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I used to download to an external USB drive then back everything up to DVD unfortunately one of my oldest backup dvds has developed read troubles lately. Very frustrating.
I used to do the same. I have my installer files on an external, and the older stuff (back when I was using DS3 Advanced) are still on CD's. I won't be anymore, simply because if it's that old and I haven't used it in a year, I don't need it that badly. lol
I actually have a NAS here in the house. It was a Christmas gift from my geeky dad. The force runs strong in my family (the nerdy one!) He also has a server I can back things up to for disaster recovery purposes. The problem is, this stuff never made it that far. Things were hectic around Christmas. I am a backup fanatic and thought I had the RDNA stuff backed up several times. I did- on my work computer! Thought I had copied everything over but those copies were corrupted or something. I've found everything but 7 files. Most of those are pose sets I bought and some textures. The biggies are there- Kali, White Wolf, some of the other unique things I loved that didn't make it over here.
Now I'm going through all my backups and making sure I have everything from YUR Digital and double checking my RDNA stuff. I also decided to make a visual catalog of my older stuff. It's a big job, but I'm getting tired of losing things down the black hole of digital content. I have my Rendo stuff well organized, so I'm starting with them. I made notebooks in Evernote, since I use it so much for everything. I started one for V4s and another for M4s. Every character gets their own note with promo pics, links, order #, etc. That way, I can tag them by store, generation, etc. I can also add what I paid, what sale was going on, when and where I used them, etc.
I probably won't do that with all the clothes and props, there are just too many. Maybe just faves. But characters, sets and scripts should be okay. It will be my "Smart Content" for stuff that never shows up in there (especially from other stores.) I need to actually see what I have, regardless of what my internet connection is doing at the time. I'm tired of trying to remember, or spending hours looking through orders and product libraries trying to find stuff.
Evernote has powerful search functions, great tags, and lots of note options, reminders, and ways to organize stuff. Plus I don't have to be at a computer to use it. It synchronizes across all my devices. I already use it as the start of many of my books.
Here's an example of what my V4 notebook looks like so far:
Thank you all! I'm glad you like it. It was a fun one to do and came together fairly easily, which surprised me.
Wow, Serum, you have THREE monitors? I'm jealous! I like the idea of putting it in the middle and extending the forest. Let me see if I can come up with a right and left forest for you.
I have had a nas in one form or another for years as well and yes I'm a self admitted geek. Unfortunately the first one which I built myself from a pc that used to belong to one of my kids suffered a hard drive failure in the disk array so a lot of things that were stored there were lost. Fortunately it was an "extend" kind of array not raid so it would fill up drive 1 then write to drive 2 and so on and it was the 3rd drive that died so while I didn't lose everything I did lose the things most recently written. I replaced that with a WD MyBookLive 3tb standalone which has worked great since.
I'm currently using an "offline" hard drive to store things in order to guard against disk failures somewhat. Cloud is an option but that can become somewhat expensive for a few TB long term.
Ouch! That's when you cry. A LOT. And then drink. A LOT. LOL
Well it was my own fault. I made the choice to maximize space at the cost of reliability which I wouldn't make at work so I knew the risks. I think the original nas (freenas.org) kept the disks running instead of letting them spin down and idle when not being accessed that contributed to the disk failure.
You're very organized! My evernotes for Daz has the screen shot of the product page/promos and then tags such as female clothing, male clothing, sci fi, fantasy, modern, furniture, props, etc. One of these days I have to start organizing content using Ice Dragon's method, but thus far I've been to scared to mess around with renaming etc. I should probably start soon though as I now have over 1000 Daz products and if I wait, it will be even more difficult.
Actually, I'm overcompensating for not being organized enough. I should've started organizing things ages ago. Now I have thousands of DAZ items and can't remember half of what I've bought. I've tried categorizing in DAZ too and get frustrated because the things I really want to see often don't show up in Smart Content no matter what (many are older and in poser file formats.) Plus, I want to see things in more than a tiny little square. I'm saving a lot of promo pics, the ones that actually sparked the ideas and prompted me to buy the items in the first place. Seems like the best way to jog my memory of what I wanted to do with that item when I bought it.
So I guess I'm creating my own product library on my computer, which it sounds like you are doing too.
I'm still trying to figure out the best way to organize it in Evernote. I'm finding it's great for mocking up book cover ideas too, since I can snip and link to and from very places, even to other notes in Evernote.
yeh on my days off from creating awesomeness (teehee) i love playing star citizen so i gotta have a cockpit lol
i use 3X 20.1 inch IPS monitors
LOL! What are days off???
