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It sounds like one way or another there needs to be a small but important change made to the refilling process.
Trusting that everyone understands the "conventions" of a site like this is naive, as evidenced by the fact that someone who "visit[s] the site daily and [has] been here for a few years" somehow never managed to pick up on them. This would be even more the case for brand new users. I agree, then, that if we expect these "conventions" to be upheld as norms they ought to be codified in the site's rules for everyone to see and acknowledge.
One simple option, IMHO, would be to add wording to the posting form that states that unless the filler explicitly states that it's OK to refill/repost an item it should be assumed that you do not have permission to do so. In other words, make it clear that the default is "no sharing", and put the onus on the filler to say otherwise.
@5200north, the hassle with Cargo is that you have to download every asset one at a time, which is probably why none of the Cargo exclusives have made it into the wild yet. It's tedious (and carpal-tunnel-syndrome inducing) to have to click on hundreds of individual assets one at a time, and then organize them into something resembling a "kit".
Another issue with Cargo is that it only gives you access to the versions of the objects for the software you have installed, so if you only have, say, Blender installed you can only get the KB3D assets for Blender. To get the versions for Maya, 3DS Max, Houdini, C4D, Unity, Unreal, etc., you'd need to have those apps installed and bridged to Cargo. And of course you'd have to click on every asset for each of those platforms...
The KB3D folks aren't exactly eager to give people an all-you-can-eat buffet like Cargo and make it easy to just download everything in a handful of mouse-clicks. People have requested the ability to download full kits with Cargo, but (understandably) the KB3D folks are hesitant. So at the moment, using Cargo to download a "kit" is an exercise in patience.
The irony is that Cargo is really a sweet solution. Most people don't really want to install a full kit anyway--they want to browse the assets and pick the ones they want to use, and only download those. People who want to use KB3D assets in Daz Studio, for instance, typically complain that they have to load a massive scene with all the kit objects in it, just to pick out the handful they want to use and delete the rest. Cargo as an asset-browser is fantastic, but it's not designed for downloading entire kits.
Some clever person may eventually write a script to download Cargo assets and package them in a kit format, but until then the Cargo exclusives will be a pain (in the wrist) to download. I'll see how it's evolved over the past few months when I get home in December.
I'm still on deployment with MSF at the moment, but when I get home in December I'll get caught up on the KB3D stuff.
@Maddy, we tried that a few weeks ago, when the "Hall of Shame" thread started here in this forum. It was going to be a place for us to post those warnings about known leakers and other bad actors. I think it lasted three days or so before a mod (or Hunter) quietly deleted the thread. This thread won't be up for very long either, I expect.
@shadowdemonlord, that's the problem, though--everyone here has a great excuse for not spending money. We're all pensioners on fixed income, single mothers, poor students, people living on disability income, etc. Everyone has a noble justification for relying on other people to do the spending.
The ironic twist in all this is that when the people spending the money decide to get selective about the people they share their purchases with, they get accused of being "selfish" by the inconvenienced leechers. We start getting hate mail, and even moderators begin accusing us of starting some sort of "mutiny".
When we try to explain ourselves in threads like this one, the threads get completely deleted by the mods who accuse us of "trying to destroy the Zone". Speaking up about problems is bad for morale, apparently, and while only Hunter can ban a leaker, any mod can delete a forum thread to sweep the problem under the rug.
I don't support my own Request Management System (RMS) proposal anymore, frankly. It aimed to solve one specific problem (points exchange), but it introduced an even worse problem that no one here seems interested in solving.
Basically the leakers in the Requests forum have ruined it for everyone by offering points for new releases and then posting them on pay-sites within an average of 1.5 days. If my RMS were implemented as proposed, it would make it much easier for leakers by removing the filler's ability to selectively avoid known leakers. Anyone with the points to offer could get access to a new release that way, and it would be a leaker's paradise that no (sane) filler would want to use.
My RMS design was naive in that respect--it assumed that all requestors were trustworthy, or that at least there was an enforcement of rules, and consequences for those who break them. We have ways of identifying the leakers--we know who some of them are--but so far Hunter has shown no interest in banning them or punishing them in any way whatsoever, so right now the leakers are running rampant in the Requests forum.
It's not a coincidence that many of the fillers you're used to seeing have quietly backed away from the Requests forum. We're tired of seeing the new releases we paid for leaked to pay-sites, with no action at all being taken to deal with the leakers. Some fillers use blacklists to help them avoid handing new releases to known leakers; others use whitelists instead--lists of members that have earned their trust.
What you're seeing in the Requests forum when people cross out their offers without the fill ever being marked as "filled" is someone buying the item and sharing it only with people that they trust not to leak it. The days of "general fills" are over, as far as many of us are concerned--at least until some action gets taken to remove the leakers.
An amended version of my RMS could be made to work, I think, but it would need to be gated to filter out the leakers. Limit access to the RMS to members who have established trust in some manner--e.g. achieved a minimum Rank, been endorsed by enough other trusted members, etc. Having the points to make an offer is not good enough anymore. And of course there would need to be an actionable process for dealing with those who violate our terms; without enforcement, the rules are meaningless.
