Poser. And to be honest, while you may have to develop a pathway to get some Studio files to work in Poser you can.
I went lazy with my backups and procrastinated for too long. It was the first time I ever had a drive crash, so I was caught by surprise. Lost my project files from 2011-2013. Lesson learned!
Hornet3d
Wise
Hi McG, great to hear from you after so long, I have missed you.
I still buy Poser content where can and as there is less being produced I tend to buy the more expensive, high quality content that I would not have purchased in the past. I still wait for a sale but in the past there was so much content around that I had spent my money long before the sale of a particular product came around. These days the expensive stuff sits in my wishlist until it is on sale or I have a idea for something right then when I pay full price but that is rare. Of course the one place I do not buy expensive content is here at Hivewire as the high quality stuff is never expensive in comparison.
I guess the only real concern I have with Poser if it were, god forbid, to die is that the vile deactivation feature would eventually stop Poser 11 working. One would hope that SMS would stop Poser 11 having to phone home on a regular basis before they killed Poser. Just in case I still have a copy of Poser 2014 Pro installed which does not have the deactivation feature. So basically I would lose superfly, area lights and a few nice to have features which would be a shame but there are other render engines and I had light setups that worked for me before area lights. So the answer is I would still continue to use Poser and either make my own content or tweak the content I have just for my own use. Just as well mind because at my age the learning process is a long and hard one so learning a new program would not be a fun prospect for me.
I one point I think that is often forgotten is that 3d Art is, for some, a form of escape from the pain of everyday life due to the fact that life has dealt some people a very poor hand. This is the reason I do not want any 3D software to fail to the point is is no longer available no matter who produced it or who now owns it.
Hornet3d
Wise
My default launch state is to have the Poser library active but also Library Manager 2 running. I use the Poser library where I can as it works in the different way and I do not want to relearn it if I lost the ability to use LM2 for any reasons. I like the Poser library manager in many ways but I rarely get a scene complete before it white screens leaving me to finish with LM2.
Hornet3d
Wise
I back up all the stuff I have created to hard drives, archival quality DVDs and the cloud, which seems extreme but years of working with computers have taught me that loses such as you describe happen all to often. Digital copies of home work, wedding photos, holiday photos artwork, stories, you name it and I am sure I can tell of a case where it has been lost. I think the one that broke my heart the most was the mother who had pictures of her daughter, who had died tragically a few years earlier, on a memory card that stopped working without warning, as they often do. With conventional hard drives you do have some chance of recovery but if you cannot do it at home, professional recovery is a costly business. I am really sorry for your loss and I hope you get as much of it back as possible but I also hope others will see this and think about what they might lose and take steps to prevent it.
McG.
Enthusiast
I've lost a few spinner HD's the last several years. "If the machine can move it, the machine will break it", an axiom I lived with the entirety of my working in industry. With computers, its the first 3 rules of Computing: Back it Up, Back it Up, and make sure to Back it Up again!
I use existing good spinner HD's, removed and stored in the electronics drawers of my dresser. Then the working archive drive, a spinner with 'working' copy for day to day use. Then 4 gig DVD's and 25 gig BluRays. If I feel worried about something, I burn it again and put it in a different book and keep that one elsewhere. Safety. I would hate having to re-download a couple terabytes of content and software *again* !!
AT this time I am the happy owner/user of three SSD's. The first, a 460 gig, the other two are 960 gig, all are SanDisk. If anyone knows a darn thing about making flash ram, THEY do! I've used their Compact Flash II cards for over 10 years now in my Olympus Cameras, E-510 and E-3. I always take them out of the cameras and put them in an external card reader. Much faster! But the cards are doing well it seems.
Someone seems to have done SOMETHING "wrong" with these larger capacity SSD's. You can write to them only X number of times, then it's read only no more writing. I never heard of that problem till after I'd bought and installed these. That is a fact that bothers me. Not as much as spinner HD's dying left and right, but still, HEY!
I use existing good spinner HD's, removed and stored in the electronics drawers of my dresser. Then the working archive drive, a spinner with 'working' copy for day to day use. Then 4 gig DVD's and 25 gig BluRays. If I feel worried about something, I burn it again and put it in a different book and keep that one elsewhere. Safety. I would hate having to re-download a couple terabytes of content and software *again* !!
AT this time I am the happy owner/user of three SSD's. The first, a 460 gig, the other two are 960 gig, all are SanDisk. If anyone knows a darn thing about making flash ram, THEY do! I've used their Compact Flash II cards for over 10 years now in my Olympus Cameras, E-510 and E-3. I always take them out of the cameras and put them in an external card reader. Much faster! But the cards are doing well it seems.
Someone seems to have done SOMETHING "wrong" with these larger capacity SSD's. You can write to them only X number of times, then it's read only no more writing. I never heard of that problem till after I'd bought and installed these. That is a fact that bothers me. Not as much as spinner HD's dying left and right, but still, HEY!
McG.
Enthusiast
I also have a couple spindles each of DVD-R and BD-R disks, a little clamshell external Pioneer for use with the tablets and laptop, then a Pioneer internal SATA BluRay rewriter and a USB SATA drive dock/reader for 3.5 and 2.5 inch drives. Ergo the Spinners and SSD's I use. 