Spanish Rose/Flamenco for Generation 3
I posted these to the Wear Them All thread, thought I'd copy here before I lose track of them. The Spanish Rose series is gorgeous. Most of it renders well, with a few issues on the skirt:
I'm finding there's some bunching in the crotch of the Matador pants as well as some in the breasts and crotch of the Flamenco top and skirt:
I tried doing some smoothing, and some combo of what I was doing crashed my computer several times, so I had to start over. Here they are in the Passions texture, and it renders beautifully in Iray. It also hides all that bunching very well. Unfortunately, Skirt 1 distorts badly with any leg movement. There are quite a few other skirts in this set, so I'll try them too.
I do not have any smoothing on here, so there are a few poke throughs on the Matador too. Surprisingly his footwear fit very well. Hers, with heels, didn't because her feet probably need to be in a high heel position first. I'll try that in the next round and some different textures as well (I have them all.) This is Ophelia 7 and FW Malachi dancing the night away. First pose is from Zeddicuss's Rhythm of Passion (Rendo), second set is Beloved Poses (DAZ.)
A few more for you. Skirt #2 also distorts a bit. I would love to figure out how to fix this, since these skirts come with tons of poses and morphs for V3. I might be able to port them over through Cross Dresser, or just parent the skirt rather than fit it. I'll have to play some more.
Here's the Spanish Heart textures:
And here's the Amores Gitanos textures with skirt 1 on Vega for V3. Digiport's Flamenco and Skirts Poses comes with poses for V3 as well as the different skirts too. There's some distortion in the textures, but I don't have any smoothing or Sub D on here. What's surprising is how good the Spanish Rose Chalet de Sevilla looks in Iray. This set must be ancient. The floor might need some tweaking but the rest is in pretty good shape. There's another texture for it that I'll pick up soon and render, based on these results.
Ok, here's the Ole! texture for the clothing and the Los Azahares texture for Castel de Sevilla set. There are a bunch of accessories that come with the dress that I still need to render. A fan, a rose for her hair, and a lace mantilla. I'll do those soon.
I didn't put any hair on Malachi, so I'm wondering if this is coming from the hat. I'm not wild about the lighting, composition or camera angles here. Just wanted to show some of the clothing and scene textures.
I used the SY Ultra Big Dress template fit to Skirt 1 only. It still distorts in the front, but doesn't seem to be as bad. It doesn't follow as well as Wear Them All. I dug into the bones of the skirt and found a bunch of bend morphs. Not sure if they were added with the SY templates or there all along.
So I adjusted a few things to get the fit better here. Some tweaks to bump maps and a higher res floor texture would make Los Azahares look better. This is just the default conversion. I'm not wild about the blue polkadots on the dress (could definitely be reshaded!) but I LOVE all the textures for the Matador. The detail on those is incredible. I've done nothing to them- these are just the default conversions. He looks great, and not any fitting issues, just a tiny bit of poke through that can be fixed with smoothing.
When I changed Ophelia's pose, the skirt was a mess, so I ended up applying smoothing instead. It didn't cover everything in the extreme pose, so I still had to use those bend morphs:
For the final version below, I applied Sub D and smoothing to her shirt and skirt, his jacket and pants, and the floor. The textures look better, but scary things happen when you try to Sub-D the walls. They crinkle really strangely like paper.
Despite a lot of tweaking, that skirt just goes nuts in more extreme poses. I'll keep playing. VWD is a possibility, so is parenting but not autofitting. I think it's worth it to figure it out. Lots of great potential here that has not been recreated for newer generations.
Ah, thanks for that. I was trying to convert a v4 shirt last night to G2F and couldn't figure out why I was having such a hard time when I've converted so many others successfully. It had been awhile, though, and I totally forgot to use the Dress Rig!
@Llynara Thanks for the reminder about Yurdigital. I've only gotten free stuff there but I double checked that I have everything just in case. One never knows when a freebie will be a must have that I need for a scene. I also love that wallpaper you did. Excellent!
The Coloseum for Poser
Ok, so this set just came out today in the Vanishing Point sale. Bargain old stuff? Only made for Poser and not guaranteed to work at all in DAZ? Throw down that gauntlet, baby! Let's go! So here are my tortured attempts at making this usable and totally avoiding doing anything productive today. Note: All of these pics are WAY bigger, just click on them to open the full size.
DAZ Iray:
Default textures, with Sub-D added. Lord have mercy! I feel like I'm stuck in an old video game.
