• 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

Sparky's products at HiveWire

carmen indorato

Extraordinary
That new Wolfman looks fantastic. I want it sooooooooooo bad. Having a lot of problems with Poser 2014 though, and still financially in a bind, but I am going to try to dig up the funds. It would make it possible for me to animate a scene I have been struggling with for some time.

@carmen indorato are you based in the U.S.? I ask because I just recently added an internal DVD burner to a refurbed workstation on the cheap. If it's a desktop I can send you a couple links.
Yes...in US...Virginia to b exact.
 

carmen indorato

Extraordinary
I have a large library going back over the years and more recently went down the Ebook route. I still buy real books these days but most of the time they are ones that have been long out of print and unlikely to be ported over to digital. In a lot of cases I pay more in postage than I do for the actual book but it is still cheap in the long run. I also have a collection of art books, mainly from digital artists, not only do I like the images I can use them for some ideas when my muse has deserted me. That said even that is not working for me this time around.

I have been using M discs for a while now and they seem good. I used to use CDs and then DVDs but always recopied to new discs about every five years as some started to have read problems after five years. Despite being more expensive the M discs have saved me the hassle and they should work out cheaper in the long run. As to the claim that an M disc will last 1000 years or more I guess my great, great, (well however many greats required) grandson or daughter will have to attest to that, assuming of course there is still the ability to read Tiff, Jpeg and other such data that many years hence. Hypothetical anyway as I have no children to so even the first 'great' is out of the question. They should last my generation and the one behind me, after that who knows.

Just curious as to why your discs have been going bad?
Are they stored in paper sleeves or plastic jewel cases....in sunlight or in darkened room?
Dry environments or damp?
I thought they have been manufactured to last longer than 5 years? So, Manufacturers have been lying to us? How can we tust M-Disc manufacturers nt to be doing the same and charging u so much more than previous technologies?
I miss my tech pens and #2 pencils! :(
 

Hornet3d

Wise
Just curious as to why your discs have been going bad?
Are they stored in paper sleeves or plastic jewel cases....in sunlight or in darkened room?
Dry environments or damp?
I thought they have been manufactured to last longer than 5 years? So, Manufacturers have been lying to us? How can we tust M-Disc manufacturers nt to be doing the same and charging u so much more than previous technologies?
I miss my tech pens and #2 pencils! :(


Basically the dye used on some of the earlier ones tended to degrade over time which produced the errors. As you suggest keeping them out of sunlight and in paper sleeves could extend their life. Also some plastics were known to react with CDs and, unfortunately, some of the CD storage systems used that plastic. People also have the idea that plastic does not age or and the recent concentration on the indestructible nature and the waste produced has supported this. Truth many plastics do age as they leach oils throughout their life and thus become brittle. If you have ever had a car stored in a garage for a long time you will see a film built up on the inside of the windscreen, that is due to the plastic. It is also the reason it becomes increasingly difficult to repair laptops as it becomes harder as they age to strip them down without the plastic breaking.

The M disks do not use a dye to burn the data they use a rock type structure but of course there is no way you can prove they will last for hundreds of years but rock sounds a little more permanent than a dye. I was being ultra cautious with my five year rewrite and many would have been fine I just did not want to take the risk. Even with M disks they are never my sole copy or medium for any of what I regard as important data.
 

Sparky

Monster Maker
Contributing Artist
Hey, guys! I am tentatively back. My difficulties were not easily resolved, especially as I was unable to publish any of the five projects I was working on before my hiatus.

For the past few days, I've been working on a project I've long had the idea for, but I was never sure whether it was viable. The issues with the dog projects gave me a little incentive to try it out. That is, an animal figure designed to be as flexible and interchangeable as possible. Here's a little look at a demo of several species I've tested so far. (Yes, I do have the rigging adjusted for each of them so that the joints move as you would expect).


I've been trying to make separate morphs for each of several individual aspects of each species, i.e. face, ears, front feet, back feet, tail, body. That makes room for the ability to make some pretty wild, fantastical, or weird critters.

ZXmorphtest01.jpg

human face, human hands, horse hooves rear, lion ears

If this project makes it to release, it would be for both DS and Poser. Claws, whiskers, teeth, etc. would all be conforming addons to avoid excess geometry in characters that don't use them, which would also allow users to mix and match the different details.

I would also like to look into the possibility of adding clones to the package. I know it's been established that it is not kosher to distribute clones of another figure you don't own. However, I think it's fine to provide clones of a figure you do own for other figures. If I created a clone for this figure on each of several figures that (DS) users might want it to share content with, that should work, right?

Question being, is this project something you guys could get behind, or am I living in crazy town? Do you prefer the dedicated animal figures? Is everyone content to just kitbash the weird stuff?
 

Miss B

Drawing Life 1 Pixel at a Time
CV-BEE
Welcome back Sparky!! Good to see you here. :)

As far as your project goes, I've not tried kitbashing human or animal characters, only clothing sets, so have no idea how I would accomplish something like that, so a multi-animal might be nice for folks like myself who can't do it on our own. As Dreamer just mentioned, I too can see something like this for those who like doing fantasy renders.
 

