Content Creator News
Today we are announcing a significant change to our VIP and Creator programs. As of May 10, 2012 new Content Creators must be VIPs in order to submit virtual goods to IMVU’s catalog.
However, all users who as of May 10, 2012 10 AM Pacific Time, are enrolled in the Content Creator program will be “grandfathered” for an indefinite period of time. This means that if you have signed up for the Content Creator program prior to May 10th, you will continue to enjoy uninterrupted product submission capabilities without the necessity of being a VIP. Of course, many of you are already part of our exclusive VIP club for the many other benefits you enjoy. We reserve the right to end the “grandfathering” benefit at any time, but we do not anticipate doing so now.
Details can be found here.
We're celebrating Circus Day (May 19th) on IMVU with a fun creator contest!
Come one, come all to the big top circus: the greatest show on IMVU! The circus has everything: clowns, acrobats, exotic animals, and so much more. The circus is also the perfect way to celebrate sunny weather as we move from spring into summer!
For this contest, we are challenging you to create an over the top circus room, complete with a circus tent, fun animations, and hopefully some interesting creatures. Your circus doesn't have to be conventional: we want to see where your creativity takes you!
Details here: http://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpbb2&file=viewtopic.php&t=423030
This is your chance to submit your high-quality work for the entire IMVU community and get exposure as a Creator. Selected gift wrap will be visible to all IMVU users when they send gifts. Significant amounts of users send gifts daily, so this is a great opportunity to get your name out there in the IMVU world!
For details on selection criteria and where to submit, please click on our forum post link here.
Thank you for your patience with our delay as we finished our database maitenance. Tiers have been updated for the month of March. Please check your tier level to see if you gained a level!
Due to ongoing database maintenance, tiers have been delayed until Tuesday, March 6th. Creators will not see an update for their tier level until that date.
If there is any further information or delays for the tier update, we will post back here. Thank you for your patience.
We're celebrating Mardi Gras on IMVU by having a meshing contest! Create your own Mardi Gras product using an original mesh and you can win credit prizes and more. Read all contest rules in our forum post here. Deadline is February 16th so start your meshing today!
Important update for Creators as of January 23, 2012:
We have disabled 467.20 pre-release so if you are currently using that version, you will be prompted to use the previous full release 467.0. Instead please go to the link below to upgrade to the latest pre-release (467.22 or above) in order to use Create Mode.
http://www.imvu.com/download.php
Thank you.
Hi everyone,
Don't forget to enter our IMVU Holiday 2011 Product Contest going on now:
http://www.imvu.com/catalog/modules.php?op=modload&name=phpbb2&file=viewtopic.php&p=9743634#9743634
Enter an original room mesh with fun lawn ornaments, a gingerbread house, or elf outfits! It is the perfect way to kick off the holiday season. Contest ends December 5th, so start on your entry today!
Hi Creators,
We have a few important announcements for our IMVU Creators regarding the latest version of IMVU’s 3D Chat. We have made some improvements regarding the way 3D products work on IMVU, and as a result, we expect that some products will not work as they did in earlier versions of IMVU. Before we go into each change, we want to let you know that all active users will receive a homepage message outlining these changes, and all Creators will receive a separate homepage message outlining these changes with more details. We hope this post will provide enough information to help you edit your products, if necessary, so that the IMVU community can continue to enjoy them.
1) Particle Effects
Change: We recently made some changes to the coordinate system for our 3D experience, and this has affected certain products using particle effects.
Result: Certain products using particle effects have become misaligned on the avatar or in rooms. For example: a wand with a sparkling particle effect may appear outside of an avatar hand instead of in the hand.
Fix: We do not officially support particle effects within Create Mode, however it is easy to fix the affected products: 1) open Create Mode 2) open up the affected product using “edit” 3) modify the particles until the alignment looks correct 4) save and resubmit your changes. If you have derived from a product with misaligned particle effects, please contact the original mesher of that product.
2) Texture Animations
Change: We have made texture animation speed independent from frame rate, just as we do with avatar animations. This change was made so that users with slow computers can witness animation speeds at the same rate as users with fast computers. We want everyone to enjoy animations at the same rate, regardless of computer speed.
Result: Some products created to achieve a certain animation speed on older computers with slower frame rates will now animate at the rate they always have on newer or faster computers. The result: texture animations on slower computers will “appear” too fast. Products that appear to be too fast as a result of our change will now need to be updated by Creators.
Fix: 1) Open Create Mode 2) Edit affected product 3) Go to the Texture Animation tool and adjust the direction variables and the frames/cell field values
3) Special-Sized Avatars
Change: We made recent changes regarding scaling and vertices. This change affected special-sized avatars: slender, very tall, very short, etc. by scaling down the body size.
