Solid State Alpha

Thanks for the link Nika. Those look pretty much like what I was envisioning.

For what it's worth, I'm not sure why anyone thinks the technique that went into making them should (or even could) be a secret. Granted, it's a somewhat unusual, and therefore clever, use of sculpties. But nonetheless, for anyone who has made sculpties before, or even watched/read the various tutorials for them on the building forum, it's quite obvious how it was done.

One word of caution I would throw out, while the prim count on these is low, the poly count is relatively high. Two sculpties equal 4096 polygons. Put a couple hundred of them in a forest, and you're talking almost a million polys. I would not recommend filling a sim with them. You could safely get away with several dozen, probably, but I wouldn't suggest going any higher than that.

Well, on going to the store (Chopsaw) to see them, I had about 4 minutes to dwell on technique as the sculpties sloooowwwwly rezzed on my laptop, and I couldn't figure it out, but I'm not a sculptie artisan. For me as a consumer, not only is the low prim count great, but the seasonal texture changes are a VERY attractive feature. I look forward to some flowering trees, Aminom!

The Terms of Use, oddly, contain a noncompete clause (4) (incidently, the TOU is missing a clause 3). I won't quote them here, but the TOU are available as a notecard from the vendor (you don't have to buy a tree to see them). It makes reference to not using the "unique construction methods" to "harm <creator's> market position".

I don't see any legal recourse that could be used to enforce this; the closest would be patent law, if the creators filed for a patent on the process used. (There is nothing indicating that a patent application has been filed.) Anyone could invent this process in parallel without even seeing the trees in question, and not be bound in any way by this TOU ... unlike a patent.

However, I personally would be surprised if this process were patentable.

These trees are great products and stand on their own, I think. If they were my creations, I would hustle to get more out the door, and trust on my lead and quality to differentiate them from the inevitable competitors.

p.s. I also see alpha sorting issues, visible as plane shimmy in the foliage, but the integrated Intel GMA I'm using is unsupported by LL, so don't mind me.
.

I finally got around to go seeing the trees. They are nice in terms of prim count, but the alpha sorting bug is just as bad as any other tree. If they were copyable like my Trees from Relic, I might buy one, id even pay more for it. But im not going to pop over and pay 250L every time I need a tree.

The reason I brought up about 'spilling the beans' is because I have a huge problem with people waving around the Lawyer Stick to try to scare people into not competing. I find that icky. Maybe Yumi Murakami and her theory of Psycological Monopolies has some merit after all. Only not in my case. Now having seen the trees, there's no beans to spill. Just a lot of random facets on a sculptie, something anyone could do.

Hi all.
I would like to mention that there are many ways to do the alpha planes that my trees have. The orientation of them is not random, and they use very specific construction techniques- this is what the ToU covers. In addition, the trunk/branches have a very unique method of construction. Multiple times I have seen derivations from my work that must have been ripped from SL, imported into a 3D editor, edited a bit, then resaved. I know this from comparing the geometry to mine; there are literally hundreds of ways to create a certain thing using sculpts, and the chance that any two people would hit on precisely the same geometry is very low. It is somewhat like a finger print.

I've been behind just about every major advancement in sculpt construction technology. The vast majority of those advancements are not covered by law, have been figured out by others in valid ways, and freely disclosed by myself. However, when I figure something entirely new out, then create something from scratch using it, only to have someone turn around, download it, and make simple edits using my geometry as a basis for their product, that is a violation of IP rights. It is exactly analogous to someone ripping a skin, editing it, and then reselling it- except with sculpts it is more analogous to stealing the full PSD file with the layer framework.

Finally, to respond to Chosen Few's comments. Sculpts use 1024 polygons, or 2048 tris. Furthermore, not all polygons are equal- degenerate polygons that have zero size are dropped early on by the graphics card, and are not shaded or textured. This gives such polygons almost no render weight; they only take up a bit of space in the graphics card memory. Effectively this means that 1 of my trees has the render weight of slightly less than one sculpt- around 900 polygons. In a test with some clients, I filled a void sim with around 500 trees, very densely packed (almost no sky could be seen from the ground in almost all places.) Using 6 people to reference having a wide variety of systems, they all said that the render lag caused was acceptable and not that much of a problem; those with newer systems saw almost no subjective degradation of experience.

