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Gnomon vs Kurv

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#21

I’m afraid I’m having a horrible time with KURV myself. I ordered the glen southern DVD back in June, was charged on my visa, and have yet to recieve the dvd. Ive emailed kurv continulaly and gotten either no response or its taken a week or so for them to email me back and say were looking into it. I’ve emiled Wes 3 times from 2 different emails over the last 24 hrs… no reply. In fact I did get a reply due to shawns post above, but wes seemed to not even know who I was, awesome my orders been lost after all this communication, i guess theres too many guys with 2 month old orders to keep track of. SO i send him my order #, address, etc. … and as par for the course… silence. - Ken

sad thing is ive ordered from kurv before with no problems, till this. Gnomon has screwed up 1 order of mine before, BUT, i had the corrected order in my hand like 18 hrs after i emailed them saying they sent me the wrong disc. I was more impressed with that than if my order had gone of with out a hitch.

#22

Wes,

I would like to bring to your attention that this is in no way a ‘smear campaign against KURV’. The public should be aware of any flaws within a system, as a company it is your duty to meet the agreements of a sale. If there is a problem within that agreement then it should be resolved and dealt with in a timely and orderly fashion.

Correct, you did email me back to which your email stated “please verify your shipping address” when I had quoted my order email exactly as it was sent to me (shipping address, billing address, order # and the exact cost of everything).

I believe that it is very professional of me to bring this up as I don’t want to see others get stuck in the same position.

While I won’t post up the details in regards to Ken (I will let him do that himself and follow after me here) I will simply say this Wes: There is no smear campaign, there is no vendetta, there is quite simply an opinion of a professional who feels that the service of KURV could learn a few things from that of Gnomon.

I would have expected a more professional response coming from the company owner himself (who knows, possibly a better explanation?) but I guess I expected too much right?

Thanks for your time Wes, I see no need for this bantering to continue as I have made my points.

-s

#23

Ken, I apologize for not remembering who you were we get a ton of orders.

Shipping issues happen, it is a fact of business. As far as emails go… yeah sometime it takes 24 hours to get back to people.

We have shipped hundreds of these DVD’s in a very short amount of time, you always have a few shipments get lost.

We do our best take care of issues in a timely manner. In your case, UPS has made an error in the shipment, and lost the billing detail. They have the package in Canada we are trying to get them to just bring it to you as opposed to taking the time in shipping a new package. That got away from us in time trying to work with them. Did we anticipate that going into it, no… just worked out that way.

As far as Shawn goes, we only heard from him yesterday… and he is not really giving us a fair amount of time to respond to him.

But seeing as you both work together at the same company, are friends and both had the misfortune of packages being lost in shipment… (man you two should get together in Vegas with those odds). Tell you what we can do… instead of shipping more videos to you, why dont we just credit back your credit cards and let the Canadian postal service enjoy the videos… sounds like someone stole them trying to put them in your mail box.

#24

I got a complete set of the tutorial DVDs from Gnomon today. Drove me nuts at first because they don’t mention that they aren’t compatible with DVD players, didn’t work on my TV DVD player so I tried the one on my notebook and it locked it up so bad I had to pop the battery. I finally got it to play on my notebook but it sized it out too large and the controls were off screen. I tried everything to resize but no luck. I finally tried it on my main system and it played fine. Very annoying because I want to be able to follow the DVDs but it’s tying up my main system. I’m having to pause it and switch over to Zbrush to try things on the tutorials. Very annoying. They really blew it on the authoring. The content seems excellent but not being able to play them on either a TV or notebook seems to be a very bad move. Most are going to want to follow what’s happening on the tutorial in the software. The problem seems to be they need 1280 res and my notebook maxes at 1024. I originally got it to write and never had problems with the screen resolution before. Seems a dumb move standardizing to 1280. Like I say a lot of notebooks have lesser video cards and don’t support it. If you can’t play it on a TV it’d sure be nice to play it on a notebook. Hope they rethink that on future versions.

#25

I don’t know how you ordered Gnomons’ discs, but they do have system requirements listed right on their site. Maybe you ordered it from a place that didn’t have that information posted?