Result: These avatars may appear deformed since scaling down the body caused a multiplier effect across the avatar bones, resulting in heads and arms becoming extremely tiny or extremely tall.
Fix: 1) Open Create Mode 2) Edit affected product 3) Open the “debug” panel 4) Go through each BodyPart entry and disable its ModeMeshScaleRec by editing the “On” value from 1 to 0 5) Then, re-enable them, starting with spine bones, until you get the effect you want.
Our sincere apologies for this short term inconvenience caused to our users and Creators. We are confident that these changes will make the IMVU experience better for the entire community in the long run. As mentioned above, we have communicated these changes to all IMVU users so that they know what to expect with the products they have purchased.
Please keep in mind that it’s very likely that we will disable Create Mode in releases before the 466.0 version once we establish that it is working correctly and is stable for all users.
Sincerely,
The IMVU Team
Over the past few weeks we have introduced a few changes and new processes relevant to our Creator community. This update provides a summary and current status of these changes, and also includes notification of some upcoming changes.
1) Credit Pend – Change is live as of September 19th, 2011
As communicated earlier, all credits earned from catalog product sales are placed on a 14-day hold before being made available to Creators for use or transfer. We gradually increased the hold period from one to 14 days and now everyone is on the final 14 day schedule. Credits earned on October 4th are delivered to you on October 18th; those earned on October 5th are delivered to you on October 19th and so on.
In addition to having the profits earned from product sales, we are also pending (keeping on hold) any derivation fees earned when someone derives from one of your products.
All pended transactions – including product sales and derivation fees – are listed in your Pended Credits Schedule report.
We are already seeing a noticeable improvement in account takeovers and UFI content submission – issues that this process aimed to address.
2) Refunds for re-rated products – Change is live as of October 10th, 2011
As of October 10th, we changed the way refunds and deductions are handled for re-rated products. Now, when a product is re-rated from GA to AP or GA/AP to UFI, the buyers will get a refund as before and profits earned by the Creator who submitted that product to the catalog will be deducted irrespective of where those credits are at the time of the refund. The change to the process is that credits earned by other creators upstream in the derivation chain of the re-rated product will be deducted as well if they are still in pend (hold). More information can be found in this forum post.
We expect this change to further prevent users from submitting content to our catalog that is against our policies.
3) Products with incorrect derivation chain information – Change in process
As several of you have indicated, we have products in the catalog with incorrect derivation chain information and therefore lower prices than what they should be at. These products show one product to be their parent product while in reality they are actually derived from another.
Our recently completed Meta Data project allows us to correctly identify the products in the derivation chain and we have done so.
We are now in the process of correcting the parent product data for all affected products (about 70,000 products or less than 1% of our catalog). Once the process is complete, these products will show correct derivation chain information AND accurate pricing in our virtual catalog. We expect this change to be completed over the next few days.
4) Products with Particle Effects – Change in progress
Our team has been working on the code employed by our 3D Chat client and improving its coordinate system to make it more user-friendly for the future. These changes have however affected some products that utilize particle effects. Particle effects is not an official feature of our Create mode, however, many of you have successfully implemented them and made some cool products. With our upcoming release of 3D Chat version 466.0, we anticipate some such products to not work properly and show misalignments.
It’s easy to fix affected products and we want to share those instructions with you so that you can do so for our mutual customers: Open Create mode, edit the affected product, modify its particles.default.json until the alignment looks right and resubmit. If you have derived from such a product then please contact the Mesher to get the correction done.
We want to convey our sincere apologies in advance for this inconvenience.
5) Holiday contests – Ongoing
We have several ongoing and upcoming contests open to Creators and rest of our community members. Be sure to participate and enjoy not just the prizes but the satisfaction of celebrating these holiday times with us and the community!
a) Halloween Theme Video Contest – Open to all IMVU users. Have a Halloween themed party, decorate your party room to the hilt, invite your friends in their craziest costumes and capture the fun in a video clip for the contest.
b) Halloween Product Contest – Open to all Creators. Meshers can create and submit an original ,spook-tacular cemetery or graveyard scene and all Creators can retexture an awesome mask perfect for any Halloween Masquerade Ball!
c) Holiday Promotional Products – You are all invited to contact us if you are interested in making products especially for our Christmas holiday gifting promotion. We will give these products to all users as we celebrate 12 days of Xmas!
Stay tuned as we continue to host more fun contests for the Creators!
Sincerely,
Sr. Community Manager