Welcome The Dark Spot 2 Members

[Otto Von Herunterhängen]

Hi, I'm Otto. Not my real name of course. I am also Brian the Snail on this site, that account usually posts my comics which can be found in the Deadly Relations forum.

I've been in the fetish community since the early 2000's, I was a member of Peter Cohen's Writers Guild over on NB under the name of Dio, and on CNB and PSV when they existed. I was over on TDSI as Dio as I recall, and on TDS2 as Trish. I'm over on DeadlyDesires as DeadlyRelations. So you've probably heard of me somewhere under a different name.

I have a quirky sense of humor, and my comics have a lot of comedy in them along with the mayhem. I'm primarily a 3D artist, Daz Studio, but have lately been running the 3D output through AIRE which adds photorealism to people in the renders.

Anyway, on to the site.

Renderunto is an original art site following in the footsteps of Visions of Darkness, and before that Art of Darkness that was run by Heironimous. Yeah, I was on all those too.

These originally started as 3D and traditional art sites, we also accept AI art here. We don't allow photomanips of photo's of people because of model release issues - too often those pictures are lifted from social networks.

There are no limitations on picture sizes, and the most you can place in one post is 20. Just keep in mind if you overload a thread it is going to run slowly.

We prefer JPG to PNG, space isn't unlimited and PNG's tend to be huge, but you can upload either. We also take WebP and GIF.

And we host video's, though I'd prefer you post those over on RenderTube and link them here, RenderTube optimizes them, we can't. See @Drac Morbis for an invite to Rendertube.

If you prefer not to join Rendertube, feel free to upload them directly here. Maximum size here is 94MB. That limit is the same for text stories and still pictures.

We are on a dedicated unmanaged server with 8TB of space. There are around 15 sites on it, all managed by either me or Drac. This makes things a lot more stable than a shared hosting account, we have all the resources. This runs around $100 a month, I pay yearly, and we are covered through Nov 2027.

Drac has the codes for this site and the hosting account, and with what's happened over at TDS2 I think that it's important a second person be involved.

This site runs on Xenforo and I do have a development site set up. If anybody wants to learn it and take part in site maintanence I'll be happy to set you up with access there. (I need to limit how many are there, though I suspect I am not going to get many takers on that )

Rules are in the TOS if you haven't read that already it would be a good idea to.

Any questions? Fire away.

 

[MCDesigns]

Any questions? Fire away.

yeah, where is my free toaster when I first signed up? haven't received it yet!

on a serious note, WELCOME to all the new members!! Looking forward to seeing your work!

 

[Brianaldiss]

Thanks Otto for the warm welcome

 

[some1]

Thank you for the warm welcome.

 

[Sam_Sneed]

Thank you for the welcome, glad to be here.

 

[LD5]

Thank you for the warm welcome and having us given everything.

 

[33rdDivision]

Thanks so much, Otto. Still mourning El Coyote and TDS, and its nice to see the kind welcome to your community.

One small question. 8 TB of space sounds like a lot, but in my experience it fills up fast. Raw PNGs for the comics and graphics I made on TDS can go up to 300 MB or more (know your limit is 94 MB, I'm just using an example).

My personal preference is posting optimized JPEGs (10-15 MB) to minimize the use of space wherever I can, and I'm still uncertain if I'll post anywhere else. But is there a concern about space usage from us at TDS migrating over?

 

[Otto Von Herunterhängen]

Thanks so much, Otto. Still mourning El Coyote and TDS, and its nice to see the kind welcome to your community.

One small question. 8 TB of space sounds like a lot, but in my experience it fills up fast. Raw PNGs for the comics and graphics I made on TDS can go up to 300 MB or more (know your limit is 94 MB, I'm just using an example).

My personal preference is posting optimized JPEGs (10-15 MB) to minimize the use of space wherever I can, and I'm still uncertain if I'll post anywhere else. But is there a concern about space usage from us at TDS migrating over?

Xenforo is capable of retroactively converting everything over to WebP which greatly reduces picture file size. If we start running into issues that's the first thing I'll do. Yeah, PNGs are an issue, I'd much rather have everything in WebP or JPG. I can also turn off uploading PNGs to force the issue.

And we actively monitor server space, as I said, we have full control of the whole server including monitoring apps. If we see that becoming an issue we can catch it quickly.

TDS was on shared hosting though, and there is no way Dreamhost would have let that site get anywhere near 8TB. That said I have no idea how big it actually is.

 

[TailsWin]

My personal preference is posting optimized JPEGs (10-15 MB) to minimize the use of space wherever I can

10-15MB is optimised? Do you mean for an entire long comic or one page? While I appreciate quality, you can squeeze almost any reasonably sized image under 1MB, probably under 500 KB.

When I export anything to jpeg, I typically set quality to around 80%, which is usually indistinguishable from the original. Unless I need "archival quality". Tho I prefer webp these days. There's no point in overdoing it with file size. Remember that most people watch content on Instagram and TikTok, which are compressed to oblivion. And most pictures get baked, screenshotted and recompressed anyway, when people share them. Going with high quality is usually overkill.

Also, there are still people with slow or limited internet, and web sites already often take tens of MB's to load even before the content images.