Does that feature deal with objects themselves casting light through the ambient settings? I'm not sure I get it, but sounds like you're having fun with it.

I think the problems with DA and the internet in general really have more to do with a severe disconnect between the aims and desires of users and those providing entertainment and services. With old media, people make the mistake of thinking the audience is the customer when they're actually the product offered to advertisers. It's really the same thing going on in internetland, the only difference being that the huge web media success stories these days (DA, YouTube, SourceForge, 4chan, etc.) no longer produce any content of their own, it's all about providing a forum of exploiting intellectual property whether through illegal distribution or giving someone the hope of getting internet famous and posting their shit on your site to feed your ad support. If you want to stay out of those systems, there are a variety of personal IP diluting projects being pushed on the masses such as Creative Commons and GNU licenses which send a clear message of (exploitable)community for the proles, real ad money for the elites. Twitter, which Old Media heralds as a new dawn of human achievement even goes so far as to dilute the quality of content itself, whatever you have to say needs to be cut down into short clips of quickly forgettable nonsense and it continues to foment the dismissive tl;dr mentality that continues to hamper any real exposition of independent thought.

Anyhow, back to DA, they recently enabled those sharing buttons you see on posts now. That's a good way for Fanartist X to get internet famous I suppose, but in the end it means more ways for people to come to DA and see ads. It makes sense, sure, but the big problem is they sat there laughing about complaints from some art-theft fearing strawman and instead of actually explaining away the irrational fears about art-theft via Digg, they used that as an excuse to cut off access to your art to non-members if you selected not to share your posts on Digg or whatever. Basically, if you, logically, look at DA as just a gallery to stow some stuff away from your site you actually want people to go to, you're art will either need to enable viral sharing networks for the direct benefit of DA or force people to get accounts, to the direct benefit of DA. The argument they used to implement it that way was really what was bullshit about it.

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Yeah, it does actually. It presents a ton of possibilities but it does increase the rendering time, which can be sort of a pain. It also highlights the fact that the "super-computer" I built to handle complex Poser scenes is no longer up to the task. I have to build a new computer sometime in the next year.

I agree with you when you say that society as a whole is developing a tl;dr attitude. However, some of the examples you used are not exactly good examples for the argument you're trying to make. You have to remember that "mass media" has been around—at the earliest—since the 30s and 40s, but didn't fully mature until the 60s. What has become the tl;dr attitude had its roots in the 70s (think Nixon, Vietnam) but didn't really start to take hold until the mid-90s. The seeds of tl;dr were in place well before the rise of the internet.

News networks like Fox that spread half-truths and sensationalize news-stories for ratings; our current educational system, which does not encourage asking questions and exploring, but instead demands blind obedience; "do as I say; not as I do"-type thinking, are far more at fault. New media and the social networking revolution can hardly be blamed for a societal construct that has been in place since the end of the Vietnam War.

The thing with sites like YouTube is it gives people an outlet that ten years before, just wasn't available. Hell, it wasn't available even if you did run your own website! It was the cost of bandwidth; the technical know-how to run a website; the cost of the software and the hardware was needed to create quality videos that made it almost impossible to stream video over the internet. Granted, in the late 90s, there was streaming video but the average propellor-head webmaster didn't have the money or the tools necessary to produce their own internet videos that were longer than 3 minutes. What revolutionized internet video was the advent of the Sorenson-Spark video codec—used in QuickTime in the late 90s—and then Flash Video (FLV1 used the Sorenson codec), which allowed for both compression and good quality videos so you could have a decent ten-minute video and still have it be available to someone with a 56k dialup connection.

SourceForge is really nothing more than an Open Source repository and collaboration site—not only that but a lot of the files that SF hosts are co-hosted on university servers. Basically, if you're an app developer who's working on something, you can post it to SourceForge and collaborate with other developers. Most people know it as a place to download free apps, though.

The only thing that 4chan has going for it is notoriety primarily because of Anonymous; the average layman doesn't even know of or care about the existence of 4chan, except as possibly another place to download free porn

Creative Commons and GNU grew out of the need for a less restrictive licensing agreement. In fact, GNU has its roots in programming and OS-development, with the idea of free as in freedom; the freedom to modify, reverse-engineer or in general do as you please with the software which even includes redistributing it, but only under the same license. Note that the license doesn't prohibit making a profit, either. That's why we have so many different versions of Linux out there. Creative Commons is the same thing but allows for even greater flexibility, like specifying whether or not a work can be used for more than just personal use only; not only that, but you're able to create a "human-readable" license that people are more likely to read and understand, especially when compared to EULAs and other legal mumbo-jumbo that's normally included.

