starionwolf said:

ps1borg said:

Central and West Australia is the place to be in January if you like it that hot, everyone who can gets away from the East coast after Christmas the storms can be massive that time of year :)

It is hot in Adelaide. Shouldn't the ocean breeze cool of the coast? Its not like Adelaide is near the equator like Darwin. Hot and dry weather reminds me of southwest U.S.A. (deserts) in the summer. Thanks for the info about the storms. I'll go read about the storms. At least you don't see cold temperatures like poor Misty. Brrr. The wind is blowing at 20 MPH. ok.. going to bed. later

It rained at Ayers Rock during January this year, the waterfalls afterward are one of the great wonders of the desert, along with all the wildflowers that come after a flood. But if you want to keep out of the northern tropics Kakadu is basically a river trip and I guess can be cooler at night during summer. January/February are the hottest months here, you choose whether you want dry or damp and go southwest or northeast accordingly.

Shouldn't the ocean breeze cool of the coast?

Well it is the Indian Ocean, the roaring forties aren't exactly a cool zephyr :lol:

Birdsville Track is a good trip if you rent an off road something and it hasn't rained much and you want to sample a bit. The Flinders Ranges are astounding, I've climbed St Mary's Peak, iz awesome. And it looks like the deserts in the old black and white westerns around there :lol:

Where we live is called The Shipwreck Coast, between about Eden one way and I dunno maybe Port McDonnel the other, weather from the Southern Ocean is ferocious sometimes.

ps1borg said:

Central and West Australia is the place to be in January if you like it that hot, everyone who can gets away from the East coast after Christmas the storms can be massive that time of year :)

It is hot in Adelaide. Shouldn't the ocean breeze cool of the coast? Its not like Adelaide is near the equator like Darwin. Hot and dry weather reminds me of southwest U.S.A. (deserts) in the summer. Thanks for the info about the storms. I'll go read about the storms. At least you don't see cold temperatures like poor Misty. Brrr. The wind is blowing at 20 MPH. ok.. going to bed. later

starionwolf said:

ps1borg said:

Morning. Puffy little clouds like white driftweed in a luminous turquoise sky offering no rain, only more heat on the parched and cracked earth in Melbourne's yellowing edge where we are right now :)

Weather forecast says it might rain though. I'm still thinking of going to Australia in the summer (January).

Windless and clear around 40K West of the city, looks the same Eastwards altho a storm can blow in from the bay (south) real quick it doesn't look likely right now. Just wrapped here and on way home, TGIF yay ! Central and West Australia is the place to be in January if you like it that hot, everyone who can gets away from the East coast after Christmas the storms can be massive that time of year :)

Whether the jewel is/was an n-gon in the modeling program it is badly modeled tris now so still needs to be cleaned up. The following image is from Blender, on the left is the jewel face as it is currently modeled, notice the edges all radiate to a single central vertex and many are outside the outline of the jewel face. On the right is just one way of cleaning up mesh so there are no edges outside the outline. If you switch to wire shaded in DAZ Studio you will see those same edges so while DS may initially so the jewel okay there is no guarantee that some advance shader, lighting or camera might no have a problem with it.

When I was in college (about 1968) one of the guys in the dorm had a core memory module from some computer sitting on his bookshelf. It was 1Kb (Kilobit) of core memory and about the size of four volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica (for those of you who remember what an encyclopedia was). The individual cores were about the size of baby aspirin, huge in comparison to the final generation of core memories which had nearly microscopic cores.

We've drifted completely off topic but it's always fun for geezers to relive the glory days. Getting back to magnetic storage, the first 1GB hard drive I ever worked with (mid 80s) was about the size of a baby casket (and that's what we called it), 19"x24"x10", weighed about 100 pounds and cost $10,000. We had two of them! Made by Seagate.

About 1970 I worked for the college (Florida Institute of Technology) and we had an (XDS) Xerox Data Systems; Sigma 5 computer. Actually it was an SDS design but the SDS company had been recently bought by Xerox. Their hard drive was called a RAD (Random Access Disk). It had a huge heavy platter arranged vertically with a thick central hub. If I remember correctly, it didn't have a moving arm with a read/record head, it had a read/record head for every track on the platter. It could only hold a few megabytes of data. The heavy platter took quite a while to start up and you could tell by the whine when it was about ready to blink green. When you pressed the stop button to turn it off, brake shoes clamped down on the central hub and the platter stopped in 1/4 rotation. THUNK!!! and the top of the 5 foot equipment rack jolted to the side noticeably. You learned not to set fragile objects on top of that rack. See picture below.