Anyway, what you need to do to get the videos to play on your laptop is to look for the hidden files, and drag them off the Gnomon disc. Then just transfer them to your laptop and watch them. You can use Quicktime to resize the video to fit, scrub the video, etc… This is what I did and I haven’t had an issue at all. And I’m running the vids on an old 1.4 Ghz Celeron laptop with 256 MB’s system RAM and 32 MB’s of video RAM.

#26

Yeah the interface from gnomon disc really suck… i also have loads of problems with them when i just open the files in quicktime they play fine…

Btw i have never seen any tut dvds that play on normal dvd players… as most are encoded with quicktime, divx ,xvid, normal dvd palyers support then .vob / svcd / vcd…

#27

it seams like Glen Southern has been using zbrush since the day it was born.

i would take Glen video 10 times over any of the others
he knows zbrush better then most.

these other guys, i haven’t even herd of till they showed up as beta tester for the company,
they might have a good background of 3d art but when it comes to zbrush ask Glen :+1:

just because you can drive a car fast
doesn’t make you a race car driver:roll_eyes:

#28

Thanks for the info. Where’s the Glen Southern video availible? I’d be curious to check it out. Other than than some issues with the authoring on the disk the content on the Gnomon disks is excellent. He did have a weird name for one hot key and I don’t know what he was talking about in Introduction To ZBrush. Otherwise he gives you a good basic working knowledge. There are things that aren’t covered but I still have four more disks to go in the series so I think most of the interface is in their somewhere. I think they should seriously consider doing a disk strickly on preparing and exporting to each of the major packages. I think it’d be a best seller. Cover at least Maya, Lightwave, Max and SoftImage. There’s a few other possibles but those are likely to be the most used. Plus some of the others may not support 16 bit TIFFs, even Lightwave needs a plug in. I hope over time all the packagess can get together with Pixologic and workout standardized import/export so the user doesn’t even has to tweak. Set up say a “normalize to maya” function in ZBrush. Then on Maya it would have an “import from ZBrush”. There’s an excellent little tutorial for importing to LIghtwave on the web but it seems pretty fiddly and can be streamlined, I’m trying my first import in an hour, wish me luck. From the looks of some of the tools coming I’d love to be able to setup morph targets in ZBrush for Lightwave. I know there’s the morph feature but I’m talking about attaching a series of targets that other packages can read. Even better yet would be being able to either export and access the new functions in other packages or setting up deformation animations that could be exported. I went nuts when I saw the surface modifiers. I’d kill to be able to use them for lip syncing or expressions. You wouldn’t be limited to morph targets you could handle expressions and lip syncing on the fly.

#29

Glen Southern is the artist on Kurv Studios DVD: “Get into Zbrush”.

http://www.kurvstudios.com/

#30

I might pick it up as well. I always find everyone has their own tricks.

The learning curve has been nasty because the software is pretty twitchy. After working all evening on a model it developed a corruption. Very depressing. Not sure if it’s fixable. definately not within ZBrush. The crashes and bugs, not to mention a non standard interface, has made it more difficult to get comfortable with than it should be. I was being paranoid about saving which for once nailed me because I was overwriting the same file for six hours. I found the corruption immediately after I saved it. I might have been able to save it through a script but the software crashed before I could do anything. Very frustriating.

#31

Normally you would just save different versions of your tool so i you mess it up, you can always go back to a previous version…

Once you get used to the interface and the fact that you can’t pickup objects again after you drawed a new one, you will probably like it better then traditional software i know i do :slight_smile:

#32

One thing I didn’t really care for was that most of the Digital DVDs from Gnomon are DVD-Rom, and not DVD like their Analog videos. Least all the ones I have (At 10 so far, and have my eyes set on the latest from Aaron Sims). If they include actual scene files and such, that’s fine but I’d rather have the versatility to watch them on a large screen, or in a regular dvd player vs having to watch it on a computer. Other than that, I think their stuff is pretty top notch. Depending on the instructor they sometimes skip over thinks like hot keys, or time saving things they take for granted, but I’m thrilled over all with the products. I’ve been looking Digital Tutors and Kurv as alternates, but so far I haven’t seen specific ones I’m interested in.