Twitter is...bullshit, IMHO. Granted, it can be useful as a status updater, like the way I use it for my comic. I also used it to keep friends up to date on the tornado back in August. Sometimes, you even find useful information. For someone like me, who will be headed into the web design field next summer, its almost invaluable as a means of getting close to and establishing relations with potential local employers. But, for the way the majority of people use it, Twitter is still complete and utter bullshit. One big complaint I have about it is the bots randomly following people and wanting them to "look at their naughty pictures."

The sharing buttons...yes...I can see how a lot of people would be concerned about them. I hadn't heard too much about the issues behind the sharing buttons, since I've been too busy with school to pay much attention to what has been going on with dA. I did do a test on one of my deviations, though. There are three levels you can choose for sharing. The first one allows you to share your works on websites like Digg; the second discourages sharing by taking away the links; and the third option is like the second option but it does like what you just said: only dA members can see it. The way I see it, nothing can really stop a person from the good-old right-click/save as no matter what is done to combat it, the issue of art-theft is always going to be there; regardless of whether or not "sharing" is enabled.

*whew* Yeah, that's a lot, I know. There's bound to be typos and other stuff but this was almost like I was writing an essay for school :\

Yeah, you make good points and there's a lot more cohesive thought behind it than my opinionated ramblings. Any time media making people stupider/people making media stupider gets brought up, it's always a chicken and egg scenario trying to figure out where it begins though. I can also point out how Youtube is centered around the idea of people choosing to submit their ideas to the commercial benefit of others for the convenience of it and you can point out that the convenience opens up new avenues of the communication of new ideas from independant sources and they're both valid statements. It's just a tough argument all around like every argument these days where there's no excuse for ignorance beyond having a thousand conflicting sources and I really need to greyer approach to my rants in general if I don't want spend my days researching.

You have to admit that mass media as we know it has historically had some deep ties to propaganda and social engineering at least since the days of Hearst though and it isn't too much of a stretch to see it at work today. Otherwise we'd have unbiased reporting being done instead of Fox sponsoring a bunch of yahoos squealing about health care they probably don't have and NBC heralding energy-saving light bulb legislation as the most important decision in the tome of human history. Something they all seem to agree on though is an aggresive stance towards the internet though and I just think a lot of that aggression for them as corporate entities lies in the fact that some dude could theoretically upload a movie onto Youtube tommorrow that could be everyone's favourite new movie moreso than the agression being born of loss of profits from their own properties. The piracy argument just makes a convenient excuse in most cases. Piracy hurts paper publishing, definitely, but TV, film and music continue to break records in spite of it; it doesn't add up in those cases.

In the case of individual websites, I think a lot of it comes down to convenience, like you pointed out, just plain making it easier and desirable for people to utilize those services. The problem, I'm currently thinking, is more due to monopolies, which again is prolly fueled more by the users than anything. If you don't dig DA, where else do you go? Any other art sites I know of don't even have a fraction of the number of users, they're buggy as hell and don't have half of the gallery, message, whatever options. If there was some decent competition, I'd go there and DA would have to change a lot of policies and practices to handle the competition, but there just aren't any real threats to DA as of yet. I'm not really sure what you could do to change that fact, but there's nothing wrong with venting about it.

My problem with Creative Commons in particular is that there isn't anything stopping people from sharing their work in those ways in the first place, they place restrictions on your ability to toss something out there and say, here, do whatever you want with this. GNU does actually make sense from the standpoint of delineating the open development process into something with the most utility to the widest base of developers and I don't know enough about standard software rights protections to really have any ground to stand on attacking GNU. The only long-term effects Creative Commons has is the dilution of independent creators' copyrights and commercial usage of independent properties. Commercial media doesn't use Creative Commons, and copyright law already covers individuals, it's a one-way stream of IP sharing.

Bah, sorry about the essays, I need to stop rambling and ranting so much.

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That is cool, but all I can think of is 'magic glow' hee.

App advancement can be such a pain in the ass. I'd like to think if my ten year-old computer ran GIMP fine, but with some bad lag on high-rez stuff, my new one should run it perfect, but nooo, a lot of things are even slower. It's at least nice to see some huge advancements in what you can do for the resource trouble.

How does speed compare if you're not using any of the new bells n' whistles though?

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That is what I was thinking of, too. I think the best application for this new feature would be using it with something like Particles3. Granted, the only reason I bought Poser 8 was to get the beta for Poser Pro 2010 and Poser 8 does lack some features that Poser Pro has, like native 64-bit rendering—which Poser Pro k10 is supposed to have so there is a good chance that the speed issues with IDL will be worked out when the next addition of Poser Pro rolls out.