I ended up buying one last night, mostly cuz I've been looking for good trees with multiple seasons. They remind me a lot of the trees available in Konruko, which are made using similar methods. I'm kinda picky, an will likely not be using it after all, but still not bad work. The prim count *is* attractive, no question!

Mari

Thanks for the reply, Aminom. For what it's worth, I feel your pain on the IP theft thing. You're absolutely right that if someone were to rip one of your trees, or any other object, out of the world and then use it for any purpose, including re-uploading it as their own, that would be wrong, and it would certainly be the same kind of wrong as ripping a skin. However, I must say I find it unlikely that that would happen. I'll explain.

When a scene is ripped, the resulting geometry is incredibly sloppy. Polygons are grouped in whatever manner happened to have most convenient for rendering at the moment. Usually, this has nothing to do with what might make sense to you or I as a human user. Individual prims don't remain intact. You might end up with face 1 of a cube attached to face 6 of another cube 20 meters away. Multiply that by all the prims in the scene, and things can get really bizarre. It takes a very determined person to sort through all that and clean it up.

I'm not saying that this would prevent anyone from stealing in the manner you described, of course. Stranger things do happen. It's just that it would likely be so much more complicated do that than just to build the damned thing from scratch, I don't see why anyone would.

Just as you say you can take a look at the geometry in-world and know how the sculpty was put together, so can anyone else who knows what they're doing. I'd be willing to bet I could get pretty damned close, just from the few pictures I've seen. Off hand, I'd say it's far more likely that someone simply examined your model in-world, deduced how it was done, and then replicated the technique, than that they ripped it, spent countless hours cleaning it, and then re-uploaded it.


In any case, ripping wasn't really what I was talking about. There's certainly nothing wrong with someone examining an object in-world to discover how it was made, learning from it, and then using the discovered technique him/herself. That's absolutely the right thing to do. It's how we all learn, and you can't say you've never done it yourself. At one point or another, you had to have come across something you thought was cool, either in SL or elsewhere, and you said to yourself, "I have to figure out how they did that". Everyone has.

Any clause in any EULA seeking to prevent that is both unenforceable and unreasonable. You can't stop people from looking. And you certainly can't stop people from learning, nor should you ever seek to.

I haven't read your actual EULA, of course, so I'm just speaking on hypotheticals here. I don't know that your EULA does or doesn't include such a clause. I'm only saying that IF it does, that wouldn't be right. Certainly no non-compete clause could ever be enforceable.

Even if you could patent your technique, which you almost certainly couldn't, it's doubtful that that would be enforceable either. You already agreed to share your patent rights in-world with every other user of SL when you joined. That's in LL's TOS. If you were to write your own special software for building your trees, that would be different, and you could certainly patent part or all of how the program works. But you can't patent a style. And that's what your tree-modeling technique really is, a style. If someone likes your style and imitates it, so be it. Some people would be flattered by that, others would be indifferent, but no one should be upset about it.



As for the polygon load, I'm not sure I'm totally on board with your explanation of the technicalities (or that I'm not), but I'll take your word for it on the results of your testing. I would be curious, though, to know what people's draw distances were at during the tests. If there were 500 trees in the sim, but 450 of them were out of viewing range for the testers, then of course frame rates wouldn't have been hit very hard. Do you happen to know if all 500 were in range for all testers?

I'd be curious to know what a modest system at 512 draw (not an uncommon setting for people on a private island, even with medium or medium-low quality machine) would make of a full sim-sized forest.



On a side note, just so no one is confused who might be reading, Aminom and I seem to be slightly off kilter from each other on our use of the word "polygon". By the definition I, and every modeler I know, have always used, one polygon is one triangle. One quadrangle is two polygons, not one. By that definition, it's not correct to say one sculpty has only 1024 polygons. It's got 1024 quads, sure, but a quad is two tris. There are 2048 triangles in a sculpty, which means 2048 polygons. Two sculpts is therefore 4096 polygons, as I said. This may sound like semantics, but I think it's an important distinction.



Anyway, Aminom, nice work on the trees. They do look great. Nothing in this discussion was meant to take away from that, so I really hope you didn't interpret it that way.

