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Nice
FYI; for people who didn’t see the 3ds Max 2021 webinar live on Wednesday, you can watch it here: https://autodesk.wistia.com/medias/ny4mu3r2n0
Nice worldwide… 5 countries on the list :hmm:
Well, thats the news. Right now its offered in 5 countries as a pilot program. The news you are reading says that pilot has been satisfactory, and that will be available worldwide soon.
For all the Countries that do have it, do we know if the price of the indie license will change? Wasn’t Autodesks plan to give out the indie lic for a year, then hit them with the full price with the automatic payment plan switched on?
If the price will change I have no idea.
Autodesk itself on the indie page was explaining how to deactivate the automatic renewal to full price. Not ideal, hope the indie is worlwide soon as a product and not as a “test”.
I bet Blender have more influence in that than anything else.
Probably yes… we all should thank the blender community and developers… without them this would nto be possible! 🙂
thank u blender
I was a 3dmax lover. then moving companies, I was forced to use blender 2.8. It changed me. There is no reason to pay for max. Blender takes a bit of learning, but can do everything max can do.
I can say the same thing. Stop giving money out to a company that doesn’t care about their product.
WOW… Beautiful…! If its true, worldwide and the price will stay more or less the same (afaik its 250 USD per year)…? Then… BEAUTIFUL (!). Well done autodesk. Greatest news from you in like a decade or whatever! :-).
(arent there any hidden “ifs”…? Seems too good to be true…)
Well they can change ideas anytime cut you out anytime, and you will loose access to your projects.
That could happen with Houdini Indie (rental only), Cinema 4D and Modo subscription. When it comes I’ll definitely get it.
Of course. Do you have time/mind to deal with 2 or 3 applications? i mean i don’t only do 3D DCC – so i use Blender and DesignSpark Mechanical(for 3D printing). And that is enough i don’t fill proficient if i add more stuff.
Yeah … I use Modo now but would like to get back to Max if the Indie offer comes through. But the point is … when you are in rental land, any software can increase it’s price out of the blue.
heck even if you have a “permanent” license the company (Autodesk) can pull the plug on you, make your renderer obsolete and unusable and force you to “upgrade” to a subscription.
Very true, however the track record of SideFX and Autodesk have stark contrast between them. It’s hard to imagine SideFX trying to screw over their customer base anytime soon.
This is shown in your basket when you buy it:
3ds Max – 1 year subscription
Price
£289.79
£1,872.00 *crossed out*
Don’t forget to including any VAT that your country may have. That is not in the price.
Just checked this site that was mentioned in the webinar. Some of the future animation features like Inertia Modifier, Directed Animation and Modifier Real-Time Blending looks really nice.
http://makeanything.autodesk.com/3DSMAX/public-roadmap-25B1-201DB.html#animation-future
I’m sure you are joking :). If you are not then you must be neither a rigger nor an animator. You could also be from an autodesk marketing department who read my previous comment on their animation road map and decided to spread a counter viewpoint :).
Nothing personal don’t get me wrong.
What do you think the joke is? This isn’t stuff we just made because someone recently said we weren’t doing anything for animation. Some things take a long time to develop, test, think through workflows, and then rinse and repeat many times. Just because you don’t see stuff doesn’t mean we aren’t working on things.
Sorry, I don’t buy it and allow me to explain why:
1 – MrCus6 up there was “Impressed” with inertia modifier and directed animation, he seems to be easily impressed, I was humbly putting things in check for him, the fact of life is that those tools are utterly useless in a production workflow of any semi serious and above user, rigger, animator, TD you name it.
2 – You don’t have an excuse Martin, nothing personal and you may be a talented person, I think you have a major management and leadership problem at Autodesk.
A company of that stature and unlimited resources has NO excuse, at the very least you can look at the solo devs and what they are doing for Max or look at your fellow teammates at Maya department and bring some of those tools inside Max for crying outloud!
You mean to tell me stuff takes time as if you are reinventing the wheel, all we are asking is to look back in time and take SkinFX for instance (you even have the dev hired for christ sake! tell him to please sit down and work on it 100% of the time and do nothing else and guess what will happen if you do?
