OK guys, please read the following procedures and guidelines listed herein, and follow them when submitting photos for the Customs gallery. All of your questions SHOULD be answered in here, but IF you manage to find a question that is NOT answered, by all means PM any of the Radicons staff (
plowking, REDLINE, Superquad7, ALPHAMAGNUS, autobotx23, or Nemesis Predaking) with your inquiries, and we can amend this article.
First of all, there is NO SUCH THING as a custom not "worthy" of being placed in our gallery, got it? You make it, and you post it here, then we want you to submit a gallery of it for inclusion. It's that simple. Now, that being said, when you go about photographing your customs with the intent of having them get added to the gallery, please follow the following guidelines:
15 images minimum, no maximum. Regardless of how poseable a custom figure is, 15 images are extremely easy to come up with. Between shooting front, back, side, front and rear angles, zoomed in shots to highlight details of a particular area, comparison pictures with an unaltered version of the figure, or another version (or group shots!) of the character you created, repeating this for both Alternate and Robot modes, showing off poseability or action or "fun" shots, it really shouldn't require much work to come up with 15 images as a MINIMUM. That's not to say you cant shoot more, in fact, the more the merrier! Personally, I try to shoot 30 or more photos of a typical custom. The goal of a gallery is that you are presenting your custom for the world to see. You WANT to show off detailed areas, poseability, many different angles, comparisons, etc, so that people who view your gallery can fully appreciate the time and effort you put into your artwork.
Maximum image size is 1800 by 1800. If the image is rectangular, then the longer side needs to be no longer than 1800. Please save all your images as either JPG or PNG. The gallery can also support Animated GIFs. Please keep Animated GIFs below 1 MB, Thanks.
Properly Name Your Files! We will not accept submissions of images that have camera gibberish for file names. We have too many things to do to have to go and re-name everyone's files for them, and we can not submit them to the gallery without a properly named file. There are many reasons for this. First, the file name shows up in the title-bar of your browser when you view an image. Second, it sucks for organizational reasons, this became very evident when we had to go and re-upload the entire gallery when we switched servers a couple years ago. This is not negotiable. If you can expect us to put in the work necessary to get your entry into the gallery, then we can expect you to do the same.
The BEST way to name your files is to simply title it the character's name, followed by a space, and then 001. for example: Devastator 001, Devastator 002, Devastator 003, etc. When you're doing this, you can easily set it up so that it will display them in the order in which you want them to, plus having the extra zeros in there keeps you from having order problems when you hit the numbers 10 and up.
NOT Accepted: DSC5323501.jpg
NOT Accepted: Dirgewingszoomed.jpg
Accepted: Dirge 001.jpg
Photo backgrounds - Please try to take your photographs on a neutral background. This means plain white, grey, or black is preferred. You can accomplish this by using a junker sheet, or getting some extremely cheap poster board to use. If you go with poster board, get two sheets (about 50 cents each) so you can lay one on the surface and prop the other one as your background.
CROP YOUR PHOTOS! cropping is clipping off all unnecessary wasted/blank space that makes the custom itself small as its unable to utilize our large maximum dimensions. Not cropping your photos makes it hard or impossible to see and appreciate all the details you've painted/sculpted/modified on your custom, which only hurts one person - YOU.
For more help on taking good photographs, I've conveniently linked you to two of our very informative tutorials:
Build Your Own Light Tent/Photo Box Tutorial How To Take Good Photographs Tutorial Videos Are Supported - Our gallery can support video files to further enhance your gallery entries! Videos are great for showing off electronics in action or any other actionable features of your custom. To see an example, check out my and plowking's
Alternators Bludgeon gallery to see 2 videos. If you want to include a video file(s) with your gallery, please note that these must be
under 4MBs in size, and that FLV is the preferred format, as it supports great compression, allowing the file to be more internet-friendly. A great free program for converting all the common video file types into FLV is Free Zune, and can be found
HERE.
Please Include Descriptions In A Text File. While there are many older entries in there that don't really have this, all the newer ones do. If you haven't noticed already, please take a look around the gallery. The description shows up right at the top of your entry's folder as soon as someone clicks it to open and see your thumbnails. This description can be why you made the custom, what you did to it, a bio, a tech spec, or anything else as long as it is relevant to your project. These greatly enhance the presentation of your work, and make it that much more interesting to browsers when they are looking at your creations. A text file is created by merely right-clicking anywhere and selecting the option of "new" from the pop-up menu that appears, and then selecting "text file". Alternatively, you can use a Word file, but these are larger and will make your submission that that much longer to upload into your email. PLEASE Include in this text file what faction your custom is a member of. If you look in the gallery, you'll see that at the bottom of each entries description area displays either a "Autobot/Maximal/good guy" icon, "Decepticon/Predacon/bad guy" icon, or a "neutral" icon.
Don't forget to spell- and grammar-check your text! Galleries can't be uploaded instantaneously. Myself, superquad7, and plowking do spend a good amount of time working for Radicons(or for TFW2005); but we have responsibilities that extend well beyond uploading things to the gallery. Whether that be dealing with members, checking posts and threads, trouble-shooting, writing blogs, or our "real world" lives which would include work, errands, families, etc (we do like to get to make customs ourselves). Having said that, we will always do our best to get submissions included into the gallery as quickly as we can, but please keep this in mind and be patient.
ZIP All Files And Submit. ZIPing up all your images, videos, and text files together not only makes it so you only have one single item to upload, but makes things tremendously easy for us as well. We only have to download one file this way. When we unZIP it, it automatically creates a folder with all your stuff in it, and all your stuff is together. For Windows users, ZIPing is easy as pie. Simply right-click the folder that has your images and text and any other essential files for your submission, and point to the option "send-to" that appears, and then click on "compressed folder". That's it!
I strongly urge you to create a new folder every time you take pictures of a new custom. When you do this, give it a good name (when you go to ZIP it later, the ZIP is automatically named the same as your folder). Our gallery is organized by the toy line the figure came from, so keep that in mind. For example, on my HDD, the folder for my Omega Supreme custom is "Cybertron Omega Supreme by REDLINE". While I or pk or sq7 are each very knowledgeable with Transformers, there will occasionally be a custom figure that we won't necessarily recognize which toy line it is from, so PLEASE include that info in the folder name, just like I displayed in the previous sentence! Lastly, don't forget to double-check to insure that not only the images you want included are in the folder, but also any video, text, or animated files are in there as well, so they will ALL be included when you ZIP it up.
To submit your work, click the submission button below. This link will forward your submission to all of the Radicons staff, and we will get it put up as soon as we are able. Please note:
include your board name in the e-mail so we know who to credit the creation to in the gallery!
-Radicons Staff
That's not ol' 'quad trying to offer up excuses; it's merely stating the facts.