When working for the college I used to talk to one of the women in the department who worked on the old IBM 2nd generation machines and how they used to have to program using patch boards.

Ah, the good old days, when computers were solid and touchable and massive. There's a reason they were called "big iron".

Oh, damn this is fun. I remember hearing my first digitally recorded music on that old Xerox Sigma 5. One of the guys in the computer room discovered that there was some analog to digital conversion facility in the computer. He rigged up something that permitted him to play a record (you know flat vinyl platter with wiggly grooves) into the converter and digitize it. Storing it was a problem. Not enough core memory and we couldn't use the RAD because it was nearly full of system programming. But we did have 9-track magnetic tape. He configured the tape drive to not write in discrete finite length records but to record digital data on the tape continuously in one immensly long record. At that speed the entire 2400 foot reel only lasted for a couple minutes. But when he read the digital data back and piped it to the tiny 2 inch beep speaker on the console panel by pulsing the beep speaker in step with the digital data values, we could hear crude music. That was about 1971. I think we were about as pleased with ourselves as Edison was when he got the wiggly grooves on a cylinder thing to work.

...there have been a number of people receiving broken figures. I think USPS is not the best choice myself (no tracking) but then I used to work in the warehouse/shipping business where I witnessed both UPS and FedEx drivers treating packages rather carelessly at times when they were in hurry to get to the airport processing centre across town.

Filing a damage/insurance claim with any shipper can be a real pain in the bum to get the full value of what was damaged.

I personally have little issue with items I order from Newegg, but then, I insure my shipment and I'm right up the coast from them instead of across the continent (or overseas). So via ground service it usually arrives in about two to three business days from when I placed the order and it comes pretty much direct, instead of being flown halfway across the country to a central processing hub and back again.

For paid for figures, hopefully Daz offers shipping options other than just USPS, and packs them more securely. Not about to plop down say 60 - 75$ for a custom figure of my namesake KK or Leela only to open the box and find it broken.

whoa, Evil I have seen all those renders before, but never until just this moment did I put together that you were using the ponytail before! It looks great in static scenes, for sure, and now that you mention using smooth tool to get rid of the curly-q that makes a lot of sense. I guess it's totally valid to have a curly-q type ponytail, but it's pretty rare to see one of those styles in real live, especially one so perfectly coiled (almost like springs). But let the ponytail relax a little and that hairstyle definitely is very useful.

Though 1000 guide hairs is really a lot more guides than needed. Most are just in the central main part of the hair, to make sure it adheres to the head, and since no movement is even needed for that section, you could get away with almost no guide hairs and use of the clump tool, plus auto grouping and shape stiffness set high. I'm just envisioning how 1000 guides would slow sim calculations :)

I received my Victoria 6 figure yesterday as well in central Ohio and it appears to have been shipped without any damage.

Based on the video that is posted in the 3D Print section of the web site and the description of the 3D print process is sounds like they used a printer similar to the ones used for the Shapeways "Full-Color Sandstone" material option (gypsum powder bonded with colored adhesive (one video I saw of the Z-Corp brand printers showed them installing an HP InkJet cartridge in the printer), dipped in cyanoacrylate (super-glue) for the final finish).

My Avatar, well the short version is...

I like cats, and especially the big cats and as the wife won't let me have a real one for a pet (I'm limited to a couple of domestic short haired moggies at the moment but I'm wearing her down) so I produced a big cat based Avatar, it is actually the Nightworld Lycanthropos with the Species add-on pack to make what I suppose you would call a Weretiger,

The Long Version...