I agree that's a choice that shouldn't be made for that person, but someone who figures something out that plagues so many and would be of such benefit to the community as a whole, and chooses to keep it a secret out of greed? That's ickier. I don't know the secret, but if I did it wouldn't be one. Don't mistake proprietary knowledge with talent. They aren't the same thing. The creator of those trees certainly has talent to spare. They're beautifully done.

Chip, "keeping a secret out of greed" would be a more convincing argument if it wasn't for the fact that anything even remotely cool wasn't ripped, pirated, freebie-boxed, claimed-as-someone-else's and just about every other awful thing in the world.

The greed we are talking about here is the greed of countless people without a *shred* of decency who would strip anyone's content and ruin their business just to make $L 10.

So in such a world, especially in one where Aminom has ample evidence of repeated, constant, premeditated, blatant theft - he has to open his wallet *and* his heart?

Ah, no thanks. This isn't sharing your lunch with friends, this is like leaving your sandwich under the open sky with vultures circling.

I hope he DMCA's the crap out of anyone who does it to him again, and I'll be on the lookout too.

Besides, it won't matter much. Someone wanting 'forum brownie points' will work furiously, then trumpet "I got it! I got it!" anyhow, dissing him the whole way.

Aminom, rock on - you are talented, AND you deserve your IP rights.

Nuff said.

Sharing knowledge doesn't aid thieves so I don't really understand that argument. If someone is going to steal, they're going to steal. They don't care to learn how to do anything. That's why they're thieves in the first place. What successful content creator hasn't been ripped off? We all deal with it.

Sharing knowledge helps the honest people who want to create for themselves. How else is knowledge spread in SL? The templates, scripting tips and script library, the wiki, the hundreds of tutorials, all of it is produced by people who've worked hard to learn what they know who then share what they've learned with others so that they don't have to reinvent the wheel. That isn't mutually exclusive from also wanting to profit from your labor. No one has a "right" to the fruits of someone else's labor, but I believe strongly that knowledge should be shared and people should compete on talent and quality.
Think how different SL would be without all the accumulated knowledge that countless people have developed and then gone out of their way to share. I doubt there's a single content creator in SL who wasn't in part helped to get where they are by knowledge that someone else was willing to share.

Now I'm not saying that everyone with a successful product that pushes the state of the art forward should be compelled to write a tutorial to show others how to replicate that product, but if you discover something fundamental like "I've noticed that if you keep X angle between alpha surfaces it reduces or eliminates flicker" that's the kind of thing worth sharing. Not to get all holier than thou on anyone, but SL would be a very different kind of place if no one was willing to share those kinds of things. That's why we have a community of artists here and not just competitors and thieves.

Regardless, kudos to Aminom for some very beautiful work.

On the whole I don't disagree with a content creator's right to keep something to himself or not. Your statement here worried me a bit though, what if someone else actually works out the idea themselves and freely allows it to be know to the market, are you saying he as rights to DMCA the crap out of that person?

blah blah blah blah...

Interesting thread, and I'd LOVE to learn more about fixing the alpha-issue on sculpts - if any informed pro would like to share with me, please.

Re your comment Chosen to see 1 prim trees, I've created a while ago a group of 3 palm trees in one prim - so thats 1/3 prim for each palm, so as long as its a tropical forest you're wanting - good to go on keeping your poly-count low

Of course getting 3 palms out of a sculpt and its texture means some flaws in detail - and the usual sculpty bugs etc, but I created these for backfilling islands in 3d instead or using textures (not close-up detail), however they came up pretty OK, and i now replaced most my LL palms on my home sim with them - reclaiming 80 valuable prims ... i guess the fact they should be 'organic' helps

http://forums.secondlife.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=48457&stc=1
3in1Palms_ZA_Marine_1024x712.jpg

http://forums.secondlife.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=48458&stc=1
3palm1_001_512.jpg

More pics on blog at : http://za-marine.blogspot.com/

Anyone is welcome to view these in-world at my island display / shop at :
http://slurl.com/secondlife/MO%20Island/240/226/22
or my home (low-prim) sim - Nomanisan Bay (which has just had it's prims doubled - so a lot more palms landing soon!)

Enjoy

No, I'm not saying that at all.