Are you running Windows? If so, what version? If you're running something like Windows Vista, that could be part of your problem. Maybe try turning off some of the more glitzier interface effects like Aero; if you're still running XP, then you can try switching to the Windows Classic interface.

If I turn off IDL then it renders faster than in Poser Pro. I've also noticed that Poser 8 is faster when starting up than PP was; its also faster on opening and saving large files—that having been something of a pet-peeve of mine for a while now.

Yeah, I'm pretty sure a lot of my GIMP speed issues are due to tile caching on Vista, but my laptop doesn't have the best graphics hardware either. I hear the new GEGL stuff could stand to be implemented more efficiently in future updates too, but that's going into territory I have no clue about and turning on GEGL doesn't seem to slow anything down at all. I think the real issue is I need a copy of Photoshop if I want to work on professional size art, but it comes at that professional price.

Quick tangent to that other topic: open development and freeware are great that way; I wouldn't have a quality digital art option otherwise and Poser wouldn't have any competition to improve over.

Damn, that does sound cool with the particles though, I was just thinking of making shit glow. Better speed on loading and file managing isn't anything to sneeze at either; that can really be the difference between squeezing in some creative time and finding something else to do when you're busy with other things. My 3d work has died down mainly just because of my version of DAZ's shit tablet support, it's a pain just to switch back to a mouse and I haven't gotten around to hopping up to Perkins for hundreds of megs of updating to Daz 3. Every update of Daz is like a game of russian roulette as to whether it'll still work on my system or erase all my content too.

I guess if all you wanted out of P8 was a look at PP 2k10, than it's hard to be disappointed. I hear a lot of Poser users saying that, I'm not sure what to make of that.

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Most laptops really don't have that much in the way of graphics hardware, unless it's something like a media center laptop. As for resolution, usually that isn't so much the app as it is how much RAM you have. Getting extra RAM might be cheaper than gunning for something like Photoshop. Speaking of, have you thought about getting Photoshop Elements? Or better yet, maybe try looking around on Amazon for a used legit copy of Photoshop CS2. That would put you on the upgrade path for Photoshop CS4, at least. Or—if it's still around—another alternative would be Paint Shop Pro. One thing I can tell you is if you're thinking about doing freelance illustrative work, most of the time the client isn't going to care about what software you're using; they're only concerned with whether or not you can do the job, so I wouldn't worry so much about needing "professional" software From what I've seen, your work is practically grade A, coming out of open-source software like Inkscape and GIMP.

I'll probably have an example image posted tomorrow (today, actually). I have the final rendering out now. I've never tried using pen tablets in 3D apps, though I know most of them support it. *grimaces* Now that you've said that, I'm not so sure if it's worth my while to download Daz|Studio for testing purposes.

Hah, there's always a lot of pissing and moaning about this-and-that not working right after some new software comes out. Just look at my issues with the cel-shading in P8 and that turned out not to be a bug at all but a new implementation with the line-width calculations that had been improved over previous versions. One thing I will say is I'm not so sure I like the new interface :\

Lessee here...Tablet works fine in Hexagon. It used to work fine in P6 cept a little touchy on the camera and posing, but now it decided to default to the selection tool at all times, even if I have other tools selected, so I couldn't tell you what the hell is going on there; it didn't used to do that. DAZ 2.x, if I try to move any sliders or pose or move the camera it's ridiculously touchy and it freaks out. I can just barely tap a slider and it'll shoot up into the thousands. I haven't re-installed it since I installed the tablet, so that might help, same with Poser, but I've been too lazy to try and be disappointed if it doesn't work.

I always despised Poser's interface. You've actually got me curious about what you don't dig about it now.

And speaking of the cel-shade, wasn't there something else you liked about it now aside from the line-width?

Inkscape can be a real pain in my ass sometimes, but I've really gotten used to GIMP. Besides it running really janky on high-rez pics, which is actually a fairly common complaint with Vista users, the GUI with floating docks can be really irritating; I've never been able to open it up and do a little work on a pic without having to wrangle docks around a little, and the docks stick around over the desktop if you minimize it, which is annoying when I want to open up Inkscape or XnView quick. Otherwise, I can do anything with it and Inkscape that I would need Photochop or illustrator for and it has a couple little bonuses like layer script support and you can set the stylus 'eraser' to whatever tool function you want instead of just the eraser. That last one is -really- handy since the eraser button options are completely independent from the other end's tool...not sure if color stays the same though...no, I think color selection is independent between the two ends also.

Oh, speaking of graphics stuff, I wanted to post some of the resources I've been working on recently like patterns, what size/res do you think they should be though? I have a lot of vector patterns I made that could make for decent brushes too, not sure what people would want for size if I just post them as .pngs though.

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