Category Archives: News

HiveWire3D Store Launch

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Dawn is coming but you can join the countdown

Dawn might still be a few weeks away (August 9th), but you can now finally visit HiveWire3D’s store and forums. There is already a good variety of content available from some well-established content creators. The roster currently includes: Lisa’s Botanicals, Songbird ReMix (Ken Gillard), Ryverthron Creations, CWRW, and Nerd 3D – so at the moment there is a very natural environment/wildlife theme to the store. This seem very fitting, but somewhat perplexing to a dystopian urban cyberzombie – where am I meant to recharge?. Undoubtedly more vendors will appear in the lead-up to Dawn’s release and the following frenzy of activity that will undoubtedly ensue with the first waves of her associated content.

So, the first thing you’ll notice about the store is that it isn’t particularly pretty. A little bit of green, black and a lot of white, but everything seems to work very well, and super quick. There are a lot of great features that will make using the site very easy when compared to some of the other similar sites out there that have many clunky and/or …err broken elements. The search feature works wonderfully, but with just over 180 items it is too early to give it a thorough testing and a DigiSprawl stamp of approval. I look forward to a store searching experience that doesn’t involve a trip to Google’s advanced search.

Some other cool store features include:

  • Customisable bundles – pick and choose which items you want)
  • Multiple customisable wishlists – ever feel the need to organise that huge wishlist into themed categories?
  • Never buy the same product twice – handy message on item thumbnail lets you know straight away if you have previously purchased the item from HiveWire3D
    10% rebate on purchases in the form of reward points
  • Products pages come with sections for user comments and images

Reward Points

While HiveWire will be utilising coupons, gift certificates, store credit and other stock standard ecommerce currency, they also have a nifty points reward points system (similar to Content Paradise?). Every time you make a purchase in the store you receive the equivalence of 10% back in these points, which can be used in subsequent purchases. One potential bone of contention is that a maximum of 30% of the total value of a cart can be funded with reward points. Of course, 30% off is still 30% off. The points also seem to work fine in conjunction with other specials, coupons etc.

To clarify 100 points = $1

How do you earn points?

I wouldn’t suggest buying things just to accumulate points (unless you want to get rid of that disposable cash as fast as possible), but there are several ways to earn points. The first is by signing up for store membership (1000), and the second by getting on the mailing list (500). The next thing you need to do is have a birthday (preferably as soon as possible) – 1000, win a competition – varies, have an image accepted into the monthly gallery – 500, and refer a friend using your unique referral code (after their first purchase) – 500.

So, $15 bucks worth of points for signing up doesn’t sound bad does it?

HiveWire3D: software inclusive

Given that Dawn comes in both Poser (9+) and DAZ Studio (4.6+) native, and all the talk of unity and such, HiveWire are attempting to include both parties equally. Potentially this could result in cross platform cooperation, learning, and influence unmatched even at the height of the Generation 4 figures, namely the polymorphic digital goddess, Victoria 4. Given the buzz around Dawn right now it is not unforeseeable that Victoria may soon have to come to a power sharing arrangement. The forums have already come to life with a friendly buzz of activity, so why not drop in and say hi.

How the inevitable DS Vs Poser skirmishes are handled remains to be seen, but let’s hope that stays to a minimum.

For content creators

The Hive is looking very attractive for content creators. Other than being a store with a potentially massive market appeal HiveWire3D also offer a very competitive 60/40 split (you/them), with the potential to push this up to 70/30 for higher volume sales. There is no exclusivity, so CCCs can sell here there and everywhere – even the same product (thought that affects the base royalty rate). Obviously given this detail, all rights are reserved by the creators. More info can be found here.

Dawn Release Date Announced

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Update: Store now open.
Just a few weeks since Dawn’s initial announcement HiveWire3D have given us a date. For some the wait has been long and restless, but on the 9th of August, 2013 Dawn will be available from HiveWire3D’s website at time of publishing), with additional content brokers Poser World, Renderosity, RuntimeDNA, YURdigital, and numerous content creators (many of whom are of great renown) being at the forefront of the charge to offer up as much content as possible at launch.

The enthusiasm from the community has been enormous, and with creators and brokers coming together like this, it seems all but a foregone conclusion that Dawn will be a massive success from day one. Launching the new figure for free for a limited time certainly won’t hurt either.

If you’re still catching up and have no idea who or what Dawn is, you can read the initial post about Dawn here – full coverage of the developments up to the days before the release date announcement. To as briefly as possible fill the blanks, Dawn is a new Poser/Daz Studio compatible figure developed by Chris Creek and HiveWire3D, famed creator of many Poser figures including Victoria and Michael.

HiveWire3D job opportunity

If you’re looking to get in on the action, and have some experience as a product tester, HiveWire3D are looking for team members. More details are available from their Facebook page.