But if a product is ripped vertex by vertex, that's clear DMCA territory.

I'll go farther, just like copyright law does. If someone does a blatant copy of his work, even if they did it themselves, that's still wrong. It's pretty clear to see if someone worked something out on their own, and did it fully on their own.

For instance, we could all tell if someone re-drew all of the PixelDolls clothing item by item. It may be 'by the copier's hand' but there's a fairly clear difference between inspiration and IP theft.

* * * * *

"Sharing knowledge doesn't aid thieves" - this is twisting it significantly, Chip.

If I left my car by the side of the road with the keys in and a big sign saying "Drive me! I worked hard for it - but it's yours now!" - then sure, suddenly nobody's a thief. Even if they would have been a thief, except now it's been handed over.

This isn't like one of Torley's or Vlad Bjornson's wonderful tutorials where a concept or tool is useful for all and there is plenty of room to delve further. I 110% support that sort of thing.

But this is more like asking someone to publish their private LSL script for the common good. It's fair to let others figure their own scripts out, draw their own textures no matter how many similar scripts and textures are already out there.

And in Aminom's case, yes, it will detract from the fruits of his labour - how could it not? It's a no-brainer that blowing the market wide open by telling everyone what he did *will* impact his business.

This is not some philosophic distant discussion for me. My tier payments are over 200 bucks a day. I have the solemn responsibility to do all I can to protect Caledon's shores - a 'give away the farm' philosophy wouldn't be just foolish, it would be negligent and destructive. Yes, I do share a lot - but there are some things I do that make a great difference and aren't readily apparent.

Let's pretend back in the day I gave away my stupid-simple object rezzer script. I mean, come on, it was ten lines of code.

Which I was able to monetise and it paid for most of the initial Caledon region. There wouldn't *be* a Caledon, but a whole lot of people would have had better-aligned houses for free in 2005. What a victory for the grid in general.

Oh, that wouldn't have stopped me you say? Ah, actually - yes it would have. I was selling rezzer-tech houses for $L 2.5k and just about anything else for $L 100. A mere factor of 25 there. Four months would have been 100 months, and I'd be considering starting Caledon in 7 years from now, without that IP advantage.

* * * * *

Aminom may not have a community to deal with, but he came up with his design, and this cuts right down to the core of what IP is.

This sort of thing gets out anyway, and fast. Sheesh, must Aminom not have his hot second before the hordes get ahold of it?

And he *does* help other designers, I've rarely met anyone so generous on the grid. He's rightfully just not stupid enough to shoot himself in the foot from the start.

Disillusion Aminom, that 1/3 prim tree guy and others like them, and you'll lose the talent and future advances they will bring.

There would be the real loss.

I don't think anyone is disputing Aminom's abilities and rights to DMCA vertex-by-vertex ripoffs, or textures, etc.. Clauses 1 and 2 of his ToU are very clear on that, and quite standard.

I question clause 4 ... whether it is realistic to assert that any customer who comes up with a similar "process" by simply looking at the trees can neither use it themselves nor speak of it. Copyrights protect the exact image/product, they do not protect processes, so Aminom cannot use a DMCA to enforce this 'reverse engineering' clause. Processes are the territory of patents. Without getting a patent, Aminom is asserting that customers who buy the trees have implicitlty agreed not to compete with products made using similar "processes". I'm simply observing, that is unrealistic ... people WILL figure things out, and unless Aminom patents his process, there is no legal process (similar to a DMCA) by which he can enforce this clause of the ToU.

Plus, of course, this clause being in the ToU does nothing to protect him from people who don't bother to buy the trees. That said, it is a good 'statement of intent' to include it in the ToU ... but it's pretty toothless.

Again, Aminom, make more trees. NAIL down your leadership in this technique. Personally, I want a big flowering cherry with an interesting trunk for spring Then regular foliage, fall color of course, and your fabulous "bare tree" seasonal textures, please. Oh, and it would be nice if one of the drop shadows that you include with this tree had fallen blossoms in it
.

As for the legalese, I'm no expert.

Company service terms, especially the 'for any or no reason' stuff is questionable too, but we all clicked it.

RIAA tries to defend against mp3 piracy - there's clearly some enforceability issues there too.