Once upon a time in a land far, far away (the UK) in a long since vanished era when archaic dinosaurs called 'Dial Up Modems' stalked the households of the world and this beast we call 'The Internet' was taking it's first tottering steps into universal domination of our lives a revolution occurred in the UK internet infrastructure, free internet access.
Well it wasn't actually free but there where no subscription payments and the access rates where pretty reasonable compared to the fees charged before.
Overturning the apple-cart of the established ISP's a company called Freeserve started offering a subscription free service where your only ongoing cost was the local telephone call charges for when you were on the internet and so the general public started flocking to this monstrosity we call the World Wide Web with the thoughts of free access to all sorts of useful services, online news, e-mail, software updates and of course that staple of the internet, free porn.
How did this company fund itself I hear you ask, well go on ask, go on, if you don't ask then I'll have to abandon this historical masterpiece and you will never know the truth behind my Avatar, and my Username...

Thank you to that person in the back row, I thought I was going to have to sign off half way through my explanation.

Now I'll continue with my epic. Freeserve and it's many competitors that jumped on the bandwagon when they saw the writing on the wall used a service provided by British Telecom (BT), the UK's telephone service provider, to claim a percentage of your call charge from BT whenever you called the number they set up for your internet pleasure.
Now another facet of BT's structure came into play at this point, local telephone calls varied in cost depending on the time of day you made the call, with evening and weekend rates being much less than those charged during the working day so I like the majority of people in the UK mainly used the internet in the evenings (after 6pm), now having started to use the internet I need a username, e-mail address and the like and being somewhat reluctant to use my given name I needed an alias, a nom-de-plume as it were.
It so happened that at this time I had developed a passing interest in Central/South American mythology and whilst reading up on this I came across a reference to a Mayan god called Kinich Ahau, now I'm sure some scholar out there will correct me but the material I was reading explained that the Mayan pantheon was somewhat involved and confusing at times with different gods having different roles and personae at different times. Kinich Ahau was in the main a sun god, but he also took on the form of a jaguar and stalked the underworld at night.
By now I'm sure that some of you can see where this is going, I like big cats, I have an interest in Mayan mythology and I tend to use the internet at night (and describing the internet as 'the underworld' just seems to be so right) so Kinich Ahau and various derivatives of it came into being as my online persona and so I started using big cats as my Avatar, originally it was the Millennium Big Cat Jaguar but it turned into the weretiger you see now some years ago during the PC anniversary sale back in 2010 as I was a founding member of the Animal Bundle Consortium (ABC), oh those were the days, members votes, high pressure and lighting fast campaigns to gather votes to get your favourite products at PC prices, but that is another story for another time.
Well that's it, interesting was it? Well it can't have been that bad as you have managed to get all the way down here, unless you haven't in which case you won't be reading this bit and you won't know what you missed because you won't have read it, or something like that.

Note. No cats were hurt during the production of this tale, all persons, events, places and deities are as I remember them and may not bear any resemblance to actual facts as you recall them or as they really happened but I don't really care. Any resemblance to proper literature is completely coincidental and not intend to cause any offence.

Are you still reading this? Have you not anything better to do, go on? Go render something or do some post work, spend money in the DAZ shop just do something else for a bit, you'll feel much better for it (possibly significantly poorer, but that is the price we pay for this hobby, though of course this is DAZ so the price you pay may well be incorrect and liable to change at any time though no fault of your own and for no apparent reason, but what the heck, deal with it).

TroutFace said:

Good day everyone! I hope everyone is having a great time! :cheese:

40Fs here, no rain/snow/sleet yet. If it holds off I'm going to get some enchiladas and quesadillas to bring home to eat today and tomorrow (the place is closed Sunday, foo). :)

Bought a couple of things on sale.. I got the Cicada! :cheese: It'll make a great monster for horror pinups (the kind I could only put on my DA site). :red:

My USB hub came in so everything is FINALLY connected. :blank: USB HD, both keyboard controllers, the wireless mouse, and my Windows 8.1 tablet, and with the power strip my Android tablet is plugged into the charger. My desk looks like starship control central.. will post pics sometime.