#33

I agree on all levels. Not sure why they went the ROM route? There is no extra content, scene files and such, so it seems pointless and annoying. Also the authoring seems to be different on each. On one I can’t minimize and on another I can. I did run onto one mentioned hotkey that the name threw me, it was the TILDE key. I don’t recall hearing the name before and it’s rarely used, it’s the ~ key in the upper left. It’s used for panning tiled maps.

If you’re talking about the Aaron Sims on Creature Design, I got it. I was a bit disappointed because I thought it was a ZBrush tutorial. Turns out it’s Photoshop and Softimage. Pretty stunning to see what he can do with Photoshop though. Makes me want to give painting another shot with it. I mostly do what he was doing with a brush tool with a cloning tool. I paint all day long in Photoshop but I haven’t done the kind of things he’s doing. It’s rather long and slow but well worth the watch.

#34

I was talking about the “new” one Aaron put out, completely on ZB, and comes with the 150 alphas, etc. I have Zack Petroc’s vid on Human Anatomy, Mr. Alvarez’s on Head sculputing and Texturing, and Meats Intro to ZB along with a ton of the analog ones. I don’t work in the industry, so it’s usually my tax returns that go towards the Vids and software. I can think of a few worse ways to spend money. If XSI turns out to be the way I want to go for rendering, I’ll likely get Aarons other two vids as well. I think one has some detailing, but mostly modeling in XSI, and the second vid doesn’t have any (or was it the other way around). Either way, I find them all great for entertainment as well as educational.

#35

I ordered what I thought was a full set. I’d be curious to check it out. They didn’t list it with the other ZBrush tutorials. I’ll check and see if I can find it.

I’ve worked in the industry for over 25 years but runaway production drove me out, I did traditional visual effects, modelmaking, sculpture, etc. Unfortunately I’m working for a small toy company right now that doesn’t pay much. That may change very soon but right now every cent I don’t spend on food goes to computer software/hardware. I just blew around $3,000 in the last week. Took me months to get that far ahead and it’s all gone now. My favorite saying is once you get into computers you’ll never have time or money again. I have my sights on a quad Operton that’ll max out at 32 gig of ram. Even building it out myself it’ll set me back nearly 10 grand. Guess it’s ramen noodles for a few more months.

#36

As the first guy said! the teaching material is the most importent! as you are buying those DVDs to learn more about somthing! Anyways your review is verry nice and strait forward! it gave me a good idea of wich DVD to bye! so thank you verry mutch!:+1:

#37

I have training videos from both gnomon and kurvs and I am happy with both of them. Meats voice is a little mono-tone both other than that I like the gnomon videos just fine. They went to rom because they where able to get a better video compression than the standard mpeg used in dvd players. (ensharpe) Yea it’s a pain you can’t watch it on your tv but having the video nice and sharpe is worth it. Bottom line is school is expensive, so throwing down a couple of hundred bucks for good quality training from master artists is worth it! I’m still watching the kurvs and getting my zbrush on, but so far Glen is doing a great job. I enjoy watching from different folks as everyone does it a little different.
So go spend some money the training is good with either company.:smiley:

#38

I just wish I could run them on my notebook. It would be ten times better if I could follow the videos. I’m now having to go back through and watch portions because I remember it’s possible to do certain things but I can’t remember all the quirky steps to doing it. I’m not sure why they mastered in such a way to exclude 1024 res. Really caused me a lot of headaches. I’ll take some video loss just to have the option of following it along. I’m seriously thinking about dragging out my old monitor I keep as a back up and setting it on the desk with one of my tower systems just so I can follow them along. Pretty silly to do it but the ZBrush interface is driving me nuts. You retain far more following along than watching four hours of lecture then trying to remember all the steps.

#39

If you copy the videos to your harddrive and open them in quicktime you can scale the window to fit your resolution :smiley:
Also found that elimated the spin down issues with my dvd player on my computer.
HTH’s

#40

Thanks. I’ll try that. I assumed that the files were sercured. It’d be a massive help.