 

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Terragen 3 Coming Soon – Win 1 of 5 Copies

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terragen 3 depth of field

Win a copy of Terragen 3 Professional

Back on the 13th of June Planetside Software announced Terragen 3. Don’t expect it in months. Expect it any day now. No specific date was set but July 2013 is the nominated month. It will be available in three versions, “Professional”, “Creative”, and, in keeping with Planetside’s business model, a free version. To promote the upcoming release there are five copies of the program up for grabs – subscribe to the Terragen 3 blog for your chance to win.

Terragen – the brief

To give a little background on the program, Terragen is a 3D terrain and natural scenery creation and rendering program. Matt Fairclough was responsible for the first versions of the program, and continues its development alongside a small team. The history of Terragen is not easy to precisely trace. The oldest version I could dig up was version 0.4. This limited feature demo version is copyrighted 2008, but the ZIP archive contained files as old as 1996, so there could well have been a public release older than this.

Since these early days Terragen has gone on to develop industry standard features and tools that have seen it put to work generating and rendering environments and terrain for film, television and games. Some examples include the recent Man of Steel and at least as far back as 2003’s Gospel of John, and Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life.

Terragen has been providing some very good tools for its price for some time now. One aspect that will appeal to many 3D enthusiasts new and old (and just about anyone in the business) is the scalable nature of the program, which can handle everything from the creation of entire planets right down to highly detailed ground level scenes, and even macroscopic style plant renders.

Other key features include: volumetric clouds and realistic atmospheric effects; procedural terrains; large-scale instancing (perfect for quickly generating large vegetated areas); overhanging geometry; global illumination; support for planet scale, and finely detailed but large displacements; anti-aliasing and motion blur; HDR output; node based texture/shader editor.

terragen 3 spherical cameraTerragen 3 features

Reportedly, the price of Terragen 3 is set to increase over previous versions, but as of yet no details have emerged. There is no comprehensive feature list and details about which version of the program will/won’t have access to which features is not yet available. One confirmed feature restriction was that “Creative” won’t have the layered render tools.

The tried and true, though sometimes complex user interface of Terragen has returned much unchanged for all versions of T3. For some this will undoubtedly be disappointing, but a relief for seasoned vets. Terragen is not one of those 3D apps that novices can just dive in and have a tinker and a play, well not for most. Most users would be best directed to hit YouTube or the Planetside forums for some tutorials and pointers.

For Poser/DAZ Studio users, and modellers everywhere the incorporation of FBX support will be a huge plus. What, if any sort of posing tools will be included is not clear, but more advanced export options will always be welcome. Fingers crossed that some form of SSS support will be included.

terragen 3 improved global illumination

Confirmed Features

  • Comprehensive layer and render element output
  • Enhanced 3D preview
  • Updated Global Illumination
  • Improved population control including per-instance editing and color variation
  • Support for FBX and other industry-standard data interchange formats
  • Performance enhancements for localized cloud rendering
  • Object mesh deformation
  • Content library for organizing and accessing scene files, objects, and textures
  • Enhanced DEM format and georeferencing support
  • New spherical camera
  • Depth of Field blur
  • Linux render node

For many, the price of Terragen, when compared to the likes of the feature rich versions of Vue, is well worth the extra time it takes to learn the program, and with these updates it could well be on its way to becoming a serious competitor for many more users. I’ll certainly be carefully watching for more feature and price announcements. Don’t forget to sign up to the blog subscription for your chance to win one of those copies.

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A New Dawn Due This Weekend… For Some

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Update: HiveWire3D announces Dawn Release Date 9th August. Store now open.

Dawn to heal the split in the DAZ and Poser community?

A good number of you have likely heard the rumblings about a new female figure that is both Poser and DAZ Studio compatible. If you’re a regular on DAZ and Poser FB pages, or the Renderosity and RuntimeDNA forums, you could well know a good deal about this new figure by now. If you tend to get your news from the DAZ forum, or somewhere way down the deepest darkest reaches of the grapevine, this might all be a new revelation for you.

The new lady’s name is Dawn, and an upstart mob known as HiveWire3D are her creators. With a public announcement made just back on the 20th of June it looks like the release is only around the corner. Dawn will be free for a limited time after release.

There was a moment of excitement when I went to check HiveWire3D’s Facebook page for updates. There was something that looked a lot like a release announcement: “Final version of Dawn to be ready by end of this week! Once she is in hand, we’ll announce her release date and get things moving with all interested content creators.” Of course, without coffee in hand, I took this to mean that she would be released by the end of the week. No dice! Content creators will get their hands on her first, and then we’ll hear about the general release. It makes sense that a new figure should be released with a certain amount of content and vendor interest from day one. Runtimes can be very unkind to a figure without a wardrobe.

 

 So, who is Hivewire3D

This is a question that troubled me some. The initial announcement indicated that the team contained the talents of the creator responsible for Victoria and Michael line of figures. But, who is this mysterious individual? Google turns up very little when you look for the creator of these figures, but after a couple of hours I finally realised I should be looking for who is behind HiveWire3D, not Victoria (durrr). So, Eric Merritt turns up, and then, following soon after, is Christopher Creek, who IS the man responsible for the figures in question.