You've possibly identified an area where Aminom doesn't have a snowball's chance in hell against thieves. If so we should rally around the guy and others like him, such that he does.

I know improper users of copybot face permaban; perhaps we need stronger inworld protection of content creators via Company appeal or something.

* * * * *

Someone is even selling the freebie sculptie textures that I compiled from many generous early designers as a service to everyone on the grid, set out for free at the Victoria City hub.

Search on my name, you'll find it - they even use my avatar name in the description. It's been there for a good while now.

Sigh.

Desmond,

I think the problem is the way you presented the situation put Aminom in an unfair position of having to defend himself. Just as nature abhors a vacuum, sentient beings abhor mysteries, and the way you phrased it, at least to me, came off as "someone figured out something cool; I know how he did it, and I am not telling; neener neener". Thing is that we're not talking rocket science here. There are PLENTY of similar "revolutionary advancements" (though I would argue that they are EVolutionary, not REVolutionary) by many talented people across the grid. Given the simplistic nature of building in SL, it is not beyond the pale for someone else to also come up with a similar idea, one similar enough to potentially be a "knockoff copy", but still be well within copyright law as an independently-created work.

For example, let's use the "revolutionary" discovery of the WarpPos "trick". Keknehv Psaltery could have kept it to himself and someone like you who admired it and whom he might have hinted at how he did it could have come into the forum and said the same thing, challenging the other creative folks to figure it out. We would have, and his "poor man's monopoly" on the idea would have been just as short-lived. That's simply the nature of knowledge and discovery. The fact that Keknehv instead shared his discovery with everyone is not really germane to the point, but it should be noted, in light of what others are saying here.

Yes, I agree, Aminom's trees are very nice, and he deserves to be compensated no less than even someone like myself for my own works. He also does NOT deserve people to be out there directly copying his work and selling it for themselves, without any benefit to him. However, that doesn't mean that there is ANY right, explicit or deserved, to a monopoly on the concept/idea. That's the realm of patents, and I think quite a few people know how bad those can be for stuff that is so trivial.

To the point: In the future, I'd suggest a different route to presenting other people's works that you admire.

Well said, Talarus.

Like I said earlier, I'm not talking about giving away a specific design, I'm saying that if you've figured out a way to work around a bug that plagues everyone in SL and disclosing it doesn't do away with the singular thing your product has going for it, then that's the kind of thing people should share. Again this is just an example for philosophical discussion, not really a commentary about this particular product.

When I first developed my clothing templates they gave me a huge advantage over every other designer at the time. They allowed me to do things with avatar textures that no one had been able to do before. What had been painstaking to the point of being impractical became easy. I thought briefly about keeping them to myself, and then decided that the benefit to the design community as a whole outweighed my desire to have an advantage that would never have been anything but temporary anyway. There's no doubt that it allowed the competition to catch up and impacted my sales in the short term. On the other hand, they've probably done more to keep my name known in SL than any of the skins or clothing I used them for. Other people having the means to do work of the same quality I was doing didn't devalue my work, and it didn't magically do the work for anyone else. It just made it easier for everyone (including myself, since that was my motivation for making them in the first place).

Anyway, I don't want this to take away from Aminom's truly beautiful work so I hope he isn't taking any of this personally. Those trees aren't just a technical trick. Even if someone knows exactly how they're made, it's a long long way from that to actually doing it themselves, that well modeled and textured. They're art, and what makes them art isn't any particular technique used in their construction. It's the sum of all their parts, not the least of which is the raw talent that went into creating them. That said, if someone deduces the technique by looking at them, they'd be absolutely within their rights to use that technqie themselves.

I hope that IP theft doesn't make us all so paranoid that we stop advancing SL content creation through shared knowledge.

Looking back over my post, I see I was a bit negative, and for that I apologize. I have always been a rather blunt individual, and most likely always will be. They are nice trees. My bother was over this EULA's no-compete clause. All I can say is, well put Chip. If SL degenerates into a litigious microcosm, reflecting back the Real World we are supposed to be leaving behind when we log in, we will have all lost the point. Agree or Disagree, thats how I feel.

Chip and Talarus have both stated this well, but I'd like to put it in my own words as well. There's a big difference between discovery of a technique and copying/stealing of an item. Just because you know HOW something was made doesn't mean you've stolen the item itself, or copied it unfairly.

