Songbird Remix's Product Preview Thread

[Miss B]

Ohhh, and your last set for 2023 may very well be Cuckoos? That just put a smile on my face.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

Looking great Ken, but is it only going to be in DS/Iray, or am I misinterpreting what you said?

Misinterpreting... it's just an Iray render. I do all my creation work in Poser and individual bird promo renders for my sets, but often use DAZ Studio's Iray for "whole world" renders because of its lighting abilities and the UltraScenery plugin.

The set, as almost all of my do, will support Firefly, Superfly, 3Delight and Iray with both Poser 10+ and DAZ Studio native versions.

 

[Miss B]

Thanks Ken, that's what I was hoping you would be doing.

 

[DanaTA]

Wow! At first glance, I thought it was a photo!

 

[Stezza]

If in Australia you will need a concrete slab to bolt it down and so the rats and foxes can’t dig their way in to get the chickens and the wind and floods don’t take it out.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

Here in Tujunga (on the outskirts of Los Angeles), we have an occasional bobcat, a rare mountain lion or bear, dozens of coyote and rats/mice wandering the streets (mostly at night). Add to that, active screech and great horned owls every night and red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks during the day.... but surprisingly our neighbors chickens in his backyard do not seem to be affected. We see 3-4 chickens (family groups) often jump the fence during the daylight hours and forage in the street. I'm shocked that the hawks seem to ignore them, perhaps our predators are too well fed to bother.

While we don't flood here, we do get wind... our seasonal Santa Ana winds can blow from 30-120 mph (48-193 kmph) in gusts

 

[DanaTA]

Here in Tujunga (on the outskirts of Los Angeles), we have an occasional bobcat, a rare mountain lion or bear, dozens of coyote and rats/mice wandering the streets (mostly at night). Add to that, active screech and great horned owls every night and red-tailed and red-shouldered hawks during the day.... but surprisingly our neighbors chickens in his backyard do not seem to be affected. We see 3-4 chickens (family groups) often jump the fence during the daylight hours and forage in the street. I'm shocked that the hawks seem to ignore them, perhaps our predators are too well fed to bother.

While we don't flood here, we do get wind... our seasonal Santa Ana winds can blow from 30-120 mph (48-193 kmph) in gusts

My father used to talk about the Santa Ana winds. He lived in Twentynine Palms.

Dana

 

[Stezza]

besides wedgies and goshies that will take a small dog and pet rabbits from your yard the main predators here are domestic and feral cats/dogs and foxes. Dingoes are more over the mountain range and inland.
Rats chewed through my daughters feed bin she has for her rabbit the other day and they have eaten some hoses in my car's engine in the past.
we don't have bears ( watched cocaine bear the other day! ) or mountain lions but the size of some ferals is ridiculous.

gladly we don't get winds like your Santa Ana ( we get around 100 - 120 kph ) but hey... it's on the bingo card for 2024 now lol

 

[Flint_Hawk]

Chickens can be found on Main Street here.

 

[Stezza]

we have ducks and kangaroos roaming our streets here

 

[DanaTA]

We have turkeys, coyotes, foxes, skunks, woodchucks, raccoons, Canada geese, mallards, the occasional egret or Great Blue Heron. Not all roaming the streets, of course, and not all the time. Some visit the pond across the street. I have seen coyotes roaming the street on a few occassions. Once even during the middle of the day. It was winter, I was shoveling snow off the driveway. I got into my car to warm up for a few minutes. In my peripheral vision I saw something moving. I turned to look, and it was a coyote casually prancing across the street into my neighbor's yard. Sometimes deer visit. There's a cherry tree across the street. One year there were three of them eating cherries off the tree. Pulling at the low hanging branches to get them. Another time, I came home at night, and there was a deer with full antlers next to my driveway. I stopped before pulling in. It just looked at me, then turned away and slowly walked off. Someone up the street has chickens that roam around sometimes.

Dana

 

[Stezza]

One evening I was out front looking down the road at the fire truck and was chatting to who I thought was my missus next to me.. When I turned around to my surprise was this big male roo standing upright where I thought the missus was looking me up and down... scared the crap out of me... and what was worse, I didn't realise the difference between it and the missus beforehand

 

[Ken Gilliland]

Here's a bird from the set I'm working on... it's the critically endangered Sumatran Ground-cuckoo. It's at risk because its habitat is being destroyed for Palm Oil plantations.

 

[Ken Gilliland]

I'm pretty close to completing the first pass of my Cuckoos... I do the Firefly version first, then Iray folllowed by 3Delight, and finally finishing in Superfly. Building and seeing the birds rendered in each of the 4 versions helps me edit and correct the set. There's the infamous Common Cuckoo-- it's what the whole Cuckoo family is based on, and not to surprisingly, sounds exactly like the clock.

 

[JOdel]

I also gather that they are LOUD.

 

[Stezza]

The Channel Billed Cuckoo here down under sounds like the demons of hell are coming for you!

and they start at 2am

 

[Ken Gilliland]

Songbird ReMix Chickens and their chicken coop are now available, They'll be 50% off from now until the 29th, then a week of 30% off.

Songbird ReMix Chickens
Songbird ReMix Chicken Coop

 

[Miss B]

Oh I just bought myself a belated b'day present.

 

[JOdel]

So, on the AOL splash screen this morning there was a link to an article that there is a movement for dozens of birds to be re-named to avoid offending marginalized groups. Or some such thing. Any idea whether this is real, or just someone trying to stir people up?

 

[Ken Gilliland]

Yes, the American Ornithological Society has decided to remove people's names from the common names of birds... so birds like Audubon's Warbler will go back to Yellow-rumped Warbler (a name they've had 3 or 4 times since their discovery-- it's bounced between that and "Audubons").

Personally, I think they should just drop all the human-oriented names and go to the descriptive ones like "Yellow-rumped Wabler".

The American Ornithological Society Will Change the English Names of Bird Species Named After People
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2023/11/01/bird-names-racism-audubon/