A completely separate aspect of the problem is that too few of us are being relied upon to buy those new releases everyone wants. With 23k+ members, 99% of the new releases are purchased by less than 10 people, and that's just not sustainable. When those 10 people stop filling requests and it becomes noticeable enough for people to panic, it says that the membership here has become dependent on too few people to feed them.
Or, to put it another way, no one is stopping other people from buying products and filling requests, here. Just because the "usual" fillers aren't doing it doesn't mean new fillers can't step in and earn some points. Why isn't that happening? You can't tell me that 23 thousand members are all so financially strapped that they can't afford to buy one item every now and then and share it. This is not a burden that should fall on 10 people to fulfill--more buyers could solve the problem.
Ah, but there's the rub. Once people start paying real money for things they become invested in a way that virtual points can't match. When you pay hard-earned money for something and share it with people who then turn around and turn a profit with it elsewhere, you start to feel exploited, and your enthusiasm for sharing plummets. You find yourself wanting to share only with trusted peers, and the Requests forum loses another "general" filler.
The bottom line: Get Hunter to actually DO something about the leakers when we identify them, if you want the requests system to function properly, and encourage more people to step up and become new release fillers themselves.
@pooper, not exactly. Those formats were proposed by individual companies without consultation with others. Each one of those vendors thought that their new and improved format would render all competing formats obsolete through sheer market dominance. There was no attempt to negotiate any industry-wide standard, just a competition to be the company that invents a format so superior that everyone either switches to their product, or other vendors are forced (by customer demand) to include support for that format. They all dreamt of being the ones to hit on the "PDF" of 3D, in other words.
Lightwave had OBJ and Autodesk built on that to make FBX, figuring everyone would switch to their new standard because it did everything that OBJ did and more, but of course Lightwave did not want to lose customers to Autodesk, so they added more extensions to OBJ and deliberately did not add FBX support to their products, so rather than ending up with a universal format this competition to develop the "dominant" format only encouraged companies to make their products less compatible.
That's what's different with OpenUSB. It's a recognition (at long last) that there needs to be industry-wide standardization, and a standards group with representatives from all the major vendors working out what that should look like, in much the same way that we have standards groups for technologies like WiFi, TCP/IP, etc.
@ethiopia, you're reading it backwards. They're saying that DS5 will be able to export to OpenUSD format (which happens to be what Omniverse requires). They're not saying you need Omniverse at all. They're saying, "hey, if you're interested in playing with this cool new Omniverse thing, good news--DS5 will be able to write USD format, so you're golden!"
The whole point of USD (and hence OpenUSD) is to let 3D apps of all kinds use a common import/export format. It has nothing to do with Omniverse specifically. 3DS Max, C4D, Blender, Maya, Unity, Unreal Engine, etc.--all either already support USD or plan to in upcoming versions, so being able to exchange 3D content between apps without losing a lot of important metadata (e.g. as we currently experience with lowest-common-denominator resorts like OBJ, FBX, etc.) is what OpenUSD is about, and why it's in the industry's interest as a whole to support it. Hence Tafi offering us that little hint about it in their press release for an unrelated feature.
Tafi/Daz has already mentioned OpenUSD support in Daz Studio 5:
Tafi currently allows users to output high-quality characters from Daz Studio into popular game engines and 3D software applications in native formats, including Unreal, Unity, Blender, Autodesk 3ds Max, Autodesk Maya and Maxon Cinema 4D, and its next update will include NVIDIA’s Omniverse via support for Universal Scene Description (OpenUSD)OpenUSD.
The Cargo-exclusive stuff will eventually appear, but it's not packaged the same way ordinary kits are. Rather than having a single bundle with 350 assets, you have 350 (x7 engines) raw assets to download and then assemble into a bundle for distribution. It's a time-consuming pain in the ass, basically 🙂
The Cargo model is asset-oriented, not kit-oriented in other words--you're expected to download only the assets you want rather than having to download an entire kit. It's also in the spirit of kitbashing, in that it makes it a lot easier to mix and match assets from different kits using a single asset browser and per-asset metadata (like the Daz "Smart Content").
You can use Cargo to download every asset in a kit (for every engine) and assemble it into what the kit would have looked like, but it's nowhere near as easy as buying and downloading the kit as a pre-assembled package.
"The person who who normally shared KB stuff here" may not be doing request fills, but he's still posting things to the blog after 30 days 😉
Cargo is the Kitbash3D asset browser. You can use it to search, browse, and download individual assets from any Kitbash3D kits that you own (i.e. actually purchased), and if you are a Cargo Pro subscriber you can do the same for their entire product catalog.
It's of no use to you if you only have pirated versions of their kits, of course; it's a cloud-based service, so the free version only gives you access to assets from kits that are linked to purchases in your account. With a Cargo Pro subscription you're paying for access to everything.
Very nice, @Abad, thank you! For people who don't have a Cargo subscription, this script looks like a very handy way to break out all of the individual assets of a Kitbash3D kit.
(If you do have a Cargo subscription, the Cargo app already serves as an asset browser for all KB3D content, letting you download just the specific pieces you want without needing to download a whole kit.)
Yup--as @mxyzptlk said, Blender works well for that. Download the Blender version of the Kitbash3D package, load the .blend file into Blender, then select the individual objects you want and export them in FBX format, so that Daz can import them properly with their textures intact.