Gotta record a song today.. I need 2 tunes for the next Ambient Online compilation. :ahhh: Finally found my niche lol! :bug:

Hopefully I can work in a pinup this weekend.. I got this cute hair and hat that would look sexy on a pinup.. hee hee! :snake:

Back to work.. need to grind coffee.. and I'm out of Velton's Treehouse Blend beans! :shut:

Yes things look much rosier after a good night's sleep :lol: Looking forward to the new ambient compile :)

Good day everyone! I hope everyone is having a great time! :cheese:

40Fs here, no rain/snow/sleet yet. If it holds off I'm going to get some enchiladas and quesadillas to bring home to eat today and tomorrow (the place is closed Sunday, foo). :)

Bought a couple of things on sale.. I got the Cicada! :cheese: It'll make a great monster for horror pinups (the kind I could only put on my DA site). :red:

My USB hub came in so everything is FINALLY connected. :blank: USB HD, both keyboard controllers, the wireless mouse, and my Windows 8.1 tablet, and with the power strip my Android tablet is plugged into the charger. My desk looks like starship control central.. will post pics sometime.

Gotta record a song today.. I need 2 tunes for the next Ambient Online compilation. :ahhh: Finally found my niche lol! :bug:

Hopefully I can work in a pinup this weekend.. I got this cute hair and hat that would look sexy on a pinup.. hee hee! :snake:

Back to work.. need to grind coffee.. and I'm out of Velton's Treehouse Blend beans! :shut:

While browsing the Zbrush Central I just stumbled upon an extremely realistic portrait created by jwillust

Portrait of Syliva

http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?191358-Portrait-of-Sylvia

- - -

What inspried me was that the artist showed in detail how he achieved that kind of realism.

While some parts of the mesh certainly are extremely high resolution there are some elements that I would hope to see more as well on characters released in the DAZ store.

- real fiber mesh eye lashes

The good old transparency maps were very funny for a quite a long time. Now its time to say goodbye and start to create realistic fiber mesh eyelashes.

What currently could be done for Genesis 2 based characters may be to hide the geometry used for transparency map lashes and add unique fiber mesh eyelashes custom designed for specific character shapes.

For Genesis 3 based characters an advanced option would be to include fiber hair eye lashes by default with many morph presets to create unique looking variations.

- - -

- real fiber mesh eye brows

For models standing in the background the painted on eyebrows certainly will do the trick.
But whenever we render out images at 3840x2160 or even larger the painted on eye brows just destroy the illusion.

For female characters you may still get away with it. Many models actually paint on fake eyebrows.
Nevertheless for male characters those painted on eye brows just destroy the illusion of any render that tries to achieve realism.

- - -

- displacement maps for fine face and skin details

We now had time enough to try out those HD morphs and by now it has become obvious what works and what does not.
One of the main ideas of the Genesis generation is to mix and match different shapes.
This works to some extent with HD morphs but in many cases different HD morphs created on the same topololgy just cancel each other out.
For that reason I hope to see again more displacement maps for face and skin details.

@ mixing normal, bump and displacement on the same surface.
While we are on that subject of maps:
Bump and normal maps are welcome for background models when high detail is not necessary.
But for up close portraits it really would make sense to use displacement maps to give the user the option to have realistic shadows cast by the displaced areas.

For non game characters it does not anymore make any sense at all to have the finer details in the face being created by bump or normal maps that do NOT create realistic shadows.

Some people argue that this difference is not noticeable. At 4K resolutions and up it is.
From my point of view this habit of mixing bump, normal and displacement maps is a relict of the time when you had to struggle for each bit of processing power. This may still be important if you are creating games that should run in real time or if you are trying to create animations.

But for creating high resolution still images - and as far as I understand it that is what DAZ content is most used for - displacement maps are the option that will offer more realistic results.

Just to understand this right:
I did not say stop including bump and normal maps in your products.

What I am saying is:
- Include one version with extremely detailed displacement maps for models intended to be used in still images
- Include bump and normal map versions for models that are intended to be used in the background, in games or for animations

- - -

Those are the most important points.

You can also get some more ideas by looking at the "Portrait of Sylvia"

- LAMH fur presets for clothing
- very fine fiber mesh facial hair also for female characters
- High resolution version of clothing with modeled detail

- - -

I think we have now A LOT of toon like characters in the DAZ store.
I really hope to see some more realistic solutions in the future.

As always anyone can do and create whatever anyone wants to.
Those are just the things that I would hope to see more in the future.