You have at the very least a muscle system or a start of a muscle system in Max! And Guess what you (as in Autodesk) did instead, you hired the guy killed his plugin and put him on now dead ShaderFX! You mean to tell me that is not a F*ckin insult to me as a user! I was forced to put in additional $$$$$ in RnD and plugins and I still don’t have a stable solution.
You mean to tell me you can’t do that even when the dev who invented the d*amn thing is sitting in the same room???? Meanhwile the rest of you are busy having AO in my viewport and inertia blending, what is this a game engine?
You do realize why your position sounds weak at this point, and once again nothing personal it is just baffling to me.
Need I go on about the default spline IK solver in 3ds Max which only allows for one up node to be defined, unlike in Maya where separate nodes to control the start and end twist can be defined?
You mean to tell me that takes years and decades to do??!!
You know what, I will stop there because I can go on about CAT and Biped and cloth (still single threaded since 2001)!! And no updates since Blizzard last touched it in their warcraft 3 cinematics.
Guys you do come from production backgrounds don’t you? I’m sure you do Martin, so unless we have experienced production in vastly different ways I completely fail to see your point.
Sorry guest, I don’t share your concerns, and maybe it’s just because I have a different vantage point. I have typed and deleted a lot here because these conversations never go well. I get you are not happy with us. Join beta. Let us know your concerns there. Do something about it. Complaining here does absolutely nothing. Hope to see you on the other side Guest.
What happens if I join Beta and your colleagues tell me they don’t share my concerns?
Let’s try this:
Can they at least give me an answer on the two points I made above, are they not valid points with historic record as proof?
I’m speaking of Kees, can he answer me here?
Kees left Autodesk some time ago. I think he’s at Disney. If you would like to have a private conversation with me, I’d be happy to do that.
Kees left!? That’s news to me I thought he was still at Autodesk.
I am not surprised though, after how they approached his road map with not just his own plugins but trying their luck on a game engine (stingray) I told Autodesk the day it was announced that they are going to shut it down within a year. I really hate being right about these things, I told them they are making a mistake to put a talented guy like Kees on these useless side projects when his skills can be better utilized on the areas he was already working on, WOW, it seems I was also right about that. He quit!
Do excuse me going on a tangent Martin, you see, I can’t help it, I’ve seen the worst of company bureaucracy and the worst of incompetency on upper levels for 30 years and counting. Usually I wouldn’t care if the company was not affecting me personally but Autodesk is, because I use their tools (sadly these days) d*mn great tools at that shot to hell for at least the last 15 years.
I would prefer to remain anonymous, I would be happy to have a private text based chat anytime if that can be arranged. And regardless I thank you for the offer and your time. Again I have Zero issues with personalities on the team, unless they tell me they don’t share my concerns, then I am genuinely interested to hear an answer with valid reasons as to why, perhaps then I may be able to come to a more solid conclusion as to why and how.
sorry, everything guest wrote is true… but i do understand that you cannot speak freeily your mind because of the company you work for. Still… everybody knows that what guess wrote is true, including yourself.
I do have to agree with @Guest (whoever they are) and @Name?… , in production these are not really that useful for a studio environment (particularly if dealing with characters that are more than just “one shot” appearances). They remind me of Andy Murdock’s “Automatron” with it’s modifier layer system (which I thought were absolutely awesome at the time); don’t get me wrong, I got very excited and was adamantly telling Autodesk to add that style of feature to CAT’s layer system in one of their many user feedback rounds… but the truth is that the “agile” rigging paradigm of CAT seems to be a thing of the past, so it doesn’t really make sense to add that functionality to animation when most characters require a rigger (and/or TD) that can reproduce that effect with a few script controllers. Hopefully I am wrong, and I will finally get my CAT “modifier layers” but considering the advancement of CAT in the last years, I think I am safe.
Martin, please tell me that chamfer in 2021 now supports persistent, custom normals after three+ years of development? It’s useless for game development without that. You’ve known about this for years. The Quad Chamfer plugin by Marius Silaghi that Autodesk stole most of the design and functionality from has supported this for almost a decade!
