Midwest is not completely accent neutral, as a kid I used to get a kick out of hearing them pronounce words with a long o in them, like no. And they talk though their nose, which if you don't is very weird when you try to if you don't. How do you even attempt to talk though your nose?

I know of at least 3 dialects in the area of the country I live in, all varients of southern accents, but am not so good at picking out American English dialects elsewhere, except for the famous ones: NYC/NJ, Boston, and that generic midwestern/Californian/Western accent. It used to be when people heard a person from western USA speak that wasn't on the west coast you'd expect to hear a accent that was mostly a Texan varient of the twangy southern accent that is well known. 

I don't think I've heard the Valley Girl accent since the 80s and I used to see a lot of TVs in the 90s. Valley Girl is a totally invented accent born of humor and sarcasm and when you hear journists sound like they are using it it's really a passive-aggressive way of insulting the integrity of the person they are interviewing but that really doesn't sound like a Valley Girl accent, a Valley Girl Accent is more intended to be harmless humorous sarcasm reflected in the extra exaggeration you hear in the questioning tone of voice, same thing a lot of journalists do, no in a non-agressive tone.

The famous twangy hillbilly and southern accent you hear on TV never was as commonly universal in the south as TV, movies, news, and others would have you believe it but more common was the southern accent were hard t were dropped and words ran together and very softly breathlessly ennunciated. I call that a Georgia accent although I don't know where it originated because it's in the central Appalachians and Virginia and the Carolinas too.

The raising the pitch at the end of every sentence began in the central valley of california amongst young white females in the 1980's ( valley girls)

Today however I see a variant of it in the media all the time and this is my theory:

People who do this are not very confident about their knowledge of subject matter about  which they are speaking and likely have self esteem issues or are not exprienced media savvy "pros"
or they are discusssing a matter they dont feel has gained wide acceptance.
They literally appear to be asking for permission to give the answers that  they are giving to the questions

You see this voice inflection in inteviews of north american white women and white beta males

People who are  recognized as absolute Authorites or have a strong command of the subject matter they are discussing NEVER, EVER us this voice inflection. no matter thier race of gender

Look at how Neil Degrass Tyson  literally lectures an interveiwer about astrophysics for example.

or Federal Reserve Chair Janet yellen discussing interest rates.

I agree it originated on the West Coast.  I first heard it in the early 90s from a young woman from Vancouver.  After that it spread south.  I believe it is an affectation, possibly intended to express surprise in every sentence.  Personally I find it tedious.  When I want a tedious character, they will use that voice.  No, there is no self-confidence in it at all.

My English teacher taught us that, when writing an essay, never say I think or in my opinion or it seems to me.  If you expect me to believe what you say, she said, you must sound like you believe it yourself.  I learned to write and speak with confidence.  Now people say, So, do you think you know everything?  :-)  You can't win.

"I've heard that accent but only once spoken by like a ten year old boy in a movie. As soon as I heard it I recognized that access as being common from decades earlier but I didn't know what part of the USA that accent comes from."

There is a particular dialect in the US where they go up at the end of EVERY SENTENCE.  "Did you see the news last night? about the fire? at the zoo? Wasn't that terrible?"  If you've ever heard it, you know what I'm talking about.  Anything can be overdone.

The raising the pitch at the end of every sentence began in the central valley of california amongst young white females in the 1980's ( valley girls)

Today however I see a variant of it in the media all the time and this is my theory:

People who do this are not very confident about their knowledge of subject matter about  which they are speaking and likely have self esteem issues or are not exprienced media savvy "pros"
or they are discusssing a matter they dont feel has gained wide acceptance.
They literally appear to be asking for permission to give the answers that  they are giving to the questions

You see this voice inflection in inteviews of north american white women and white beta males

People who are  recognized as absolute Authorites or have a strong command of the subject matter they are discussing NEVER, EVER us this voice inflection. no matter thier race of gender

Look at how Neil Degrass Tyson  literally lectures an interveiwer about astrophysics for example.

or Federal Reserve Chair Janet yellen discussing interest rates.

ditto 

The one thing we lack in the world of Daz are clear-cut Latino characters. If we get those, then we might have a well rounded cast of characters. Of course, then we could fight over whether the Latino characters should be of the Carribean type (like Puerto Rico) or the Central and South American type I guess. LOL Then I suppose you can research population ethnicities and percentages of you really want to get technical and base your characters on that ;). Me? I wouldn't worry about it and just use what you want ;).