Retexturing with DA Stone Shaders: "My God, Jim! I'm a doctor, not an architect!"
Poser
Firefly: Yucky
Superfly: Surprisingly...passable. WHY LORD, WHY????
Honestly, I'm afraid to turn up the details, it might look bad.
DAZ 3Delight- Not horrible, not great. I stuck it in the Top of the World Skydome. The set is so huge I had to increase the skydome scale a lot to stuff it in there.
DAZ Iray- One more time, similar lighting (First Light HDRI) and exact camera angles and textures:
Conclusion: With better bump maps and textures, it MIGHT be usable. The model itself is interesting, and I certainly love the history it's based on, but I'm not sure it's worth the work. For $3 I'm not out much, so I'll probably think about it for a while and see if I can come up with anything. I'm not good at modeling OR retexturing yet. This might be a "someday" project.
oh dear. In the DS versions, you can see some REALLY bad problems. The texturing or the mesh or whatever on the seats inside.....it's more noticeable on the 3delight version.
Unfortunately, it's MUCH worse close up. The set is huge, and with the right textures might look very good.
Here are some Superfly renders set at a medium quality. The closer you get, the worse it looks.
id consider taking it in breaking down the base model and re texturing it
I'd love to have a really good coloseum/colliseum (however you want to spell it.) I'm afraid this one isn't it.
"Sun Salutation"
V4 is still gorgeous. She converts easily and wonderfully to Iray. (After working with V3 for a while, V4 is a dream to work with!)
There are so many products available for her, often for pennies. There are also some beautiful characters still being made for her at other stores. Some even come with Iray and Superfly shaders. The versatility of Generation 4 is still amazing after a decade. Finding the content can be a pain in the rear, but rendering it- what a delight.
Recently I picked up a bunch of Maddelirium characters on sale, including this one- Sakkara for V4. She comes with all kinds of options and makeups. Normally I use Anagenesis shaders, but for some reason they made her eyes look weird, even with manual application. So I went with V3D Digitimes Iray shaders here.
The dress and hair are SAV's DragonLady. These gorgeous textures are from Renapd. Designed for Poser but they look great in Iray. I added Uber shaders and upped the metallicitya bit. I did about .50 for areas with gold and .25 for the rest to make the fabric a little shiny.
The set is Top of the World by Bitwelder. I added Uber and set emission to 50k with a peach color to match the sky. Painters Lights were used to help light the scene inside the skydome. The backdrop renders a bit pixelated, but a DOF or some postwork take care of that issue easily.
Here's a wide screen wallpaper version:
Maharajah for M3
Here is DarwinMishap's Ahmad for G3M wearing Maharajah for M3 by Renapd (Rendo). There are many pieces to this set, including jewelry, hats, swords, the chair and ottoman, several clothing items and a really cool long coat that I'll render next. There are a ton of textures, all mix and match. You can get so many looks from this set. There's a FREE add on expansion that includes even more textures and even an M3 Majaharah character. Did I mention it's on sale till midnight for 6 bucks? Yeah!
It renders very well in Iray, and I suspect even better in Poser. (The DragonLady dress I posted above looks amazing in Poser.) There are also poses for M3 and the clothing, but I'm not sure how to even begin converting those over. I adjusted a pose here, and there's still a bit of collision because these clothes are billowy. A little texture stretching too, but not bad. Deformers, smoothers, or VWD might help, but overall I think it looks very good.
Click and zoom in for more detail. It is a bit grainy. Hammam (background) is a memory hog and somehow my render settings got reset, so the render ended at 2 hours.
That looks gorgeous!
(I think I need to dig the outfit out of the depths of my Poser directory *g*)
You are such an amazing artist Llynara!!!
Your art is always so stunning!!!
Marvelous renders
Thank you all very much! I am really enjoying working with these older clothing sets. And Renapd's are top notch. OMG, so beautiful! Making them look good in Iray is fun.
I do love the colors in the clothing/props, and it fits him so well. Thank you for showing this!
I just get an image of you going to a charity shop and purchasing old clothes and re working them into fashion icons haha
How did you know??? LOL Are you spying on me?
I confess, I'm a bargain queen online and offline. They know me pretty well at the thrift stores...
BUT- that's how I afford my 3D Barbie addiction!!!
not knocking it at all haha i have soo many friends who are vintage models that do the same thing! :)
I can't help it, I love finding bargains and then seeing what I can with them. It really should be an Olympic sport!
Im totally down with it just because i love to upcycle stuff :)