as long as this forum wont be anything like CA then I am ok with it.
A FINISHED section being the main game, where people just drop art and don't contribute to the community. if you pick out a random poster from CA and see what he posted, its nothing but ass patting. If you are to lazy to post constructive crit's or comments then ffs, get a twitter account.
Its the main reason I hardly browse that site anymore even when I was in the beginning very active, but the "community" grew to big with faceless artist posting their stuff, clotting up everything, making it hard to communicate with the hardcore community.
On the other side, I agree, that its not the artist responsibility to spoon feed info to the mass. Its up to the aspiring artist to be curious and proactive into finding info. its a journey we all must take. the gist of it is available after a bit of searching. if you want info spoon fed, write yourself up for $600+ classes. Then you at least pay the artist to spoon feed you.
Adam: "you're all lazy asses who don't post enough WIP threads"
Noobs: "You're right Adam, we love you!" /sack lick
Sr Noobs: "Hey hey hey, if polycount wasn't broken, it would be easier to browse with limited time... fix ur site nub =P"
Adam: "yea yea I'll look into some upgrades in the mean time remember more WIP"
Sr Noobs: "okay deal"
Noobs: "I'm lost what where we talking about again?"
Adam: "you're all lazy asses who don't post enough WIP threads"
Noobs: "You're right Adam, we love you!" /sack lick
Sr Noobs: "Hey hey hey, if polycount wasn't broken, it would be easier to browse with limited time... fix ur site nub =P"
Adam: "yea yea I'll look into some upgrades in the mean time remember more WIP"
Sr Noobs: "okay deal"
Noobs: "I'm lost what where we talking about again?"
Yeah. I the WAYWO is important. But only because I can see images quickly in one place. If it were replaced with a different way to browse images from all over Polycount I doubt i'd miss it. But there would be no need to remove it. I think if people knew there images were getting exposure somewhere they might be encouraged to create WIP thread rather than spam WAYWO.
The point of sharing work-flow and design processes is to train new artists to be better artists. Once they become accomplished and professional artists in the industry, they can come back here and share their experience to teach the next generation. I, for one, certainly feel the need to share the benefit of my training when I can. I'm not a paid professional, but I'm not a noob either, and I contribute my knowledge to the less experienced when I can. I really like helping others get better and maybe that's an attitude that we need to be pushing more proactively here?
Posting art for a pat on the back is all good and well, but when I first came to this community, I was under the impression that its primary goal was to help others improve their art. I know some of us feel that they offer a lot in the posting of their exemplar work and that should be enough, but nobody is beyond learning more about their craft and can always benefit from more advice and learning. So if a learned veteran can come here and learn new things, is it too much to ask that they return the favor by imparting their own expertise to the less experienced? Everyone gets some education by participating in this community, it would be best if those that benefit from this community give to others what they have received from it themselves.
I hope that doesn't sound pretentious, it's just how I feel about the whole sharing and learning. I think this community can offer much more to the new artist than a paid educator can (although there are exceptional outliers.) After all, you're learning from successful professionals who care deeply for their craft and rather than somebody who might not have their finger on the pulse of the industry anymore. Worse yet, they might be failed professionals who took up teaching because they couldn't hack it or didn't care enough about it.
I've found this thread quite interesting tbh. Ok. its turned into something a bit different to the original request, but that discussion for you. It can go anywhere. And I think Polycount itself deserves some feedback and critique.
Something else worth noting: Huge, drastic changes to PC are hard for us to do. Nevermind the impact they might have on your browsing habits, but we simply do not have the knowledge to do it ourselves nor the funds to pay for quality work.
That said, things can still get done and hopefully on the cheap.
Pior -- I really like that idea but am interested to see how that would feed back in to a messageboard.
I really like that idea but am interested to see how that would feed back in to a messageboard.
I'm not much of an expert on javascript or anything but that's probably how you would do it. The way I think it would be done is you have something like the thumbnail previews like McGreed showed, then use those to randomly generate the mosaic like Pior showed. Since they would be drawing thumbnails from specific threads it should be easy to have them link back...I think...
I don't know what influences the sizes of the images that is something more complicated I would think. It would be much easier to just have them all the same size.
On the other head, this thread has been pretty insightful and interesting, to say the least. A lot of good points have been made but not matter what the entire issue is going to be a double edged sword.
Jesse, Cghub uses a random algorithm to chose what images are shown at what pixel size based on the forum thread post # and attachment. So in theory it runs it self and a really crappy picture could be large for one moment but it would change as soon as you hit refresh a few times.
To others yea image overload is fine for a gallery but that's not Cghub's forum that is their gallery showcase preview. Cghubs forum is actually pretty poop and moderated almost as bad as ours these days.
I'm not opposed to having an image wall, but it should not be the prime way people look at a forum.
The additional problem with thumbnails and image walls is that some people would have to stop visiting from work. At least now a 'NSFW' or 'nudity' tag will keep them from clicking.
To be perfectly honest; NOTHING says 'ignore the noobs that need help' more than this.
Their pics become small and overlooked.
Your eyes go straight to the large images. It's simple design 101. This will only encourage more 'OMG AWESOME' posts.
I think that could be worked around by either randomly sizing the images (no size-by-views), or keeping all images the same size. Likewise, limiting the image mosaic to a supplement to the sketchbook sub-forum viewable only on by going to the sketchbooks, instead of a frontpage banner, similar to the way Zbrushcentral's Gallery link works would mean only people interested in WAYWO instant art updates style hit-and-run viewing would see it.
Effectively:
How Now:
"I want to see lots of random art that people are working on" -> WAYWO thread
How Then
""I want to see lots of random art that people are working on" -> Sketchbook Subforums
getting rid of the WAYWO would remove a good portion of the daily visitors, including myself. I'm sure I'd still come around, but having a mishmash thread to post doodles and sketches in is one of my favorite things about PC.
I still don't see how you all seem to think PC is broken and needs to be fixed. Change is good... but not just for the sake of change. I'm still not entirely sure if pior's PC front page mockup was a joke or not.
These might be a dumb ideas, but what about an image wall that shows the most active thread displaying it with the largest thumbnails? I would assume a simple art dump thread might not get many replies other than a few exceptionally great works, but useful threads with lots of discussion would be the most visible on the wall and would help point out the best threads to the community. If the community finds it really useful, we can pin it to the wiki as is the fashion of PC. Maybe there could even be a "helpful", "inspirational", or "insightful" button to further push the most beneficial threads to the top? Furthermore, there could be a "best threads of the week" section that highlights the best threads of the week so that those who didn't get to participate that week can have a second chance to look at the threads the community thought were great and get them to add to and expand the discussion.
I think promoting useful threads would provide incentive for members to contribute better discussion about the various artwork that gets posted here.
The WAYWO thread will never leave Polycount, its a staple of the PC experience. If anything, I want to streamline how quickly you can view the images within the thread.
As an unrelated note, this is what I am thinking for a thumbnail system. If its possible to do, we'll do it. At least to tie us over until other, larger, updates:
polycount is afaik one of the first big digital art forums that had a waywo thread? It's cool, removing it would be a shame. Encouraging posting in other places (maybe even something subtle, like giving the waywo threads, current and archive, their own miniature subforum to remind people that it's not the entirety of p&p?) would be good, but waywo has to stay!
I can see the thumbnail mouseover to be a step in the right direction - but it would still feel like a bit of an hack. It sure would save some clicks and random digging tho.
I think it's important to not be afraid of breaking the "pretty" line-by-line forum layout. It is adapted to some other forums where everything is text and discussions. But if we need thumbnails to make art more accessible and they happen to somehow break the line layout, then so be it ... Information is what matters.
As for the wall - I guess we could start by experimenting with ways to extract and display the RSS feeds ? There's gotta be simple ways to do that ... Also maybe the CGHub guys might be able to help ?
Waywo could be turned into a wall in itself ... clicking an image would send you to the corresponding individual post. Contributing to the thread would be done just like it always was - there would just be another way to look at it.
As far as WAYWO is concerned, perhaps add a function to display only the posts of a certain arthor within a thread? Therefor it would be a lot easier to keep track of the progress of a specific artist, without having to dig through pages. And not only WAYWO but other master threads can benefit from it too.
I'm one of those polycounters that's always around and post every now and then. That is because I try to keep my useful/useless post ratio intact.
The first part of this thread, was very interesting to read, but the last part of it, no offense to anyone, sounds not too relevant. I might be missing the point here tho, so sorry if that's the case.
I don't really have any concrete ideas to bring in, but I just wanted to say that I also am interested in seeing polycount move towards MORE useful pots, than just showing off. I am willing to volunteer for any coding/art related stuff that needs to be done to move polycount in the right direction.
One thing that I do remember is, I had created this tool that would make MAKING tutorials easy. The idea behind it was that most professionals simply don't have the time to make screenshots, crop them, put them in a html, write something, make it look good, upload etc. That tool would take care of most of that.
Perhaps we can try and figure out something BUILT-IN to polycount that behaves like that? Just some random thoughts.
P.S: Polycount has the best wiki atm, that's a big plus!
I love that layout Pior did. So awesome. If we add that in addition to the forum, and have each of those images link to a WIP thread, that'll be awesome.
As to the CGhub thing, I'm not too good with that stuff, but I'm pretty sure it's just Thickbox.
As far as WAYWO is concerned, perhaps add a function to display only the posts of a certain arthor within a thread? Therefor it would be a lot easier to keep track of the progress of a specific artist, without having to dig through pages. And not only WAYWO but other master threads can benefit from it too.
So kind of like the sketchbook threads?
An artist "wall" would be kind of interesting to see. I can't see the WAYWO thread going away and I think it serves its purpose as of now, but the thumbnail layout for active threads is a sweet idea.
As far as WAYWO is concerned, perhaps add a function to display only the posts of a certain arthor within a thread? Therefor it would be a lot easier to keep track of the progress of a specific artist, without having to dig through pages. And not only WAYWO but other master threads can benefit from it too.
If you want to view only the art of one specific member, we need to make sketchbooks more popular. Filtering through a thread w/ hundreds of posters sounds crazy, to me.
Pior is on point. No-one is talking about eliminating WAYWO, but instead evolving. I would really like to see the sketchbooks get some sort of love. I think tying them to WAYWO or a image cube/mosaic is one way to do this.
At the end of the day, PC is still the best 3d art forum around, but you shouldn't sit on your laurels.
An artist "wall" would be kind of interesting to see. I can't see the WAYWO thread going away and I think it serves its purpose as of now, but the thumbnail layout for active threads is a sweet idea.
Not necessarily. You still have one mash of a thread you can skim through and participate in without the exclusivity and burden of seperated threads, which is what makes the WAYWO so great and unique. Adding said funtionality only provides the viewer a convenient tool to dig into this big mess pile of treasure.
I like the waywo too,
but if you look at it, it's not uncommon to see "hit n run" art posts, "awesome" posts, pro-stuff requoted x times, noobs ignored etc.
The cghub mosa
Something else worth noting: Huge, drastic changes to PC are hard for us to do. Nevermind the impact they might have on your browsing habits, but we simply do not have the knowledge to do it ourselves nor the funds to pay for quality work.
That said, things can still get done and hopefully on the cheap.
out of curiosity, do you have a ballpark of what this sort of quality work would cost?
WYAWO = genius and amazing
Sketchbook vs PnP forums = confusing relationship.
I subscribe to both pnp and sketchbooks in google reader, and somedays there are as many threads with great content there than in pnp. The split forums have created this invisible rift where there should be none. Most content that is in sketchbooks could, and probably should be in pnp (im guilty here too), but I wouldn't say the same about the pnp -> sketchbook relationship. The fracturing i feel encourages the behavior adam brings up on P1.
its nice to have a place to dump all the stuff we're working on in the sketchbook foru... oh wait that's WYAWO... or is it pnp... or is it sketch...asdfha;skdjf ah fuck im not going to post at all!
I like the ideas that push more art out of the threads directly onto the main page.
But please keep it light weight!
I'd hate to give up on PC because it turns into one of those bloated sites that take forever to load because it needs to buffer google api, twitter api, facebook api, andwhatnot. Just keep the base site simple and save the bandwidth for the art! Thanks
Ryan : I really like your mockup! Love the idea of having these "minimize arrows" for each section of the page, it gives a nice feel of customization and I can see myself using them a lot
(The side bar is awesome, maybe too big, but awesome.)
Yea the mock up was real rough and I am sure can be redesigned a whole lot better but hopefully it sparks some ideas rather then people thinking it makes the site more bloated.