Laurie

BD Esther is a beautiful Spanish character for V7.

I love BD Esther! So much so that I put her on the cover of my book and am using her as the main character in all my promo art for Black Kat. 

I can't remember who said something about good looking Asian men, but there are quite a few in the DAZ store and I've certainly known a fair share. And gorgeous Amer-Asian ones too, though I'm not even sure that's the proper term anymore. I married a man who is half Korean, half German and very handsome. Everyone mistook him for Native American and called him "Chief." We had two beautiful children together. One looks more Asian, the other looks Scottish, like me. Go figure.

Genetics are fascinating and so is seeing how they're respesented in art.

This is cool, but in Opera at least, the wishlist items are very wide so that there's only two items per row. The boxes are mostly empty. They don't need to be that big.

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you send a screenshot?
The default Daz wishlist has only 2 items per row at smaller resolutions. There is nothing we changed there. Is that what you mean?

No. On a regular screen 1920x1080, I now only have 2 items per row in my wishlist instead of 3. Each item takes up half the width of the screen. It's kinda ridiculous.

Does it go back to 3 if you disable the wishlist notification feature? It's one of those things that I cannot reproduce. On low resolution it's 2 items per row, on HD resolution (the one you mentioned) it's 3 items per row for me, provided that the browser is running in a maximized window.

As far back as I can remember (Chrome, 1080) I'vehad the ridiculous 2 column wishlist page regardless of any addons.

This was actually easier to do than I thought it would be. I sent @Overdrawn this feature to take a look at. I can't actually test on an HD monitor during the holidays, so I hope he has access to a normal resolution monitor to see how it looks with up to 4 columns. 4 columns were okay even on my lowres "holiday-monitor", so lowres looks fine, I'm guessing it looks okay in highres, too.
The feature will allow you to set the wishlist page to display 2, 3 or 4 columns, regardless of the screen resolution.

Does my 48" 1080p display count as "holiday monitor" these days? I'm not really sure what the standard is anymore.

Sorry, by "holiday monitor", I meant the monitor I use during the holidays. At home, I have a normal HD monitor, but I'm at my parents' for the holidays, with a slightly smaller monitor, so I'm a little limited when it comes to seeing what it looks like on normal monitors.

It was mostly a joke to ask what regular sizes were these days xD

I don't think you can buy anything below full hd these days (1920x1080), and then it's 4k monitors after this. At least in this part of the world, in Central Europe.

So I have the Chrome version, but no wishlistify button that people seem to be talking about.

Wishlistify is a bookmarklet, originally made by Morgan: http://3dwishlist.com/bookmarklet I made a slight modification to it, so it works on filtered sales pages as well, but it's basically the same code as his: http://civilizationhunt.com/ds/wishlistifyplus.html
Pull the link on the page to the bookmark bar of the browser (click on it, pull to bar, release), then when you are on a category page, click this bookmark.

I tried going to my wishlist page and clicking Sync (whatever that does) but it errored out saying check my settings. Everything was set to the default and I doubled checked it, but still nothing. Am I doing something wrong?

That is for the email notifications of wishlisted items going on sale. You can read about that feature in more detail in this comment: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1892921/#Comment_1892921

 

4 view Wishlist is super useful for me, thanks!

I'm glad you like it! :)

Ohh it's a separate thing, no wonder, thanks!

This is cool, but in Opera at least, the wishlist items are very wide so that there's only two items per row. The boxes are mostly empty. They don't need to be that big.

I'm not sure what you mean. Can you send a screenshot?
The default Daz wishlist has only 2 items per row at smaller resolutions. There is nothing we changed there. Is that what you mean?

No. On a regular screen 1920x1080, I now only have 2 items per row in my wishlist instead of 3. Each item takes up half the width of the screen. It's kinda ridiculous.

Does it go back to 3 if you disable the wishlist notification feature? It's one of those things that I cannot reproduce. On low resolution it's 2 items per row, on HD resolution (the one you mentioned) it's 3 items per row for me, provided that the browser is running in a maximized window.

As far back as I can remember (Chrome, 1080) I'vehad the ridiculous 2 column wishlist page regardless of any addons.

