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Rick 4F

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Everything posted by Rick 4F

  1. Just upgraded the 4Forum. If you see anything being "off" or not seeing anything, like black text on a black background for example, could you please let me know if so? Biggest change for you, is the 'customizer' in the top bar giving you a wee bit more control over this sites appearance then before. <- -- Rick
  2. 'nomad' 'drifter' 'wanderer' ... ???
  3. Just a prop. Saddle was bought with the help of your donations. Also fun to get: And then my OS pauses program after program, including the render running over 2 Mac's for several ours. Panic? Whazzdat?
  4. It's getting a bit crowded in there....
  5. Don't give me idea's! I feel like 'the Wicked Witch of the West' sometimes. Except I'm not 'melting' but 'drowning' in idea's! But we'll see. Let see what I got up my sleeve first.
  6. My desktop is now littered by artwork from Wallace Wood for reference and inspiration. When I decided to upgrade an old image of mine I had trouble figuring out the setting/background. While working on the spacesuit, I realized it was going into a direction I remember from old comics by Wallace Wood. 'Sally Forth' in her skin-tight, near painted-on, silver spacesuit for example. Interesting enough this artists illustrations are in large part responsible for how I got interested in sharply dressed women. Even tough at the time I had no idea it would evolve into where we are now. I've been trying to recreate some '50's, '60's like sci-fi machines (during the heatwave with 30C in my workroom), like you can see on magazines "pulp" covers from around those area's, to place in the background of the image. It's always nice if those big bulky, round machines with levers and big round buttons have some sort of function, besides just being there to fill up the room. So why not have them around to support some sort of experimental stasis- chamber? Of course anyone who wanders into an infested research center/vessel, needs to be able to properly defend themselves. Digging around in 'scifi "pulp"' I stumbled over this. Wow, what a great piece and evokes so many memories. :) Wouldn't mind having that on my wall. Talking about old Sci-Fi shows, while I finished the pressurized injection "gun(?)", I was looking at the render and some other, old, memories showed up as it looked a bit, if you use your imagination a bit wildly, like a certain iconic spaceship. Which got me thinking, I know I shouldn't but I can't help it, the beginning of a new story started to develop in my head. Something like 'Lara's 6' or something, something, I dunno. Like I wrote I can't help it, wish I could put a lit on that part of my brain but new ideas keep surfacing there. Maybe best if I finish what I'm working on first before taking another detour. :)
  7. ahhPFFFFFFFFFff!! (Ahem...) ↓ Just something I've been trying to update for a while. Full silver body spacesuit & rebreather with a stronk '40-'50 scifi spacebabes cover illustration feel. Struggling with the background though, and tentacles. Always those tentacles.... ↓ This nasty thing (semi-automatic injector for remote controlled mechanical arms), will go somewhere else. ↓ Maybe an update to the 'MNW Core infomercial' page (not sure) but it got flying cars now... Need to replace some buildings for scifi ones, looks a bit too modern (flying cars or not).
  8. I'm currently coughing my heart inside out for the 6th day, combined with sneezing, running nose on/off fever and some more. According to my doc its not COVID-19, just a stupid cold, but on the heavy side. To do something, but hang here like a zombie, I thought today to upload some images in the latex club section. Long story short. I managed to delete that entire section. Oh I got backups but those things are about everything, you can't pick and choose to only restore certain parts. I can manually put most things back though. Just not now as my energy is already gone for the day. Lesson learned when sick, stay the F* away from things with delete buttons.
  9. Well, maybe I've spoken too soon. More disk space is no problem, sending bulk mail is. Thanks to the #@%xxx!# spammers, hosting providers aren't happy with providing options for sending bulk mail. And I made things worse by changing to Sendgrid. I've just managed to get an extension on what this forum can send for the next 29 days, after that...