I knew how those trees were sculpted as soon as they were mentioned. When the photos were linked, it merely confirmed what I'd already suspected about how it had to have been done. True, I hadn't yet though of applying the technique to trees in particular myself, but the actual technique itself has been widely known for some time now, and has been used by many for other purposes. In fact, there were in-depth tutorials posted about in the building forum months ago.

Does the fact that I instantly understood the technique make a me a thief? Of course not. If I now go and make my own trees this way (which I very well might), would I then be a thief? Not at all.

The ONLY way I'd be a thief would be if I were to copy the actual items that were made by someone else. Simply using the same methodology to create my own item is not the same thing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with doing that.

So, really, all these analogies about "leaving the sandwich out for the crows", and pirating MP3's, and such are just a waste of breath. They're not applicable.

The MP3 thing actually makes for a perfect argument in the other direction. If you copy someone else's recording without permission, that is IP theft. But if you use the same recording techniques to create your own song, that's obviously not theft at all. Your song is YOURS and the other guy's song is HIS. The fact that you both happened to have recorded them in the same way means nothing.

Look, when the first person decided to climb on a horse and ride to town instead of walk, certainly people noticed, and a good percentage must have said "That's a great idea. I should have thought have that. I'm gonna go catch me a horse to ride it, too." Within a very short time, I'm sure everyone within communication range was riding horses. Does that mean all those other people stole anything from the first rider? No way. All it means is they decided to do the same kind of thing he was doing. There's nothing bad about that. It doesn't diminish the first rider in any way, just because others are now riding too.

When the first guy decided to hit a big soft stone with a small hard stone to hammer out a sculpture, surely people noticed that too. And many of them undoubtedly said, "Hey, that's a good idea. I'm gonna try that, too, and see what I can make." Were those people stealing from the first sculptor? Again, no way. They were just adopting the technique he happened to have pioneered, for their own purposes. And again, there's nothing wrong with that. The original sculptor is not diminished simply because others are now sculpting as well.

This is how progress happens, people. It's a good thing, not a bad one.


Does Aminom have a right to be concerned about IP theft? Yes, we all do. But keep in mind what IP stands for, intellectual PROPERTY. Can a modeling technique be considered property? Once again, no way. Aminom does not own the technique of using sculpties in this manner any more than that first sculptor owned the technique of hammering, or the first rider owned the technique of jumping on a horse. That's just not what property means. What is property are the actual items Aminom has created, not the manner in which he created them.

Sometimes procedures can be considered property, which is why we have patents. But this isn't something to which that kind of protection would (or should) apply.

As I see it, to deliberately withhold knowledge is arguably selfish enough. But to state that anyone who seeks to discover knowledge is somehow in the wrong, or a thief, or in violation of some unreasonable EULA, is indisputably ludicrous. And this fear that if others were to figure out a model was made, it would somehow diminish the modeler is beyond ridiculous.

Heck, if Aminim wanted to, he could probably teach classes all day long, explaining exactly how he's made every single item he's ever created, and still 99% of the people in the class would never be able to make their stuff look as good as his. And even if they did, so what? It's not like every single customer looking to buy a tree would all wind up shopping in the same place anyway. This kind of scarcity thinking is just silly. There are more than enough customers to go around.

Bottom line, if anyone wants to get upset about the illegal copying of items, that's worthwhile. But, as Chip said, don't confuse technique with talent, or with product.

don't think for one second that no one is going to mimic a well crafted item. once you put it out there, it's fair game. welcome to reality.

don't think for one second that no one is going to mimic a well crafted item. once you put it out there, it's fair game. welcome to reality.

echo

Echo

ECHO!





LOLOL

Talarus, what you are saying makes sense; I can see it.

How I present something is for people to like or not - it's up to them, that's fine.

I draw various reactions, but I'd rather be a bit controversial and genuine, than sweetness and light all the time. I think everyone else prefers that too, in the long run.

* * * * *

Chip, you can afford to be generous. I probably can too. But I think you are way over the line suggesting that everyone else has to be, especially in today's market.

Western society, at least, says it is unlawful and unethical to just look at something and make it your own, if it is novel or branded and the originator does not wish it.