This was actually easier to do than I thought it would be. I sent @Overdrawn this feature to take a look at. I can't actually test on an HD monitor during the holidays, so I hope he has access to a normal resolution monitor to see how it looks with up to 4 columns. 4 columns were okay even on my lowres "holiday-monitor", so lowres looks fine, I'm guessing it looks okay in highres, too.
The feature will allow you to set the wishlist page to display 2, 3 or 4 columns, regardless of the screen resolution.

Does my 48" 1080p display count as "holiday monitor" these days? I'm not really sure what the standard is anymore.

Sorry, by "holiday monitor", I meant the monitor I use during the holidays. At home, I have a normal HD monitor, but I'm at my parents' for the holidays, with a slightly smaller monitor, so I'm a little limited when it comes to seeing what it looks like on normal monitors.

It was mostly a joke to ask what regular sizes were these days xD

I don't think you can buy anything below full hd these days (1920x1080), and then it's 4k monitors after this. At least in this part of the world, in Central Europe.

So I have the Chrome version, but no wishlistify button that people seem to be talking about.

Wishlistify is a bookmarklet, originally made by Morgan: http://3dwishlist.com/bookmarklet I made a slight modification to it, so it works on filtered sales pages as well, but it's basically the same code as his: http://civilizationhunt.com/ds/wishlistifyplus.html
Pull the link on the page to the bookmark bar of the browser (click on it, pull to bar, release), then when you are on a category page, click this bookmark.

I tried going to my wishlist page and clicking Sync (whatever that does) but it errored out saying check my settings. Everything was set to the default and I doubled checked it, but still nothing. Am I doing something wrong?

That is for the email notifications of wishlisted items going on sale. You can read about that feature in more detail in this comment: http://www.daz3d.com/forums/discussion/comment/1892921/#Comment_1892921

4 view Wishlist is super useful for me, thanks!

I'm glad you like it! :)

The one thing we lack in the world of Daz are clear-cut Latino characters. If we get those, then we might have a well rounded cast of characters. Of course, then we could fight over whether the Latino characters should be of the Carribean type (like Puerto Rico) or the Central and South American type I guess. LOL Then I suppose you can research population ethnicities and percentages of you really want to get technical and base your characters on that ;). Me? I wouldn't worry about it and just use what you want ;).

Laurie

BD Esther is a beautiful Spanish character for V7.

I just wanted to thank all the people at DAZ for all your hard work, you guys don't get enough praise or hugs from us. I'd just like to thank you all, for your hard work and wish you all a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

P.S. Thank you so much for all the Christmas Bonus Freebies, you guys Rock!

+1 ..... make that +100

With an extra thank you for the all of the Holiday freebies 

Let's see.

Iray license: I think Daz3D must pay several thousands of dollars per year to include it in their Daz Studio program.

ProRender license: free

Yep, a lot of people will be using ProRender.

 

Well ...... we don't know how much DAZ 3D pays for the licensing of Iray or any other terms of the contract. It may even be free for DAZ 3D to use if it is seen by Nvidia as a good marketing strategy. But, IMHO, I seriously doubt we'll see DAZ 3D integrating ProRender into DS unless their business relationship with Nvidia goes bad. Even then it might not happen since they could decide to broker some sort of deal with Otoy for integration of Octane render (since there is already a plugin for it).

While ProRender being free is nice, if it doesn't have the performance, features, and support of other "pay for" render engines on the market, then it won't be a very popular. Time will tell just how popular it actually gets. Keep in mind that Cycles has been free for commercial use for several years, and other than Blender, Poser is the only commercial implementation of it that I know of (Cycles has both Cuda and OpenCL support, but as others have noted OpenCL is well behind Cuda in development and stability in Cycles). Also, Pixar's Renderman has been free for personal use for a while now (and the commercial licensing has be dramatically reduced in price), and there have been no DS plugins developed for it. So, just because a render engine is "free", doesn't mean it is a viable candidate for DS plugin development

Within the DAZ Studio community, IMHO, ProRender will have an insignificant impact unless someone steps up to the plate and makes a plugin for it. The biggest question for any potential plugin developer would be "is this a commercially viable product" (or "will I get my investment back .... and make a profit"). In general, the majority of DS users seem to be very reluctant to learn how to tweak shaders, so any potential developers would have to be able to convert Iray/3Delight shaders at a near 1:1 quality level. To gain wide adoption within the DS user community, it would also have to have an equivalent or better feature set compared to Iray to get the interest of those with Nvidia cards (and perform as well as Iray on Nvidia). There may be enough AMD users of DS to make it financially viable, but this is a risk the developer would need to consider (and given the length of time Iray has been in DS, I would guess the majority of the user base now has an Nvidia GPU). Of course there may be someone who is interested in developing a DS plugin more for their personal use or altruistic goals, where any sales of the plugin would be icing on the cake (or maybe even release it for free). So I'm not saying there is no chance a plugin will be developed for DS, I just wouldn't hold my breath waiting for it (or invest in an ATI card in anticipation).