  10. I've had it up to here with my current host. They are nice, helpful people but expensive for only 15GB of storage. Because they don't allow me to send bulk mail, updates to members of this 4Forum who have signed up to receive these (1x, maybe 2x), a month news letter, I'm forced to use 3d party email providers. The previous one (Sparkpost) suddenly, against previous made promises, lowered the free of charge mails able to be send, to 500/month. If I wanted to send more I had to pay 30.- a month. Not going to happen. Also they where no-longer supported by the forum software engineers because of the trouble they had dealing with this company in the past. So I tried another one (Sendgrid). The forum supported this one but I, had a lot of trouble installing it (which in the process even took this site down for half a day) and now installed, only now, I figured out I didn't read properly and I can only send 100 mails/day. So that's it. I'm going to look around for another host which allows me to send directly bulk mail. And maybe one with a bit more disk space. If and when it happens it should go smoothly with all the backups that I have, but I'm a bit skeptical. This is one of these things where a lot can go wrong. Anyway, if you read this you know there might be some unexpected downtime in the near future.
  11. "I tripped over a wire" yesterday trying to set up a new 3d party email provider so I can send people who choose to, 4Forum updates. Hence the 4Forum was down for almost 18 hours or so. 4Forum is back up now (duh) and I'm now trying to figure out how to re-set up the internal mail notification system. My apologies for the trouble.
  12. We're here in the 'lowlands' at the end of another heatwave (temps above 25C) and I've just send a render off to Google's "Zinc", as with this heat it's not healthy to have 2-3 or even 1computer rendering a detailed background in an already warm (29C) work room. I'm still evaluating that service with my free trail but it's easy to setup, quick to launch and moves the render load (and heat) off and away from me. If I can keep my renders between the 5-10 bucks I might stick with it. What Zync is rendering now is an 'EI interior' scene that took a bit to put together but I think looks now pretty great. I started this mid section based on one drawing by creativore. The 'mutated' stem on the right was an experiment with the last plug-in I bought for the 3D program I use. Maybe something for later as I first need to figure out how to create a semi-transparent slimy gooey texture, that doesn't drive my render times into the sky and beyond. One thing I noticed over time is that an image becomes more interesting (at least for me) if you add differences in hight (plateaus). To get a bit more grip on that I added in these temporarily scientists. After a bit I decided on a camera angle and put two cylinders in to see how that would look as stasis pods. Yah, well, no. Didn't look like anything I like so I opened a new document and created something more inspired and put that in. This is sort-off ok but way too bulky and attention grabbing. I also don't like the huge rotation cylinders so it's back to the new document and remodel these "pods". This is a lot better with a more elegant rotating mechanism and not too much room inside the pod if its inhabiter wakes up. As usual I model more then you'll see in the render but it makes me feel better that this could work in reality. There's still some stuff missing but now after a while I have most things where I want them. So I open a new document and copy the models from this scene one by one over to the new scene. I start with the floor, texture it then copy the next thing over and texture that and so on, in a (slightly) structured and layered approach. And then after more time has past things start to look, interesting. This is somewhere around test render 20. I'm still tweaking things like light, glow and reflections, while continuing building up the background. Test render 28. I added a HDRI to see how it looked if I had some reflections and light from an industrial complex in this scene. I didn't build (this time), anything behind the camera. In another test I mirrored the front scene to the back and the only result was a render time that tripled. The HDRI did the same and gave off too much red light so after a few other test renders I removed it. As for the final result, you'll have to wait till I have everything for this image ready.
  13. No pictures this time just me moaning (a bit). First things first: I've just made some minor updates to the "Escape pod 16 image", where I removed some white spots on the left of the image and added a slightly modified harness to a second version. https://4f-creations.com/site/forum/index.php?/gallery/image/7567-escape_pod16_sd2jpg/ V2: https://4f-creations.com/site/forum/index.php?/gallery/image/7566-escape_pod16_sd2_v2jpg/ Bulk mail: I'm using bulk mail to tell people when there is something new. I keep that bulk mailing to the absolute minimum as I hate getting over-communicated with stuff myself. Currently there are +360 people on the mailing list. To send bulk-mail I must use a third party because my hosting company has a limit of emails I can send per hour which conflicts with the forum bulk-mail software. So after climbing some technical high mountains I got Sparkpost working. Three years ago they promised to have forever a free option to send under the 10.000 mails. Of course corporate greed knows no limit and they broke their promise this year. I either have to cough up 30.- bucks a month (to send 360 emails! Muhaghahaha), or be limited to 500 emails a month. So if I want to send 2 bulk-mails a month I'm sporked. But there is Sendgrid, who seems to be not yet corrupted by greed so I'm going to try to switch to that. Wish me luck as I have little knowledge about DNS, CNAMES value's and what not. Cinema 4D Talking about corporate greed, Maxon the company behind my favorite 3D application, Cinema 4D, fired its 3 founders and hired an Ex-Adobe guy. Do I need to write more? Last year the maintenance price went up by 50.- Euro to 550. That was ok because it has been that price for years.This year it's suddenly 720.- and they quit the maintenance option and have instead a nice phone-home every 14 days extortion in place. An subscription of course which means if you don't pay, you can no longer access your own files. There's still a perpetual license but everybody knows that's going the way of the Dodo soon. Being a loyal customer for 14 years or so holds apparently zero value for Nemechek/Maxon. Fine, they're no longer getting my money. So I'll stick with what I have until it stops working and then I'll switch over to Blender. In the meantime I try to make sometime free to roam around in blender to get familiar with it. One picture to end: No pictures I wrote... Ugh. That's not nice. Lemme see... This is as preliminary as it gets. See it as a sketch, nothing set in stone. Just trying to get a feel for it but I like the idea of zooming all the way out. Of course if this evolves into a final piece in some sort of form, I'll add a more zoomed-in version too.
  14. I think I made it that way in the past because a friend could not stop talking about seeing Jessica Biel being strapped in in the movie 'Stealth'. Although it has its charm.... It's a bit low tech though. I got some more advanced framing now. I still have to deal with sky_light. Meh, it was me being afraid, getting out of my comfort zone. I think I managed it, largely. In a way it's not hurtful to the eye. Still got some experimenting and practicing to do in that area. In a way, outdoors latex can create fantastic shine and reflections. In an other way, if you really look at the reflections, it can become pretty ugly with what it reflects not only going vertical but even upside-down. In that way I prefer the "sterile" studio reflections more then those outdoor.
  15. Heatwave in Europe and I'm thinking of women in latex. Madness, this is madness I say! Uhm oh, where wasI? After last upload I was 'hungry' for more and strolling through some old files I went for updating the 'EI' story line. Having set my mind on the featuring girl, I began figuring out the background. I'm still flip-flopping with that as it could be just before "the event" (don't seek too much behind that) or slightly after the event. Before: indoors high-tech, after: outdoors sky, water. Indoors means I have a lot to build but have an easy time with the shiny light reflections on the latex suit. Outdoors means a lot less building but getting the reflections on the suit right will be challenging if I want the woman to merge properly into the scene. So I made some things, put some HTML 5 together then started on the high-tech interior. First thing I made was this: More a 3D sketch then anything but sometimes you just need to let your "pen" go where it wants to go and see where it ends. I then realized that to fully understand how that interior (where the above would end up, or not), would look like was to build the outside first. Years ago, probably over an decade, I made this 3D ship for the 'EI' story I had in my head. Sadly it no longer is 'sufficient' for my needs so I began rebuilding it. Having the outer hull redefined I could start figuring out the interior. Yeah it's gone be small but it's not a luxury vessel, just enough room to do your thing and on occasion bump your head at the low ceiling. And there the flow of "what comes next" stopped. So I directed my attention towards the escape pod and ended up with this (still needs some work on the inside): And then I remembered an old image from the past (that I feel sort off failed) and I'm now thinking of doing a total rework of that one and skip on the interior idea.
  16. If you're viewing the MNW or IE stories and you use for that the Apple Safari browser you'll "miss out" on some ambiance enhancing sound FX that auto load. Safari blocks Auto Play until there has been "user action" -> you *click* a button (mouse over events no-longer work since short) and from there on you've "agreed" to have sound auto-play for that specific document. It means I need to re-edit all scenes that load with sound that have auto-play to have a click-button (user action) first. I'm not too sure that will look anywhere near great. It's not impossible but requires time and I'm not too sure I'll implement these buttons as they will break most of the 'flow'. In the mean time there is a solution that you as Safari user can do though. You can go into Safari's preferences and for this website turn on "Allow All Auto-Play".
