I have read so many things about sharing, community and such on these forums.

IMO, there are some very community spirited persons willing to share and help on these forums.

Yet, there is another group that promotes their for sale content items on the forums constantly. These people are not using RL for developing video, but to sell us their content stuff. Read the forums and just review who is really a contributor to the community.

For over 10 years I spent thousands of hours contributing to the Air flight simulation community. The community was alive like this one never has been. It was not unusual for thousands of members of the community at various times to release for free download a very complex 3D aircraft that had taken many months to create.."at no charge to the community".

Even today, the same spirit of "Real community" exists in the air flight and air combat flight simulation communities. There are major complete reworks of old flight simulator applications that have taken years. The people that coded those updates haven't charged one dime to the community and the programming is more complex than 3D animation. 3D animation is just one component of producing air combat or air flight simulation applications.

Programming or coding for aircraft flying and fighting, requires a myriad of mathmatical calculations and physics. All the simulation aircraft are developed from scratch with all the flight physics applied.

Everytime I look up we have some new contant marketplace items for sale, and most of them are barely recognizable as what they are supposed to be.

So, yes this is a lecture to this community, which is NOT community. That is, except for the great bunch of people that share on these forums to help people use the RL applications. These people for the most part are not producing any content sale items. They are just genuine people that care and help others.

Yes, we do need content marketplace. Most of the junk content I see doesn't need a price on it. The developers of many of those items should be free and the developers should be paid by constructive criticism to help those developers improve their craft.

Yes, there are a few people that are into RL that are professionals. They aren't that many, and most are just hobbyists, like myself. I rarely even look at the marketplace any more. If I read a referral on the forums for a content item I will generally click on the link. There are people we all know that do excellent work, but even some of those are out of control and pricing their content items is not worthy of the prices they ask.

The RL community is different from most communities, because they allow content developers to promote their content items constantly on the forums. I can understand if RL users share something of value about a content item with a link. That is a referral from a 3rd party, but all the promotion of 3rd parties everytime they put something up on the store and constantly post with their big promotion sigs should not be allowed. Many of these developers constantly post on the forums saying good things about other developers stuff and so on. They don't really have anything to say most of the time, they are promoting themselves and the content they are selling. They commend themselves among themselves to stay in prominence on the forums to promote their stuff. It is just like watching the stupid infomercials on TV.

RL needs to establish some guidelines for this forums and put some retraints on content developers.

My suggestion to newbs and those who have just started with iclone. Get yourself a copy of the 3DXchange and you will open the door to content that is superior to most of the iclone marketplace items. Most of it is free, especially props and some motions. The internet is full of good content and there are plenty of people developing content and honestly sharing with community spirit.

Daz3d is now giving away their programs, or has reduced their high quality applications to extremely reasonable prices. They promote content like crazy, yet they don't let all the pork through the sieve as RL does on this site.

This is a chastisement of RL for just letting any and everything be promoted on the forums and on their site, with no standards of quality. This is a chastisement of the so-called developers that constantly release their near worthless content and try to sell it. This is a chastisement of RL users, that will purchase and condone the near worthless content.

IMO, I would embarrassed to offer anything for sale in the content marketplace that wasn't the very best quality I could produce. There would be no hasty thrown together stuff like we see so much of lately.

The content released and promoted by RL has overall, been best quality. Yes, I buy RL content and I don't regret those purchases. In fact, some of them are very outstanding.

Now that we have the improved 3Dxchange with all the excellent import ability there is no excuse for us NOT to raise the bar for accepting only the best quality content from ANY source.

A short message to those content developers that keep pushing through near worthless content, and those people that hammer away at us with content only and contribute nothing but the promotion of themselves.

You should rethink your contributions to this community. :cool: