Link: 3d.sk
Reviewer: Neil Lucock
Posted By: kurv
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| Website |
www.3d.sk |
| Reviewer |
Neil
Lucock |
| Review
date |
January
2006 |
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Most skilled artists can do something
that looks reasonable but sooner or later you are going
to need to have a picture of something you can't copy
in a mirror, which is where www.3d.sk becomes useful.
You pay a monthly fee and have ready access to high
quality reference photos so that you can get your 3D
model exactly right. That's the theory, anyway.
3D.SK's
photos are excellent quality, most are 3000 x 2000 or
higher and clearly show whatever it is you are looking
for from a series of angles. If you want a woman's hand,
you'll have plenty to choose from. The photo sessions
are good, a model is shown in useful poses from all
angles.
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| You also get facial expressions, there are movies (once you
subscribe) and pictures of animals. The page had a link to a
well written Maya tutorial, presumably there will be more contributed.
There is also a small gallery of high quality work that has
used the materials from the site. |
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www.3D.SK Reference images
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3D.SK
offers a variety of payment options via CC Bill, starting
at .50 a month for individual artists. This allows you
250 photos a day until you have been a member for 3 months,
then you can get as much as you want. There are corporate
membership options too.
So, is it for you? The cost is reasonable, if you only use
one of the photos a month, it has paid for itself. What I
was not sure about was the search feature. Put in `women`
or `girl` as a search term and you get no results. Put in
`woman` and you get pages and pages. This is like an old fashioned
shop; you have to ask the shopkeeper if he has a product.
I prefer the supermarket model; you are shown a selection
of products and choose whatever you like. It depends on your
work style. Ask for a male hand and you get everything including
hooks and armoured gloves, so you have to browse through it
anyway. If they have what you are after, it's faster. If they
don't have exactly what you asked for, it can be frustrating.
How do you know what they named the picture? You don't know
if a search for `Asian man with knife or sword` will give
any results until you try it.
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www.3D.SK front page
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36,400
royalty-free photos (too much to fit on a DVD) is a very good
reason to subscribe. There are free (full size) samples on
the site and you can see in the thumbnails what is available.
The site is European (Slovakia) so has nude pictures without
the legal `I am really 18 and I really want to see naked women`
(and men) warnings you get on US sites. It is assumed that
you are mature enough to cope with non-erotic nakedness, but
I could imagine some people might be offended. You are looking
at how a long pair of jeans folds around the ankle, the next
page of thumbnails shows the model naked. From the point of
view of avoiding stuff that you don't need, I'd prefer the
galleries to be separated.
To
sum up, a useful resource for artists and modellers, I thought
the search feature was not as useful as it could have been,
but the high resolution photos are well worth the modest subscription
cost.
Neil
Lucock January 2006
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