Replies
A FINISHED section being the main game, where people just drop art and don't contribute to the community. if you pick out a random poster from CA and see what he posted, its nothing but ass patting. If you are to lazy to post constructive crit's or comments then ffs, get a twitter account.
Its the main reason I hardly browse that site anymore even when I was in the beginning very active, but the "community" grew to big with faceless artist posting their stuff, clotting up everything, making it hard to communicate with the hardcore community.
On the other side, I agree, that its not the artist responsibility to spoon feed info to the mass. Its up to the aspiring artist to be curious and proactive into finding info. its a journey we all must take. the gist of it is available after a bit of searching. if you want info spoon fed, write yourself up for $600+ classes. Then you at least pay the artist to spoon feed you.
Adam: "you're all lazy asses who don't post enough WIP threads"
Noobs: "You're right Adam, we love you!" /sack lick
Sr Noobs: "Hey hey hey, if polycount wasn't broken, it would be easier to browse with limited time... fix ur site nub =P"
Adam: "yea yea I'll look into some upgrades in the mean time remember more WIP"
Sr Noobs: "okay deal"
Noobs: "I'm lost what where we talking about again?"
How dare you.
I think replacing WAYWO with a CGHUB thumbnail mosaic that linked to individual sketchbooks would be brilliant.
OLOLOL SACK LICK
now suddenly people who work their ass off are the lazy noobs ? you got it backwards i think.
Posting art for a pat on the back is all good and well, but when I first came to this community, I was under the impression that its primary goal was to help others improve their art. I know some of us feel that they offer a lot in the posting of their exemplar work and that should be enough, but nobody is beyond learning more about their craft and can always benefit from more advice and learning. So if a learned veteran can come here and learn new things, is it too much to ask that they return the favor by imparting their own expertise to the less experienced? Everyone gets some education by participating in this community, it would be best if those that benefit from this community give to others what they have received from it themselves.
I hope that doesn't sound pretentious, it's just how I feel about the whole sharing and learning. I think this community can offer much more to the new artist than a paid educator can (although there are exceptional outliers.) After all, you're learning from successful professionals who care deeply for their craft and rather than somebody who might not have their finger on the pulse of the industry anymore. Worse yet, they might be failed professionals who took up teaching because they couldn't hack it or didn't care enough about it.
"It would be cool to see more WIP threads." is what I get out of the original post, if you read between the whines...
the seed leech ratio
That said, things can still get done and hopefully on the cheap.
Pior -- I really like that idea but am interested to see how that would feed back in to a messageboard.
To be perfectly honest; NOTHING says 'ignore the noobs that need help' more than this.
Their pics become small and overlooked.
Your eyes go straight to the large images. It's simple design 101. This will only encourage more 'OMG AWESOME' posts.
I don't know what influences the sizes of the images that is something more complicated I would think. It would be much easier to just have them all the same size.
On the other head, this thread has been pretty insightful and interesting, to say the least. A lot of good points have been made but not matter what the entire issue is going to be a double edged sword.
To others yea image overload is fine for a gallery but that's not Cghub's forum that is their gallery showcase preview. Cghubs forum is actually pretty poop and moderated almost as bad as ours these days.
I'm not opposed to having an image wall, but it should not be the prime way people look at a forum.
The additional problem with thumbnails and image walls is that some people would have to stop visiting from work. At least now a 'NSFW' or 'nudity' tag will keep them from clicking.
I think that could be worked around by either randomly sizing the images (no size-by-views), or keeping all images the same size. Likewise, limiting the image mosaic to a supplement to the sketchbook sub-forum viewable only on by going to the sketchbooks, instead of a frontpage banner, similar to the way Zbrushcentral's Gallery link works would mean only people interested in WAYWO instant art updates style hit-and-run viewing would see it.
Effectively:
How Now:
"I want to see lots of random art that people are working on" -> WAYWO thread
How Then
""I want to see lots of random art that people are working on" -> Sketchbook Subforums
Just some thoughts.
I still don't see how you all seem to think PC is broken and needs to be fixed. Change is good... but not just for the sake of change. I'm still not entirely sure if pior's PC front page mockup was a joke or not.
I think promoting useful threads would provide incentive for members to contribute better discussion about the various artwork that gets posted here.