...yeah the house I lived in was over 50 years old and drafty, particularly by the exterior side door/cellar steps and in the attic bedrooms ('energy efficient" was not part of the common vocabulary when the house was originally built). All windows were double hung wood frame with single pane glass requiring full frame storm windows to be hung in autumn which were replaced in late spring by full framed screens. Naturally this made for lots of air leaks all over the house and in winter, the storm windows would frequently frost up completely, particularly in the upstairs bedrooms . Thank heaven's for the old German "Federbetten" we had.

The gas furnace vented exhaust gases to the central chimney which the old coal one used. In the kitchen there was cover plate on the wall shrouding the chimney which used to be the where the flue pipe from the the old wood fired range vented as well..

Yeah it was definitely "old school" living. The house even had an external rain barrel (which was filled in and turned into a flower bed before i could remember) which was connected to a hand pump next to the cellar laundry sinks.

With all the environmental sealing in more modern homes today, I can understand that the risk of CO buildup is a bigger concern. What it sounds like you have is what is called a "dual fuel" setup where you have both an external central air unit and a furnace hooked together. If your place does not have a roof vent or chimney, than I can see the heat exchanger portion of the unit being needed to bring in fresh air and vent potentially harmful exhaust gases from the furnace outside.

Kyoto Kid said:

...interesting that the vents of the unit must be clear to avoid CO buildup when heating the structure with the furnace if it is primarily used for central air conditioning.

Again we just had a forced air gas furnace with no external system and never were in danger of CO poisoning.

Before that we had a coal fired furnace in the cellar, and nobody in the house ever felt any ill effects from it either

It is not primarily for central air conditioning. That was a secondary unit. It is for heat and air conditioning. I don't pretend to know exactly how it all works. I know that there's a thing in the back yard, near the house on the patio, that I think is a condeser. It's sort of a cube, with radiator-like fins inside and a fan facing down on top, and a couple of copper tubes/pipes that go inside the house into the furnace, where I think there are cooling coils or something and the air is forced over them to cool the house. But the unit is first a heating furnace. Without that thing outside it would still be a heating furnace. As I understand it, not all the units in this development originally had the central a/c. I'm not sure of that, though. A few (very few from what I can see) have fireplaces and chimneys, we don't.

How long ago was that furnace built? They started putting the intake and exhaust vents through the wall to the outside for safety reasons. You may think you were never in danger, but you were. They change the way things are done to improve safety. I'm not sure when they started doing that, really. This house was built in 1998. We bought it in 2001, it was 3.5 years old. Gas naturally burns clean, but with a furnace there's always the possibility of something being just a little off and you get CO. Even if it's just when it initially ignites. Like I said earlier, the exhaust vent is pretty high. If we had snow that deep, we'd have a lot more troubles.

I remember when I was young we had a gas space heater. it was this big thing in the kitchen with a couple of little vents in front near the bottom that had fans in them, and you could pull out the face and turn it and let it go back to change the direction of the fan's wind. But that was just a little extra boost, the heat mostly came off the top through vent holes. Nearly the whole top was like a sheet of metal with holes, like a screen but thicker and a bigger grid. I might not be explaining it well. Anyway, that didn't seem to have an intake but it did have an exhaust going into the refitted chimney port. I guess it used our air inside. But houses also weren't as airtight in those days as they are now.

If I had lots of money, I'd look into getting a geothermal heating system. No more fuel, except electricity for the pump and the heat distribution system. That tech is really cool. The fluid used reacts to pressure. The tubing goes into the ground at a certain depth, getting the ambient temperature from the ground. Then it is pumped through a choice of two tubing systems. The fluid reacts to pressure, with less pressure it cools down, with more pressure it heats up. So, for cooling wider tubing is used. For heating, narrower tubing is used. It's initially not inexpensive, but the savings in fuel cost over several years probably pay for it.

Dana

...interesting that the vents of the unit must be clear to avoid CO buildup when heating the structure with the furnace if it is primarily used for central air conditioning.

Again we just had a forced air gas furnace with no external system and never were in danger of CO poisoning.

Before that we had a coal fired furnace in the cellar, and nobody in the house ever felt any ill effects from it either

Kyoto Kid said:

DanaTA said:

Kyoto Kid said:

DanaTA said:

Well, it's still snowing here. The snowdrifts are crazy. My car is almost completely exposed, but the drifts next to the fence, a couple feet away from the car, look like almost three feet deep!

