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:

I'm really not sure what your problem is.

Who is forcing you to view items in the Marketplace? Who is forcing you to purchase said items?

Who is forcing anyone else to purchase said items?

Gerry

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System: Win 10 Pro (21H2), Asus X99-E WS, CPU i7-5930K -3,5 GHz, 32 GB DDR4 2666-16 RAM, NVidia GTX 1080 Ti GPU - 11 GB VRAM(Driver Studio-536.99), Samsung 850 Pro 512 GB SSD, 6 TB HD storage.

BUT ! Without the market place you would need deep pockets for RL content and also put up with a much smaller choice in content.

Look at the medieval stuff RL produces, lots of villages and knights, very few ordinary people, third party developers come to the rescue.

I am not disagreeing with everything you have said but the market place and it's developers have filled the gap of what RL can supply and what Iclone users need.

As for the community aspect, there is a hard core group in this community that help out every day, the first to pick up calls for help...

We all know their names..

Also you call to people to buy 3dxchange and load in models from the net .... Wow another massive learning curve for people who just want to make films..





I Make My Mates Do The CanCan For The Amusement Of Killer Robots:D

You should re-read what I wrote.

Do you go to other forums where they allow flagrant promotion by commercial interests?

When someone is selling their stuff, that is a commercial interest.

On other forums if there is promotion it is not disguised as participation in community, they have ads that we all recognize as ads.

On other forums the kind of promotion that prevails on the RL forums is consider SPAM, and the posters are banned forever. I know, because I moderate one such forum.

Do you really think the content marketplace has any quality standards for people to maintain when they put up their stuff for sale?

Do your really think most of those content items are worth the money they are asking?

I won't argue there is some good content, but not the majority of it.

My purpose was not a chastisement of the people that actually contribute and try to help others in the spirit of community. The people that don't have their money grubbing mits out all the time.

I can name some people that sell high quality content, and when they contribute on the forums they actually contribute freely... valuable information. Even then, they aren't patting someone on the back so they can promote themselves. :w00t:

Their postings have viable information.

@Rampart,

I have a mixed reaction to your commentary.

I love free stuff.  And I've made a few minor contributions to a few people.

But I confess my philosophical leaning is free-market based.

I'm not stating that anything you said is wrong, only that we may have different viewpoints.

Some people want to paint.  Others want to sell paint.

Some people enjoy making props.  Other's want to make videos and don't feel it's worth their time to make props.  In that case, some people feel trading money for props is a good and fair trade.

I've see a fair amount of free stuff in the iClone stores, and frankly, that's the correct price for some of the props.  Other stuff is beautiful and obviously took a lot of care and effort to create.  If it's overpriced, or unwanted, it won't be bought.

I'm okay with encouraging people to freely share content.  I've seen it happen often.  But people's time and talent do have value.  If a person has the skill and desire to make content for others, why shouldn't they benefit of that if they want to?

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There is a section of the forum that is dedicated to promoting your content, I do not see a problem with this.

There is a option to try before you buy, I don't see a issue with this, infact it makes sure you only buy the right content for you.

You the content buyer can rate the content to stop others buying poor content and rate good content.

I am not wishing to be at odds with you, it a good post, and raise some issues..



I Make My Mates Do The CanCan For The Amusement Of Killer Robots:D

I did not say do away with the marketplace.

RL needs to establish quality guidelines for content marketplace and content store :)

If RL did such a thing, you will see much higher quality content items before long.

People can get lazy and won't discipline themselves to make the kind of effort that is really necessary for quality content. You and I both know this, because we have all seen people that are competent just put something up for sale they have to know isn't worthly of promotion.

Getting by is not quality work, getting by is "getting by"

Then look at the marketplace. You see alot of cheap price content, but look at it. It isn't worth a free download. There are some of these developers that are constantly pumping this stuff out to make a couple bucks. I used to dismiss this by reasoning they were in impoverished or 3rd world countries and were desperate to make some money. I still think that is some instances.

RL should moderate the quality of all the content the allow for sale in their stores.

I don't see any of the kind of junk looking content on DAZ3d we see on RL stores.

I'm not a big Daz3d fan, so don't go there.

A set of guid lines for content development would probably need to be made by the community rather than RL as I think they will be knee deep in development of Iclone and buy in their content.

But what would those guide lines be ?



I Make My Mates Do The CanCan For The Amusement Of Killer Robots:D

Bluemidget

People are always resistant to change.

The way things are doesn't mean they have to remain that way.

There should be no commercial promotion on the forums. All RL has to do is allow a sig link to content item devs website. There should be no directs to specific items discussed in postings. Only generic links to the website. If third parties comment or link to other sites moderators should make sure the forums isn't being used to spam members.

We are constantly spammed on this forums. The method is more discrete than a list of links to all manner of off topic information. It is still SPAM.

I realize RL shares in the money from 3rd party content items sold, which has probably been their motivation for allowing such quality abuses.

I do not see a problem with the market place section of the forum, where new content is show cased. Out side of that there is no or very little marketing ( I have been away a while, I might have missed something).





I Make My Mates Do The CanCan For The Amusement Of Killer Robots:D