We now have a weighted normals modifier that does what you are looking for.
No, I doubt that it does. Weighted normals are a poor concept and they work very poorly for hard surface modeling. It was an okay idea when we only had 12 polygons to work with but with today’s hardware it makes zero sense. They’re unpredicatable and unintuitive as as people can’t estimate area nearly as well as they can angles, and they’re also unreliable and inconsistent as they change dramatically if you alter the geometry by adding cuts for materials boundaries, skinning, or anything else. I don’t know why Max has decided to follow Maya and others and go down this tortured route. This is why I will never waste a second of my time with the Max beta program. I don’t know who requested or approved of weighted normal’s, but they’re ill informed. It’s an ancient technology. The Chamfer modifier knows exactly what the normal’s should be. No modifier will every know more about the chamfered geometry than the Chamfer modifier does. Why do Max developers inssit on making this so difficult? This has got to me a few hours change to set the normal’s as custom. This is why people will abandon Max for Blender, where they can modify the open source software when developers refuse to implement something trivial. I paid $20–ONCE–for the Quad Chamfer modifier and I’ve been using it for over 7 YEARS now with this functionality. One guy could do it, why can’t Autodesk? Marius updates the Quad Chamfer plugins every year timely without any additional “maintenance” fees.
Looks like there is no winning here. Alright. Have a good night everyone.
Im not exactly a rigger also..but i found the features mentioned above to be very handy as well
Really great! Hopefully it will come to Maya too.
Now the thing is, with Autodesk, no guarantee that the price will stay the same over time
Do you have to give up your perpetual license to use indie? That’s the only thing that would worry me. If not, then I would go straight for this.
It should be a separate license agreement, so your perpetual license would be un-affected. If it isn’t I wouldn’t touch Indy. They might try some kind of ‘surrender your license to get 5 years of indie’ deal though.. that would mean you would vaporize your perpetual, but I’m not sure they would do that as they haven’t in the UK/US so far. As we all know, they have perpetuals cornered in the longer term with their ‘no activation’ customer service policy. So we’ve already been swiped with the stick.. and I guess this is the carrot.
You know where they can shove their carrot.
Who’s to say they just won’t cancel/hike the price to more like the regular rental in 5 years?
If they hadn’t consistently eliminated options to benefit Autodesk over their users, I’d be more inclined to cut them slack.
Eliminated upgrades
Cut grace periods on subscriptions
Ended perpetual sales
Hiked the price of maintenance subscriptions out of all proportion
Ended the maintenance subscriptions entirely
Said they’re not going to issue keys for anything older than a few versions
Why on earth would any sane person give them the benefit of the doubt with that track record?
Sadly, this is the current state of the pseudo customer relation at Autodesk. As much as I support the team behind Max – the team is probably the best they had since a long time with many past users – I can’t shrug it away.
With the current economy woes due to the pandemic, I fear that there will be lay offs affecting the team size, and, probably, prices will go up once again.
In any case, I’m eager to see the indie being extended but… I still have my doubts about the conditions…
Yeah, I know. Its difficult not to be cynical when trying to assess any moves by Autodesk. Considering the Machiavellian behaviour of senior management over recent years I suspect Indy is a ‘positive’ tactic to mop-up more of those stubborn perpetual licenses. So perpetuals are caught in a pincer movement.
Who knows what metrics were used to determine the success of Indy across the US and UK.. but its not difficult to imagine they might have looked at if indy was displacing perpetuals in active use by smaller businesses. So continuing this hypothesis – and it is just a cynical theory.. what happens when indy replaces almost all perpetuals and the activation deadline passes?
Would Indy be eol’ed?
It could be much simpler than that though and they are simply trying to appeal in the long-term to a segment of the market that can’t afford full rental prices.
What do you mean with that…? if one bought 3ds max perpetual he can activate it only for certain ammount of time?
Um.. have you not heard the news?
In theory you can continue to use your perpetual forever yes.. but in practice you will probably want or need to install it on a new machine at some point. But from Spring next year you won’t be able to activate perpetual licenses older than 3 versions from the current release (sorry, I forget the exact date). 2010 and older are already frozen out from last summer.
I dont get it.. if someone has bought the last perpetual license of max (2016), perpetual, didnt touch any maintance or whatever (i dont even know what that means)… Then for sure he can use his perpetual 2016 forever… correct? Otherwise i believe it would go even against rules of some states or EU for example for which autodesk isnt above. So what is this fuss about not being able to use perpetual…?
IT’s referring to this news https://cgpress.org/archives/autodesk-to-stop-activating-older-software.html
Somewhere in the adsk-forums (or in the comments of the above article), some statement from an adsk-employee was quoted, kind of “of course you keep the permanent right to use the software, adsk just doesn’t activate installations after the 3 year-period”.
Generally I think the same like you, in my country in Europe this would be legally highly questionable, that they want to block me from excercising my perpetual right to use the software.
Personally I don’t have the money to bring this to a court. Somehow hoping some larger company will do it, But maybe I won’t care anymore, have stopped paying for the maintenance last year and started using/learning Blender. Not easy to begin fresh after 20 years of using Max, but it works.
no matter what, you will have to give up your perpetual license. AD does not let you the choice, that is part of their policy …. perpetual licenses no longer exist
where did you get that? That would devious :-)…?
I’m surprised how unclear these perpetual license stories are….
Perpetual licenses no longer exist, period.
Smart move, Autodesk!
You mentioned on stack that without Indie you would leave. I’m guessing that would be Houdini? I find it an amazing software but much more complicated than Max.
Maybe the docs and training are more technical than it should.
I am interested pending details. Looks like working from might be here for a while so could be useful
Interesting point about working from home.. maybe the virus has focused minds at Autodesk HQ. I can imagine they are pretty uncomfortable with the thought that a lot of people globally might be tempted to go with Blender or Houdini if asked to work from home.. especially game or asset store artists who might just need to export fbx’s at the end of the day.
Good news: the Indie Limit of 100k or even 30K, in few months when AD comes with the license model, should be NO PROBLEM at all for most of us!
Concerning the current situation, after Corona-Market-Wipe-Out, there will be only few customers to order 3D-Art from artists and freelancers at all.
AD will have the largest Indie-Sales in the history of 3D Software – we all will be Indie 🙂
Donate to Blender if you want a better, more affordable 3ds Max!
Autodesk is feeling the beat from Blender. Blender has demonstrated fantastic, user focused, development and innovation. This is in stark contrast to the progress of 3ds Max over the last decade. The profits from Max are surely not being re-invested into the software, but are likely funding all kinds of random projects at Autodesk.
Even if you don’t use Blender, I encourage you to donate to their development fund. Blender’s success is the best, and likely only way, that Autodesk will provide Max developers with the resources they need to innovate and deliver the quality of software we desire and have been paying for all these years.
Blender is too slow, and the interface is made by aliens. Stop comparing the two.
the new 2.8 the interface is finally OK, what are you talking about? (and i dont even use blender).
You do know that before 2.8 redesign amazon studios for the man in the high castle was using blender so if blender was slow as you say they wouldn’t of use it in such big production. I suggest checking out the new 2.8 ver. Sincerely a 3ds Max user.
Funnily enough or not … if you look at their reel for the 3rd season, there’s a lot of Maya and Houdini now. So they had to bring in other tools to support the work.
I love how Blender has such crap market share that people still need to parrot “MAN IN THE HIGH CASTLE” 5 years later. Yeah, we know it was used in that show, that’s why the CG in the main nazi building looks straight out of a 2002 direct to DVD movie.
I have worked on Maya, LW, 3DS Max, modo, Houdini. For modelling there is nothing faster and better than Blender (with exception of poor curve tools). Rendering is also fast with Cycles, and if you want faster, go Eevvee, almost realtime. Generally the pipeline is neat and was also for 2.79 version. What is slow? Object import (in the works), and undo (same).
And edit poly, and any modifier performance on medium/highpoly for example.
Haven’t noticed any of that. Viewport is a bit slower than 2.79.
You will notice if you compare it side by side. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iHxHPWdQr7k
Blender is great for a lot of things, but seriously needs some boost on performance on multiple areas.
Everyone who is comparing Blender to Max has missed the point entirely. Blender is free and open source. Think about this for a second: if you do any personal work in Max, you will have to pay a yearly fee to access your native scene and/or assets. You are completely at the whim of Autodesk to modify or revisit your hard work at some point in the future. Even if you have a “perpetual” license, it’s clear that Autodesk is reneging on their commitment by slowly eroding access to the software one line of fine print at a time. Blender, and everything you do in it, can never be taken from you or restricted. Maybe Max is faster now, but Blender is improving by leaps and bounds. Max is not. Max has had zero innovation in the last decade. All the time wasting crap they stuffed into Max and promptly abandoned would take pages to list. They copy and play catch up, and don’t even do a good job at that. They buy up competitors and botch the software or kill it. The Blender viewport render is amazing, while Max’s viewport died on the vine like everything else they do. The default viewport shadowmap in Max was set to a default of 512×512 for over 7 years with no way to change it besides by scirpt, all while video card RAM increased gigabyttes a year. I could go on with the list of rookie software development moves they constantly make. There are many things you can do in Blender that you cannot do in Max, at all. Can you create a smoke simulation in Max, let alone import an Open VDB file? After how many years? Can you paint or sculpt in the viewport with something other than 20 year old technology? How about a cloth brush? Camera tracking that works? GPU rendering? Blender has had it native for years. Free single GPU Octane Render license? Sure, Max is better and faster at many things and will be for a while, but even Autodesk realizes the huge impact and threat Blender is. Do you think Autodesk decided to offer indie licensing out of the GOODNESS OF THEIR HEARTS, around the same time a massive Blender release dropped? Zero chance.
So, I’ll say it again since you’ve all missed the point: Even if you hate Blender and never care to learn anything about it, if you want Max or Maya to improve, donate to Blender development. That’s the only way Autodesk will get off their ass and improve the product you DO care about. Autodesk can’t buy Blender and kill it, they will be forced to compete–finally.
100% agree !
Well said!
About licensing its absolutely obious, everyone should have blender installed.about different features let me add somethingh:
-can you create smoke in max? Yes, with pugins. And I know you mean directly with the software, right no. But you can do with plugins smoke that has been used and refined in production for multiple years… and you compare this with mantaflow…. that yes you can do smoke, good luck using this in production.
-Import vdbs in blender as far as I know its still in development. If you need vdbs in max you can as well with bifrost (as well in development), or you can use an arnold vdb importer.
-gpu rendering? Arnold gpu? Now you have as well final render gpu.
-sculpt in max: in my opinion hell no. You need a solid base for that. Having the industry moving to specialized tools for certain areas why max should spend time on something will take years and years to dont reach the competition? Upgrading the basics totally yes.
For me the thing right now is: Blender is doing great things and its free! So for people keep paying for any 3d application needs to be or way better or add functions that keeps it appart from blender.
In my opinion max still has the edge on some areas like performance, sdk (with multiple thirdparty developers), particle systems, and some tools coming from third parties, archviz tools, cat system, splines, OSL, edit poly,… checking whats coming next in max, looks like headed on the right direction for me.
Good luck using it in production? Not everyone is working on the next Avatar or Lord of the Rings sequel. There are plenty of examples of amazing work, professional and otherwise, being done entirely in Blender. There is a whole generation of artists learning it who could care less that it’s not as fast as Max, because they’re too busy making cool stuff. And they’re not shelling out $4k a year on licenses of: Max, Zbrush, Substance, Photoshop, Phoenix FD, Syntheyes, Nuke, etc. Don’t underestimate how much ill-will professionals have for Autodesk, even if they currently use their products on a daily basis. I was working at a renowned company when the press release came out that Autodesk purchased Shotgun. A collective groan traveled though the entire studio. When the time is right, companies will be all to happy to jump ship and never look back. There is zero loyalty to Autodesk, and deservedly so.
Blender now loads VDB, version 2.8.3. For free.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HGnn8HAx_-Q
Nothing to add! Thx for this comment
If you believe that Autodesk cant buy Blender then you are lost.
If you think that Autodesk CAN buy Blender is that you know nothing about licensing and Blender itself 🙂
It’s clear you know nothing about Blender, or open source software. All the source code is available for anyone, as we speak. It can’t be bought.
It is not that BLender is driving Max development but MAx is driving Blender’s development. Blender’s developers look at MAx and Houdini and figure out how they can reverse engineer it into Blender. Personally, I don’t see how free software is good for the growth of the industry.
If you look at the top plug-in makers, Chaos Group, Real FLow, etc, they don’t offer a plugin for Blender.
I’m sorry but that’s not the way it is.
They try as much as they can to remain “unconscious” of other softwares (something that I don’t like at all), of course there are things that are proposed by users that are inspired but other softwares, but in general their target is to develop their own solutions, for example function nodes / particle nodes has had many inputs from users proposing ICE or Houdini as model to follow, but they tried to achieve a proper solution based on their own investigation.
In other words: reverse engineering is not a valid solution, the solution must be original, or as original as it could be, because in the end all developments use to be based on investigation papers.
I think management is really afraid of losing their bonuses and are scrambling around with different business models to keep up the money flow steady, instead of increasing dev team like 10x times.
The dev team of Max is already the biggest ever and way bigger than Maya’s. I for one am looking forward to it.
how do you… where did you get this information…? How many people are working on it?
The original max team is dead sadly and this new team are doing ok but nothing like the old team.
Tom Hudson for example is back!
lol, You don’t seem to understand how it works inside. They might as well bring in Will smith for marketing, it does NOT matter people, these are all marketing bag of tricks to “encourage” consumers for the bright future, in reality the leadership controls what goes in and out of a software and they tell Tom and others exactly what to do or else the highway, kindly and with pretty please with sugar on top.
My answer was for “The original team is dead”. Well implying that means there is no one from the original team, this is not true.
The exclamation mark made it look like you were excited about it that is all.
Exclamation mark to say: I dont know what its more close to “original team”. Than Tom Hudson itself.
That’s not exactly right, but there is a process. The videos from the lab stuff is stuff we are working on. Nothing really to do with marketing.
They should do indie rent to own options. That way you can have it in a perpetual version which is more friendly on indies and people who are not big companies.
I want to give Adesk money, but renting just doesn’t work as work is come and go and that doesn’t work renting software.
if Adesk had rent to own for collections (or even better make your own collection, mix and match softwares) that would be awsome.
Will never happen thank adobe for that.
It all depends on the market supply and demand. Let’s wait several years and see.
“At some point” is not much of a confirmation given their track record. “Autodesk hints at Max Indie rolling out worldwide” would be more appropriate title.
Guys… If you got nothing of substance to say, please think twice of typing your messages. Its getting to a point where the main bad thing about Blender is its users on this forum. If you like to promoting Blender that is best done by pointing out its pro’s and to keep an open mind towards everyone that might have different feelings than yourself.
Autodesk might be a greedy company in you’re mind, but the indie license is a greatly desired product for many people. This news is a hopeful sign, most likely caused by Blenders development in the past year. So great news for all!
Agree with what you say, sadly this comes in at a time when Autodesk is the least trusted in all 3d companies out there, so an indie license today may turn non indie when say maybe the virus problem slides away in society?
One can never tell these days.
Regardless Indie licensing is a plus. I just wish it was on a more robust 3ds max, the max I remember in the late 90’s and very early 2000’s.
I totally agree … I’m a little tired of this squabble between Blender and 3ds max … I really like Blender and 3ds max, the problem is not there
Rather, the problem is at the level of Autodesk policy and the lost trust that is placed in them.
I’m not going to risk my files being locked up by autodesk – i choose blender
I agree, but this “software x is better than y” is so old and will probably never stop. And hey, somehow comparison is needed.