  17. Been a while so I "scraped some scrap" together to give some idea of some things I'm working on. Firstly 2 chest patches: I love making these. Usually they end up deformed, scaled down on a shoulder so they don't take front stage but this time they'll be presented fully frontal, left and right. Then there was this image that almost instantly started to 'spook' around in my head telling me this story. It's called 'The Auction' about a Princess up for sale, standing there rather stoic, more busy with herself (one of the reasons she ended up there) then the crowd around her trowing money at her display position in a bid to outbid each other. I have parts of the image somewhat foggy in my head but need to work on the details a bit more (something Arabic oriented with Jawa like creatures???). I did start working though on one of the greedy, grabby claws, eagerly reaching for the Princess ankles: I'm thinking of curving the left/right side so there's a more 'natural' and less static flow. Then yesterday a new idea for a new "infomercial" for the MNW storyline 'Core' section popped up in my head. You know with the Shárànda and Meganoid bits and pieces? I will try to keep it simple this time like the Shárànda part. Anyway on the left you can see the background as simple as possible which is rendering now as we speak. Those curtains take hours to finish. Next up part of a model I started to make when another image began telling me a story. The visible chain is one of 5 that work as guides for girl that is kept in this rather old cylindrical room. The problem with the story the image 'told' me is that it's somewhere in the 'middle'. So I need to figure at least how she escapes this room as it's hermetically locked off from where ever it is located. And then something that needs to be reworked from scratch. For some time now I wanted to make a 'sequel' to the X5 'space opera image. Trouble I put myself in is I want too much. Because of the low angle I wanted to enhance this by capturing this 'rising up' feeling with the launch-dock elevator, at the same time I wanted to have this huge rocket looming over the astronaut(s) and both without being an obvious copy of the 'X5' image. Anyway it's not working at the moment so it's "pinned" to the drawing board until I figure out how to re-approach this. Fortunately I got more then enough to do until that happens.
  18. I'm currently re-re-re-re-re-rendering this. I'm at the moment only rendering the top half right now and then I'll render some local small parts of it, with and without the straps so the straps can later, when everything is combined, properly placed on the occupant of this "research table". It will be this time without the center device. :) I had it fully cabled up and like this, with just one cable attached and it is/feels still too 'crude'. Too obvious. Not 'sexy'. Too much 'in your face' as they say, at least for me. The bottom part still needs some modeling too. I only added it in last Friday as I originally cut the image off right above the area where the bottom 'keyboard holder' now is located. The reason why I added more space to the bottom part is that I decided that once all pieces come together it won't be looking great with the machine's occupants feet cut-off. Maybe I can do something there at the bottom, or between the 'legs'. Forebode stuff not 'push it into your face'. I began modeling this last summer. Took me a few times to figure out how to approach this with no sketches or such. It started with a picture of a bikini model standing with her legs spread on a brightly lit beach. One hand on her hip, the other up in her hair. I removed the 'hand on hip arm' and replaced it with a mirrored copy of the 'hand in hair arm' so both her arms where in the same direction. Then I slapped some quick digital rubber on the scantly dressed model and saw that it had potential to become more. So I placed the 2D image in #Cinema4D and posed a 3D poser figure more or less into the same pose as the model on the image, after which I started to cube-model the above around it. As written it took me a few times before I got it where I wanted it. I made a few renders and then I got cold feet. That happens often to me. This is not an easy thing, mixing a 2D image into a 3D render and make it look convincing and it's so, <em>so</em> easy to fork it up. Especially when you move someone standing in a bikini from a brightly lit beach into a darkly lit room, laying down, strapped to a research table, dressed from neck to toe in shiny latex. Oh, and then I forget to mention that the model is, should be, wearing some sort of head gear, only leaving her eyes free. Last summer I build some sort of mask and at first I was happy with it but then I started to doubt. That, combined with my 'cold feet' made me put this project in the "freezer", next to many other projects until I got my confidence for this project back. And that was last week! Final image will be cut in a 19 high by 13 wide ratio. I render this out in a 13 high by 19 wide ratio because otherwise the camera perspective really looks jarring. I maybe can fix that changing the camera's angle but this works too. Only downside are huge PS files when you layer things up. Of course not saving the render as a 32 bit file (which I discovered I have no idea how to properly convert down to an 8 bit file), helps too. Things to do: - Finish bottom part of the 3D model. - Add something potentially "menacing" between the 'legs' of the table. - Render bottom part out. - Finish head gear, connect it to apparatus in the top then render it out. - Put 2D rubberized ex-bikini model in/on the table and strap her in. - Polish the model up, add both her lower legs (original photo is cut off at the knees), give her feet wear (ballet boots?). - Finish the image. - Write next entry in the 'Castle of Evil Incarnation-redux' (where this image is aimed at). - Compose Hype HTML 5 file. - Put all the stuff online. - Pick up next project.