I had to go outside around 4:00 am to check on the heating intake and exhaust vents. I didn't want to chance carbon monoxide poisoning. I really hated to go out there at that time, in that blowing, sideways, snow. But it was nagging me and I couldn't get to sleep. Good think I did. A drift was pretty close to the intake vent. I'd say maybe eight inches. The exhaust vent was never in any trouble, it's pretty high.

No power loss!

Dana

...your place has a heat pump I take it?

I'm not exactly sure what that means. The furnace burns natural gas and there's air ducts throughout the house and a big fan pushes the hot air through the ducts. There is a return air shaft as well. The central air uses the same blower and duct system. The compressor is outside, of course. I think that's the compressor.

Dana

..yeah that sounds like a heat pump, basically a unit that sits on the ground beside the house which forces air (heated or cooled) through the structure's internal vents. Lived in Wisconsin where we had a gas furnace but it had it's own internal forced air system.

No, the furnace is inside in the basement. The blower is in the furnace. The only thing outside is the condenser or compressor (I think condenser), whatever, for the central air conditioning.

Dana

DanaTA said:

Kyoto Kid said:

DanaTA said:

Well, it's still snowing here. The snowdrifts are crazy. My car is almost completely exposed, but the drifts next to the fence, a couple feet away from the car, look like almost three feet deep!

I had to go outside around 4:00 am to check on the heating intake and exhaust vents. I didn't want to chance carbon monoxide poisoning. I really hated to go out there at that time, in that blowing, sideways, snow. But it was nagging me and I couldn't get to sleep. Good think I did. A drift was pretty close to the intake vent. I'd say maybe eight inches. The exhaust vent was never in any trouble, it's pretty high.

No power loss!

Dana

...your place has a heat pump I take it?

I'm not exactly sure what that means. The furnace burns natural gas and there's air ducts throughout the house and a big fan pushes the hot air through the ducts. There is a return air shaft as well. The central air uses the same blower and duct system. The compressor is outside, of course. I think that's the compressor.

Dana

Kyoto Kid said:

DanaTA said:

Well, it's still snowing here. The snowdrifts are crazy. My car is almost completely exposed, but the drifts next to the fence, a couple feet away from the car, look like almost three feet deep!

I had to go outside around 4:00 am to check on the heating intake and exhaust vents. I didn't want to chance carbon monoxide poisoning. I really hated to go out there at that time, in that blowing, sideways, snow. But it was nagging me and I couldn't get to sleep. Good think I did. A drift was pretty close to the intake vent. I'd say maybe eight inches. The exhaust vent was never in any trouble, it's pretty high.

No power loss!

Dana

...your place has a heat pump I take it?

I'm not exactly sure what that means. The furnace burns natural gas and there's air ducts throughout the house and a big fan pushes the hot air through the ducts. There is a return air shaft as well. The central air uses the same blower and duct system. The compressor is outside, of course. I think that's the compressor.

Dana

I'm missing this one thankfully, but in '78 I was in central Jersey for a 24 incher. And again in '83 for both an 18 incher and a 24. The 24 was the most fun because I shoveled the driveway in preparation for ex's homecoming--but he got stuck in NYC. It blew all night and the next day I had to shovel it again.

BTW, I picked up a couple of little lanterns from Amazon because we're plagued with outages here (usually lightning related but sometimes ice) and they both take D batteries. Love the little things they're very powerful and useful.

Also an AM/FM/NOAA crank radio. Comes in handy but I don't know which is more boring: having no word from the outside world or sitting there cranking the thing.

Good luck everyone and hope you get through this fine. We're just getting rain tonite, tomorrow, and maybe a little snow when the backend sweeps through.

Be aware that right now (3pm central) several of us are having trouble with the checkout. It's not going through with paypal, and one person is having trouble even with credit cards. With paypal, it says can't access gateway. The orders are NOT going through. I have already reported it to the moderators. :)

I'm picking up Rons Sci Fi Custom Shapes Bundle, Ron's Ink, Whimsical Border Brushes and #2. That is, if the order goes through.

We're totally repainting the interior of our home, so that's why I am not online much this week. :)