That's why patent & trademark law exists, for the *precise* reason of protecting innovation, built reputations, and the originators of such.


How about this: if it's such a good idea to turn over ideas like this to the community for the 'common good'... then all of us can pay a tax so guys like Aminom get compensated for making such great contributions.

Preposterous? Not nearly as preposterous as him just giving it away for free.

Sure, that may have made for great marketing in your case. But 'oops it didn't work' won't be good enough, if it doesn't work for others.

* * * * *

Chosen, I think you are dramatically belittling what Aminom is done.

Sculpties have been out for about a year now. If it was so obvious, then the grid would be filled with these things in the second or third week.

It's not obvious.

It's one thing to come up with trees independently by yourself like the 1/3 prim tree guy. That's cool.

But it's wholly another for anyone to jump on Aminom's bandwagon like a parasite after seeing what he has done.

Especially when it would be much to Aminom's great financial harm, for personal profit or even worse: self-glorification in a forum.

What kind of person would do that?

And yes, I know, the grid is full of people who would do that in a heartbeat. That doesn't make it right.


There may not be law here yet, but that doesn't negate ethics.

Not at all. I came right out and said the trees look great. Nothing and no one can take that away from Aminom.

However, it's misguided, and yes, selfish, for anyone to claim ownership of a technique.





I didn't say it was obvious. Like all good ideas it does seem like it should have been obvious in retrospect, but it goes without saying that it wasn't. What I did say was that the technique itself is well known. You can head over to the building forum right now and watch a video all about how to do it. What Aminom did that was fairly novel was to apply this well known technique to trees. Lots of people had previously applied it to objects like ladders, staircases, chains, and lots of other items with great success. It's hardly a secret.

I also said, if you recall, that even if Aminom were to explain it step by step, it's highly unlikely that most people would have the skill to make their models look as good as his. If that's not a compliment, I don't know what is. It's the exact opposite of belittlement. I'm sorry for you that you can't see that.



There's nothing parasitic about it. Do you honestly mean to tell me you've never examined something to see how it was made? Hell, when I was 4 years old, I disassembled my father's bicycle to see how it was made. People do this all the time. It's how we learn, and it's as natural as breathing. There's absolutely nothing wrong with it.

What is wrong is when someone tries to use outlandishly unreasonable legalese to try to bully people into not learning. "Wrong" isn't even a strong enough word. I'd go so far as to say it borders on disgusting.

That does not take anything away from the quality of Aminom's work, or the clever thinking that went into it. For that he should absolutely be applauded. But for trying to discourage people from learning, he should not be.


Oh, come on. First, other people's learning does not cause ANYONE "great financial harm". As I, Chip, and others have stated, lots of us share our knowledge freely every day. It hasn't served to cost any of us anything. If anything, we gain from it. Personally, I love it when people learn to do what I do. It's great for them, obviously, and it's good for me too because it forces me to keep getting better and better.

Second, we don't post here for self-glorification. This is by far the most insulting remark you've made so far. Do you have any idea the amount of time that I, and others, spend volunteering every day here? You really think we do that just so we can look cool in front of a bunch of strangers? Can't you see how ridiculous that assertion is?

I can't speak for anyone else, but the reason I teach here is for three reasons. One, I very much enjoy helping others to succeed. It's one of the things that makes life worth living. Two, I want SL to look as good as it possibly can. The more people who learn to get good at this stuff, the better the whole world looks, and that benefits everyone, including you. And three, I learn more myself from teaching than I ever could just by doing. It happens all the time that someone asks a question here, and I go, "Oh, that's a good one. I've never tried to do something like that before. Let me figure it out real quick, and then explain it." As the wise man said, "you get everything you want out of life if you just help enough other people get what they want."

None of that has anything to do with personal glory. Once again, if you can't see that, then I truly feel sorry for you.



The kind who wants to help.




Yes, it is right. Again, I'm sorry you can't see that.

Stealing is wrong, absolutely, and I'm the first to jump on people when they do it. In fact, just the other day, I alerted the owner of a website that hosts 3D models to the fact that a friend of mine has apparently been routinely ripping textures from it and uploading them to SL for use on his own models, in direct violation of the license that comes with the originals. It didn't matter that this person was a personal friend of mine. The author had a right to know his stuff was being stolen. I gave my friend the opportunity to stop, but when he refused, the right thing to do was to alert the author.