  19. This is something I'm working on (too) at the moment. It contains some "spoilers" for when it goes up even tough I blurred some bits out. So if you rather wait till it's finished and online... don't click that button. :)
  20. This post concerns people who's subscription has ran out before or around June 2018 and are blocked from signing up again. If that happened to you and you like to reinstate your subscription contact me directly please. I will reissue your renewal by email at the old (5.- buck) price. What happened? A forum setting I wasn't aware of, a very stupid forum setting may I say so, blocked people from signing up again after their subscription expired. When I got aware of this I immediately changed this setting and thought that had fixed it. It sadly appears that this fix only works for subscriptions made after the change. Any expired subscription before the change is still blocked from signing up again if people wish to do so. Again, if you find your self unable to re-sign up again and you still like to do so, please contact me and I'll fix this. My apologies for the mess.
  21. And have a great 2019! So I've been trying past days to squeeze out a background for my first image of 2018. I had this free credits on Google Zync worth 300 bucks or so and decided to make use of it to get a feel for the service. Basically I setup my render as usual but instead of rendering it here out I let Google do it. It's probably best used if you do animations but I was "I don't do animations" so lets see how it works with stills. It's driving me crazy. One big problem is that you can't see the progress the render makes. Is it at 1/3, halfway? Almost ready? Your guess is as good as mine. So I cancelled my first render after 24 hours as it was too much even for Google. Then I tried what I am working on now as it's not as heavy. Before I go further I must explain that I learned to chop my renders up in parts. This way if something is wrong I notice it a lot sooner then if I wait for the entire render to finish. I gave Google Zync 1/3 and ran the same here to see how much if any benefit I get. Zync finished 2.5 hours earlier on this project on a 32 GB machine. I didn't try a 64GB machine as that costs too much to try things out and that would quickly gobble up all my credit. Plus thing is that I don't have to deal with the heat the render machine produces. And then I noticed something odd. The fog I have in my outdoor scene floated halfway in the sky. I do many, many, many many! pre-renders while I'm working at a background and I was sure the fog should be several meters lower. So I do a pre-render on my machine and yup, the fog floats way too high in the air. There's no reason for that but it is. I go back to an earlier backup file and check. My fog is positioned in the right place so I redo the fog, check it, check it again then send it renewed to Google. I go to bed, wake up happy happy as I have my first part rendered, check the file and the fog is once again up in the air. Not only in the render but also in my original file that I just hours ago had fixed! It's insane but somehow activating Zync lifts my fog up in the sky? Don't mind the little jump and missing figure, I had to use an old render but you can clearly see the fog jump up, which is Zync's work somehow. If it's at the bottom it is how it's before I use Zync, if it's up it's after using Zync. Mucho weirdo! So in the end I ended up rendering the background out myself. It sux because the background would had been ready by now if guggle hadn't fuggled my fog up. To be continued!
  22. As announced month's ago through my sporadic News Letter and once here on the 4Forums in a "scrapbook" post, today the price for subscriptions have changed. If you are on the old plan with recurring billing, nothing should change until you skip or cancel your recurring fee. To make things a bit more easier (you have to uncheck one check button) I've added a non recurring option too. New price is as mentioned before 14.95 a year with a option for recurring billing at 7.50 a year. https://4f-creations.com/site/forum/index.php?/forum/44-4f-subscription/ I'm still trying to add another payment option to this site next to Paypal because I know there's need for it.
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