)
Now, all I have to do is USE them occasionally!
)Now, all I have to do is USE them occasionally!
McG.
Enthusiast
I'm not going to rephrase my statement and still stand on it. A certain company has made it a point to flat out kill Poser off. THEY chose the path they are on. The only Figures they produce now are designed to be Studio only. Are you saying you can load Genesis 3 and 8 Figures STRAIGHT UP in Poser? No? I've gone the importing route for Genesis 3, and bought a few things to verify positively what I need to USE Genesis 3 in Poser. My personal conclusion is it is too much to bother with for any mass use at all.
So, YOU go right on ahead and play around with tweaking and fixing and altering to your hearts content.
I've told a lot of people this and you are added now:
"If it won't load straight up into Poser from the Poser Library, I don't even want to see it." The DSON Interpreter for Poser works WHEN the authors produce Poser Companion Files for the item. We can argue till the sun comes up a thousand times. And it won't change what is going on. The simple facts are that we are short two more POSER oriented stores now, and what DAZ convinced/paid the "Harry's Boys" from the latest site they absorbed to do is heinous.
McG.
Enthusiast
Hey, ECLARK1894, take note of this will ya?
What I am about to say to do (I have done it for more then 2 years now) was worked out over a period of months (spare time) between me and Richard Haseltine over at DAZ. This was just after the time I lost a 2nd 1 TB spinner drive with my over 800 GIG Runtime. Yeah I messed up, ONE unbroken stinking pile of Runtime. ONE. *click TINK!* oh wow, where did it GO!? That vanished. I did coax it to read long enough to see the remaining info was so corrupted to be useless.
WE figured out that DS is more flexible than Poser is about where you can put file types. That makes for a hideous mess IMHO. Frankly I prefer the strictness of the Poser file hierarchy.
Poser (with DSON loaded) needs immediate access to the new 'data' folder for all that info DAZ now stuffs into it. You KNOW they created it so they could move strictly away from the POSER folders, right? Legacy content don't matter right? Anyway. Pretty much every one of my ~40 Runtime's (one drive) now have a data folder associated.
There is the base working folder name, and its basic 4 folders, such as:
3D Work FIGURES A
\Content
\data
\Readme's
\Runtime
And that is ALL I allow to be in that space. Yeah I use Readme's as an ancient habit I don't want to break. ALL documentation for everything goes in there somewhere.
Content is an oldie too. I steadfastly refuse to use anything prefixed with "My_". Damn M$ anyway. And Damn em again for "User" folders. The HIVE was better off the old way. ;o)
Now you and the world can like that, or hate it, or whatever trips yer trigger. I ain't changing that. I consider a small amount of "installation Housekeeping" normal, and is done before being cut/pasted into its permanent Home Runtime.
So yes ECLARK1894, we really are short FOUR sizable sources of POSER content in just about 2 years time. And DAZ3D intends to kill off ALL sources of POSER content. I am guessing [their owners] just want to gloat or something.
What I am about to say to do (I have done it for more then 2 years now) was worked out over a period of months (spare time) between me and Richard Haseltine over at DAZ. This was just after the time I lost a 2nd 1 TB spinner drive with my over 800 GIG Runtime. Yeah I messed up, ONE unbroken stinking pile of Runtime. ONE. *click TINK!* oh wow, where did it GO!? That vanished. I did coax it to read long enough to see the remaining info was so corrupted to be useless.
WE figured out that DS is more flexible than Poser is about where you can put file types. That makes for a hideous mess IMHO. Frankly I prefer the strictness of the Poser file hierarchy.
Poser (with DSON loaded) needs immediate access to the new 'data' folder for all that info DAZ now stuffs into it. You KNOW they created it so they could move strictly away from the POSER folders, right? Legacy content don't matter right? Anyway. Pretty much every one of my ~40 Runtime's (one drive) now have a data folder associated.
There is the base working folder name, and its basic 4 folders, such as:
3D Work FIGURES A
\Content
\data
\Readme's
\Runtime
And that is ALL I allow to be in that space. Yeah I use Readme's as an ancient habit I don't want to break. ALL documentation for everything goes in there somewhere.
Content is an oldie too. I steadfastly refuse to use anything prefixed with "My_". Damn M$ anyway. And Damn em again for "User" folders. The HIVE was better off the old way. ;o)
Now you and the world can like that, or hate it, or whatever trips yer trigger. I ain't changing that. I consider a small amount of "installation Housekeeping" normal, and is done before being cut/pasted into its permanent Home Runtime.
So yes ECLARK1894, we really are short FOUR sizable sources of POSER content in just about 2 years time. And DAZ3D intends to kill off ALL sources of POSER content. I am guessing [their owners] just want to gloat or something.
McG.
Enthusiast
Hi Hornet3D! Wow. Yeah a LOT of water and even bridges gone by. I do 3D art because it's fun. I can explore all kinds of ideas, with and/or without people or creatures of any kind, in 3D Space. It's a great way to visualize things. And I do see myself escaping through it more as the years flow by. I sure hope things pick up for you and me both!