It will be interesting to see what happens, and competition is a good thing, but I'm just a bit skeptical about a plugin being developed for DS. Once the Blender plugin is complete, it may finally make me learn Blender 

just launch DIM occasionally.  it'll present a list of available product updates after it touches base with daz central, and you can take it from there...the app doesn't begin any installation or update processes until you tell it to.

j

If you've never downloaded a product with DIM it has no baseline to compare to, and therefore no way of knowing if a product has updated.

I keep all my downloads on a 1 TB usb drive.

just launch DIM occasionally.  it'll present a list of available product updates after it touches base with daz central, and you can take it from there...the app doesn't begin any installation or update processes until you tell it to.

j

When Leonard Nimoy passed away, I felt motivated to complete a scene that had sat unfinished for quite some time.  My goal was to interpret the 1974 model kit (designed by Aurora (known for its various movie monster kits) and distributed by AMT in the US), expanding upon and enhancing the elements of the kit.  Yes, the original version of the assembly kit included a 3 headed space hyrda and Mallen Lane's mythological beastie proved the best choice.  Funny enough, Lane's Sea Dragon would also have worked as the head and its morphs are nearly identical to those of the Hydra.  Because the model kit depicted the monster's heads all springing from a central neck, I had to use three copies anyway, hiding all body parts except for the central neck and head.

Credits

Michael 2 P4...DAZ.com
Face morph...Porthos
Uniform tunic...XCalPro
Uniform pants...XCalPro
Uniform boots...XCalPro
Tricorder...XCalPro
Phaser...MechMaster
Communicator...MattyManx/Sgreco
Spock hair...Mylochka
Dragon's Keep...AntFarm
Twister sky-dome...AntFarm
RDNA XenoFlora...Traveler
Hydra...MallenLane
Enterprise...MattyManx/David Metlesits

*** *** ***

Sincerely,

Bill

Amazing work!

It's 5:20AM Central, and the Featured Artist discounts are still not working.  I was going to pick up Easy Environments Hell.  But, it only shows a 30 percent discount total....(my Holiday Loyalty)

Yes, I am having the same problem. No 40% discount only 30% Loyalty discount. 

Hope a Mod sees this thread and can report the issue for us before the offers run out.

It's 5:20AM Central, and the Featured Artist discounts are still not working.  I was going to pick up Easy Environments Hell.  But, it only shows a 30 percent discount total....(my Holiday Loyalty)

20%?  I think I've only been offered 5%!

mine was also at 5% till today... it jumped to 20%

go figure 

Me too - must be an early Chrsitmas present!

20%?  I think I've only been offered 5%!

mine was also at 5% till today... it jumped to 20%

go figure 

The one thing we lack in the world of Daz are clear-cut Latino characters. If we get those, then we might have a well rounded cast of characters. Of course, then we could fight over whether the Latino characters should be of the Carribean type (like Puerto Rico) or the Central and South American type I guess. LOL Then I suppose you can research population ethnicities and percentages of you really want to get technical and base your characters on that ;). Me? I wouldn't worry about it and just use what you want ;).

Laurie

Check out Javeria (Sabby) at Renderosity, new yesterday!

The one thing we lack in the world of Daz are clear-cut Latino characters. If we get those, then we might have a well rounded cast of characters. Of course, then we could fight over whether the Latino characters should be of the Carribean type (like Puerto Rico) or the Central and South American type I guess. LOL Then I suppose you can research population ethnicities and percentages of you really want to get technical and base your characters on that ;). Me? I wouldn't worry about it and just use what you want ;).

Laurie

Most definetely!

The one thing we lack in the world of Daz are clear-cut Latino characters. If we get those, then we might have a well rounded cast of characters. Of course, then we could fight over whether the Latino characters should be of the Carribean type (like Puerto Rico) or the Central and South American type I guess. LOL Then I suppose you can research population ethnicities and percentages of you really want to get technical and base your characters on that ;). Me? I wouldn't worry about it and just use what you want ;).

Laurie