As an unrelated note, this is what I am thinking for a thumbnail system. If its possible to do, we'll do it. At least to tie us over until other, larger, updates:
I think it's important to not be afraid of breaking the "pretty" line-by-line forum layout. It is adapted to some other forums where everything is text and discussions. But if we need thumbnails to make art more accessible and they happen to somehow break the line layout, then so be it ... Information is what matters.
As for the wall - I guess we could start by experimenting with ways to extract and display the RSS feeds ? There's gotta be simple ways to do that ... Also maybe the CGHub guys might be able to help ?
Waywo could be turned into a wall in itself ... clicking an image would send you to the corresponding individual post. Contributing to the thread would be done just like it always was - there would just be another way to look at it.
The first part of this thread, was very interesting to read, but the last part of it, no offense to anyone, sounds not too relevant. I might be missing the point here tho, so sorry if that's the case.
I don't really have any concrete ideas to bring in, but I just wanted to say that I also am interested in seeing polycount move towards MORE useful pots, than just showing off. I am willing to volunteer for any coding/art related stuff that needs to be done to move polycount in the right direction.
One thing that I do remember is, I had created this tool that would make MAKING tutorials easy. The idea behind it was that most professionals simply don't have the time to make screenshots, crop them, put them in a html, write something, make it look good, upload etc. That tool would take care of most of that.
Perhaps we can try and figure out something BUILT-IN to polycount that behaves like that? Just some random thoughts.
P.S: Polycount has the best wiki atm, that's a big plus!
As to the CGhub thing, I'm not too good with that stuff, but I'm pretty sure it's just Thickbox.
So kind of like the sketchbook threads?
An artist "wall" would be kind of interesting to see. I can't see the WAYWO thread going away and I think it serves its purpose as of now, but the thumbnail layout for active threads is a sweet idea.
If you want to view only the art of one specific member, we need to make sketchbooks more popular. Filtering through a thread w/ hundreds of posters sounds crazy, to me.
Pior is on point. No-one is talking about eliminating WAYWO, but instead evolving. I would really like to see the sketchbooks get some sort of love. I think tying them to WAYWO or a image cube/mosaic is one way to do this.
At the end of the day, PC is still the best 3d art forum around, but you shouldn't sit on your laurels.
As I said I've inquired about someone with vB development experience helping us. But at this very moment, its all pipe-dreams.
Not necessarily. You still have one mash of a thread you can skim through and participate in without the exclusivity and burden of seperated threads, which is what makes the WAYWO so great and unique. Adding said funtionality only provides the viewer a convenient tool to dig into this big mess pile of treasure.
but if you look at it, it's not uncommon to see "hit n run" art posts, "awesome" posts, pro-stuff requoted x times, noobs ignored etc.
The cghub mosa
but everyone here can zbrush the hell out of the concept though!
out of curiosity, do you have a ballpark of what this sort of quality work would cost?
I can only imaging that would make me subconsciously want to ignore lower counted threads/threads that display a not awesome image.
Not sure if joking. We have reply counts on the right hand side.
Woops, should have been view count
lol there is view counts... scroll over the last post of a thread.
The WAYWO thread for example has 1,062,568 views...
I like the image wall idea with random large size thumbnails. I just wish I had more coding knowledge to make it happen...
WYAWO = genius and amazing
Sketchbook vs PnP forums = confusing relationship.
I subscribe to both pnp and sketchbooks in google reader, and somedays there are as many threads with great content there than in pnp. The split forums have created this invisible rift where there should be none. Most content that is in sketchbooks could, and probably should be in pnp (im guilty here too), but I wouldn't say the same about the pnp -> sketchbook relationship. The fracturing i feel encourages the behavior adam brings up on P1.
its nice to have a place to dump all the stuff we're working on in the sketchbook foru... oh wait that's WYAWO... or is it pnp... or is it sketch...asdfha;skdjf ah fuck im not going to post at all!
You can beat it up it is cool it was a 30 min doodle.
But please keep it light weight!
I'd hate to give up on PC because it turns into one of those bloated sites that take forever to load because it needs to buffer google api, twitter api, facebook api, andwhatnot. Just keep the base site simple and save the bandwidth for the art! Thanks
(The side bar is awesome, maybe too big, but awesome.)
/approved.
*squirt bottle*
bad!
get of the couch!
no really, I like the idea of rollouts, but I personally thing there are a bit much on that image.