However, I would not only point fingers at Blender users. Some Max-users (I’m looking at you, Eloi) here even take the time to create and upload videos to youtube just to point out how weak, poor and unusable Blender is.
My point for youtube videos was never to display “how poor or unusable blender is”. I am using Blender for certain tasks where its great for the job. I did some videos after getting some statements from “artists” pointing blender or X other software was better overall than 3dsmax, with performance included. I dont know whats the problem showcasing what are some of the 3ds max strengths compared to other softwares, nowadays looks you only can bash 3dsmax because its the trend.
Ok, 3ds Max and Blender each have advantages / disadvantages. We all agree with this but again, we don’t care, the problem is not there
This amazing news for freelancers !
The problem for Autodesk in the future is small teams.
They’ll still license 3ds max to the ILM or MPC of the world, but for small companies doing TV or Ad work, Blender will be a no brainer.
You can have one max license and 30 seats of Blender artists for example…
Think about India or Asia.
Free and good is an unstoppable force.
Please make 3ds Max Linux support available! then it will be great!
This is something that would be great if Autodesk would shed some light on. I do take their silence as it’s not going to happen, not planned, or maybe just not possible without a rewrite of Max – still an official word would be great! Just a render version would be a great start.
A Linux farm is faster, much, much easier to maintain – and for example looking at cloud rendering, a same spec’ed Linux node on AWS is only about 25% of the running cost vs Windows. Something that really racks up costs quickly when you start to scale things up.
I use blender and houdini only
Maya & Max indie are only available in 5 countries for almost 1 year now. There is no indication about when these indie version will be available in others countries (within 10 months, 2 years, 5 years or 10 years…). I will not waiting for these indies version, from business perspectives I don’t like to deal with a company that does not have a clear vision & strategy. Even for the owner of indies version, there are lot’s of uncertainties with these indies version (will the price will be increase or will the indie version will be abandoned in the future, etc). I will stick & invest my time with Blender. From my perspective, Blender has the future with more sounding vision & strategy…It gives me more certainties from my indie business perspective.
They said they are working on it and its coming, just they can not say any date. They need to be sure with legal departments things are ok per country and it takes time.
About price…..what company on this world will tell you there will be no price increase on a product/service? (Other than the free ones)?
“They said they are working on it and its coming, just they can not say any date.” This sentence is pretty much Autodesk in a nutshell 😀
Until now, they said they can not say any date. Looking at the beta indie version that is already available in 5 countries for more than 1 year now. It could be available in other countries within 1 year, 2 years or even 5 years from now….
I agree that there are always price increases in all industry. But, if I interpolate at their business practice (rolling-out a non-technical version takes long time and unpredictable time frame). It is very difficult for customers to predict a “reliable” price increase. For example, when I licensed Windows or other softwares, I know that that the prices will not increase more than 200%. With this company behind Maya, I really don’t know whether this indie product version will be discontinued next year or maybe there is very high price increase.
The longer the delay with implementing Indie world-wide, the more it hints at some reluctance and lack of commitment from them to the indie model. It hardly inspires confidence.
Maybe regional sku issues are partly behind the delay, but I’d be surprised if that were the case given the international structure and size of Autodesk. Or maybe there is some delay getting a green light from them up top? Who knows.
Actions speak much louder than words when it comes to certain companies though, so it just feels kinda shaky. I hope I’m wrong..
I have to agree. A billion dollar company can’t implement a worldwide license of their product? Right.
I was really looking forward and hoping for that, but you know what? Scratch that. I better invest in Houdini. It’s more difficult, but at least the company is open, has an apprentice version for ages and have been doing amazing updates.
I guess they are taking some extra time to make damn well sure, that in case they get sued for renewing annual licence at full, non-indie price, they have insidious enough passages in the EULA to make sure they can’t lose that lawsuit in any country indie version is available.
Some countries, especially EU ones have some quite robust consumer protection laws, so it takes a bit of time to find proper loopholes that cover all of them 🙂