Eric and Christopher [edit – also e-commerce and marketing guru Steve Kondris], HiveWire3D’s founders, have a long history in the industry spanning back to the top echelons of DAZ 3D, and Zygote Media Group. Among many other more impressive feats, Zygote is responsible for a number of early Poser figures. If you’re a DAZ/Poser trivia buff you will undoubtedly know a split within Zygote resulted in the birth of DAZ Productions. So it’s clear, these guys are not new kids on the block. They know their stuff inside and out.

But what about Dawn?

Enough history and more about our new lady. She isn’t technically compatible with both programs, well not in a singular package, and that’s due to the different weight mapping solutions employed by DAZ Studio and Poser. So, what we really have is two identical figures except one is weighted for Poser and the other for DS. If I’m not mistaken this means that content creators will have a relatively simple time in ensuring their products work for both versions of the figure, at least as far as fitting goes. When it comes to materials, many a vendor would rather walk through burning buildings than go to the lengths of creating two sets for two very different rendering programs. Still, given the differences between the two programs, this is probably the only real way to have a universal figure with all the flexibility it was intended to include at design.

As good as DSON is, it just can’t beat a Poser native weighted figure for performance and flexibility. For many it is close enough, especially for those that happily use both programs.

Weight maps

Being a weight mapped figure, Dawn will conform to the new standards Poser and DS users have come to expect. Although with unweighted Victoria and Michael (and the others) still making up a large proportion of figures in use (not to mention selling!), for some, Dawn might be a first when it comes to serious work/play with weighted figures. Oh, what you users will realise you’ve been missing all this time! As you can see from the images she has plenty of well-defined details, and has nice natural bending in the joints.

Posable

In addition to all the usual movable and posables, Dawn also has a posable jaw (not reliant on morphs), and individually posable toes (Genesis 2/Victoria 6 also has these features). Unlike any figure I have seen, she comes with two sets of eyelashes – one regular and the other “super long” for those fantasy characters. Looking at the image of the ear it seems the figure is designed with subdivision in mind. Dawn seems to be a slightly higher poly figure than the base Genesis 1/2, but a single level of subdivision should be fine on most systems, and then perhaps another at render time for larger images. Over all Dawn appears to have a good level of geometry detail for most uses typical to DS and Poser applications, and looks set to make a valuable addition to runtimes on both sides of the software border.

 

Reality support

Paolo Ciccone has thrown the support of Reality behind Dawn, and has added her material zones to Reality 3 and is working on ACSEL shaders for Reality 2. These additions will be free. Paolo states the goal is to have “excellent renders of Dawn straight out of the box for all Reality users.” Given the creators humorous comments (intentionally so?), likening Victoria 4’s domination of runtimes everywhere to a looming potato famine, and his mute indifference to Genesis, his enthusiasm for Dawn is no surprise.

Destined to succeed, or another figure to the tomb?

New figures are nothing new to the DAZ/Poser community, but few, especially independent ones, tend to go on to live full healthy and broadly supported lives. Antonia is one of the more recent examples of a great figure fighting a valiant fight, but ultimately failing to take off. The figure came in both weight mapped (Poser 9+) and unweighted (Poser + DAZ) varieties, and was Posers best hope for a current weight mapped figure. Her site and dedicated store is all but abandoned, and the other retailers like Runtime DNA and Renderosity only have a handful of compatible products on their shelves.

What is to say that Dawn won’t go down this street? First and foremost, experience. Between them, Eric Merritt and Christopher Creek have a lot of experience, not just putting quality products together, but in managing and growing businesses and communities. Ensuring Dawn is 100% finished before release seems a priority, as is getting solid content creator support. Both of these factors can only lead to a launch that will be as successful as it can be. Enthusiastic and innovative content creators will turn heads.

A big factor in getting people in right from the start will be the limited time free release. This will undoubtedly have a positive feedback for content creators and the community at large. Finally, given the current state of scene with the generation 4/Genesis/Genesis 2 split, now might just be the perfect time for a new cross compatible figure to emerge. It is unlikely that Dawn will be the extinction event for any of these figures, but she could well become a viable alternative. Who knows what the future will bring.

One anomaly is that HiveWire3D’s figures are and will be without genitals. One of the stated reasons for this decision is that they want to pursue business and educational channels in the future. To me, it seems strange to offer a product that isn’t anatomically correct when educational channels are being perused, but then again I can imagine some problems occurring during high school 3D arts classes. For a large portion of the community this won’t pose a problem, but for instances where full or partial nudity is required it will involve a greater degree of creativity, and perhaps expense, to get the figures ready for these uses. To me this rings puritanical, or pandering to these sensibilities, but then I’m not the one attempting to launch a new figure/content business.

All the best to HiveWire3D and their soon to be released Dawn. May it be the first of many.

At the time of writing HiveWire3D’s website was unavailable, apparently still under construction, but according to a message on their FB group we can expect to see it up very soon.