Surely, if I'm willing to make that kind of sacrifice to stand up for what's right, you can tell I don't take this stuff lightly. I can 100% promise you that if I were ever made aware of someone stealing Aminom's work, or anyone else's, I would do whatever I could to assist in putting a stop to it.

But as I've said about a hundred times now, a modeling technique is no one's property. It is knowledge, not work product. And such knowledge should flow freely.




The person whose ethics need a tune up here is you. There is absolutely nothing unethical about learning a technique. There is, however, a lot unethical about trying to prevent people from learning.


This whole thing reminds me of the story of the 4-minute mile. For centuries, people were convinced that it was physically impossible for a human being to run a mile in under 4 minutes. It was something many an athlete strived to do, but the conventional wisdom was that it simply couldn't be done. Then one day in 1954, an English runner named Roger Bannister actually did it. You know what happened later that week? About a dozen other people around the world did the same thing. All they needed was to be shown that it could be done.

Did those people steal anything from the Bannister? Of course not. His achievement was his own, and no one could ever take that away from him. Even today, when running the mile in under 4 minutes is so commonplace that it's become a standard measurement for achievement, Bannister is still respected as the one who did it first, the one who changed the sport forever.

The two-prim tree is now seemingly a very similar story. Many probably couldn't have imagined previously that such an item could have been made at all, let alone as well as Aminom has done it. As I said earlier, the idea certainly didn't occur to me, even though I was quite familiar with the technique involved. But now that it's been proven possible, lots of people will be doing it. Some may examine the trees themselves, and imitate what they see. Others, like me, might just put two and two together from the knowledge they already have. Either way, nothing will have been taken from Aminom. I really wish you could see that.

It seems you're currently approaching this topic from what Dr. Stephen Covey calls "the scarcity mentality". People who think in scarcity terms see life as a kind of pie. If they get a big slice of it, they feel good. If someone else gets a bigger slice, they feel bad. I would encourage you to try to see it from "the abundance mentality". Abundance thinking basically means it doesn't make any difference to me how big your particular slice is. If you've got a big one, I'm happy for you. It doesn't take anything away from what size slice I might be able to cut out for myself. There's more than enough for everyone.

If you're good at what you do, which Aminom clearly is, and you're willing to market yourself well, it simply doesn't matter what others are or aren't doing. He'll do well regardless. The idea that by making a similar tree, someone else somehow would be taking something away from him, is crazy. The world is just too big for that.

Desmond, the 'That's cool. ' part makes me believe and trust the rest of that wasn't intended for me. But it also may sound to others like I'm still kind-of mixed up in this - like I in some way based my 1/3 prim palms on Aminom's (after seeing what he did), or that I jumped on his bandwagon possibly damaging his sales (this thread?).

So just to clarify that, I'd like to say I think our trees are worlds apart, from what I've seen pics Aminom's are better detailed (more controlled mesh), while mine are more prim / mesh efficient, and they are for entirely different climates / continents.

Further, today is the first day I became aware of Aminom trees (via this forum - theres a second link discussing sculpts where i posted some prev work too and I saw a link to this thread in there). To date I've still not seen them in-world. I've not seen the user-restrictions Aminom has thats mentioned either, but wouldn't have as I'm not a user, and don't see it affecting me.

While they are both sculpted, obviously the meshes would be very different and techniques too i guess - each person works their own way. Furthermore, I was most likely creating mine the same time as Aminom was, perhaps even before as I've had mine a while (I only started selling them now as I'm setting up shop as ppl always nag me to sell my stuff), or perhaps after, but really thats all irrelevant.

I enjoy making low-prim sculpted objects, and owning a low-prim island sim, it was a logical step for me to create ultra-low-prim sculpted palms, and I'm sure other sculpt creators may be thinking about making trees too (why not) - in fact with all the sculpty artists, there is very likely more out there we haven't seen yet, and may have been for some time.

Good luck to anyone that's prepared to sit the long days necessary to create a sculpted tree, and I hope they get well rewarded for it.

PS: To protect my IP, should I be patenting 1/3 prim sculpted palms?