Rae134

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
Yay! We've missed you Sparky!

I'm all for kitbashing, looks very interesting!

Edited to add: I've been searching for a Sphinx, I think one could possibly made from something like this
 
Last edited:

pommerlis

Noteworthy
Contributing Artist
Yay! Good to see you back!
We sure have missed you here!
I can see the Gorgons of Olympus emerging there, and the ancient Gods from the Veda's, and, and, and.....
 

JOdel

Dances with Bees
HW Honey Bear
All sorts of monsters (in the heraldic sense). Sounds great! Would be lovely to be able to just dial up a griffon or a hippogryf. Even if the wings had to be added on separately.
 

Sparky

Monster Maker
Contributing Artist
Thanks, guys! ^.^

I'm not familiar with wyrsa, but from google images, they sure look cool. Like dragon-greyhounds. :cool:

...I can see the Gorgons of Olympus emerging there, and the ancient Gods from the Veda's, and, and, and.....

That's just the sort of thing I like to hear! ;-)

I've been doing quite a bit of work on this guy. Originally, I had the base model in A-pose, because it's easier to do weightmaps and the like, and I also figured it was more neutral. As I continued to develop species morphs on that A-pose base, I discovered that it was not ideal: it's harder to place the feet on the floor properly, so it's more work to pose it, there was a certain amount of distortion in the feet and body partial morphs when combined with (non-matching) body morphs, less user-friendly, etc... So I've spent today putting the base geometry and rig into T-pose instead. A significant change, I had to redo several of my shapes, but I have my new base.

Horselion accomplished!

ZXmorphtest02.jpg


No JCMs, yet, so there are some weird bends in the legs with the horse body shape applied, but overall working pretty good, I think. The base will have no JCMs, so that each species can have its own corrective morphs without worrying about interference from unnecessary JCMs causing the need for even more corrective morphs to correct the over-correction of underlying JCMs, lol.

I'm thinking all the basic body and head shaping morphs and expressions will exist on the base with mcms for each species, so that the majority of expressions and shaping will survive changing from one species to another. That should help facilitate transformation animations and stuff, too. Tomorrow, I'll begin compiling a list of generic body and face shaping morphs and expressions to include in the default figure. I'll begin sculpting the morphs once the species base shapes and their corresponding teeth are complete.

As teeth are concerned...I am debating whether I should create a set of all-purpose teeth with enough tooth geometry to make proper teeth for each of most species; or to make separate teeth for each species. On many of the species there would be alot of hidden geometry if I went all-purpose. It would be more versatile and make for smoother transitions between species (as for transformation animations), but it would be less optimized and require me to think ahead to the species I might create that would have the most teeth. Separate sets of jaws would require less forethought, but also be less versatile. I'm leaning toward all-purpose (lots of teeth) jaws, but would anyone like to weigh in?

To aid in cross-compatibility between the shapes, all the species will be about the same size, and differences in scale will be handled with the general scale dial. I'm thinking that there will be several partial morphs that can be dialed individually or by a "master" dial for the species that will drive all the partials as well as anything else needed to complete a particular animal, and the scale will be driven from there. That way, you can mix and blend morphs from all the different species without having to worry too much about weird size-related distortion. Obviously not all the shapes will blend seamlessly, but I'll do my best to make them work together as well as possible.

I think the next species I'll try making will be an eagle, so that griffons and hippogriffs will be a ready possibility from the start. Not sure how long it will take to model the wings, though. Feathered wings have always seemed like such a time-consuming task to me. I also want to put a crocodile and hippo on the list so the figure could become Ammit. But those would likely be further down the line.

The desire to make griffons and hippogriffs puts lions, horses, and eagles in the top 3, but I'm not sure what else to shortlist. I'm thinking a wolf would be good. The bear is closer to completion than the others, since I could re-purpose the texture I made for the HWDog-based bear I made ages ago. Would anyone like to make a request?

Sorry for getting all technical and rambling, I thought it might help me to lay down a roadmap, and maybe get some feedback if you guys have any thoughts on it. ^.^ This might not have happened if it wasn't almost 5 o'clock in the morning, when I got up at 8 yesterday morning and haven't slept. But maybe that's for the best. LOL
 

Rae134

Renowned
CV-BEE
Contributing Artist
Cant help with the teeth question but I can tell you I've wanted a Griffon for a long time. I also love Hippogriffs so of course I would love these options first. I started a Tarot set and have been needing a Sphinx and there doesn't seem to be any (except statues which is not what i'm looking for) so since you said Lion would be in top 3, then could a humanoid be fourth so we could get a Sphinx? (and since horse is in top 3 as well, then this would facilitate a centaur as well).
 

Sunfire

One Busy Little Bee
QAV-BEE
Contributing Artist
The wyrsa are described in her books as being a snake mated with a greyhound and covered in scales.
 
Top