Edwin Braun on the history of Cebas
Cebas Visual Technology was founded almost three decades ago and has been developing plugins for 3D Studio and 3DS Max for over twenty years. Their software has been used to create VFX for a great number of TV series, game cinematics and films, such as Lost in Space, 2012, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Harry Potter, etc. Cebas’ list of released plugins includes ThinkingParticles, FinalRender and MoskitoRender, as well as other ones such as PyroCluster, Bunch of Volumes, Real Lens Flare, ProOpticSuite, GhostPainter and more.
Edwin Braun, CEO and co-founder of the company, has been a witness to many changes in the CG industry and we had the chance to interview him on the occasion of Cebas’ 27th anniversary to discuss these subjects, his views on the evolution of the CG field and his decades of experience of managing the company.
You founded Cebas back in 1988 in Heidelberg (Germany), together with Achim Smailus. Please tell us how the company came to be.
I started my own company after high school graduation way back in 1986. I wanted to study computer science and electronics. When I checked out the Universities, I wanted to apply to, to my surprise I found that they did not even have current technology and personal computers. All they had were big gray, oversized and power hungry metal boxes that had to be programmed in Cobol or Fortran.
That was not what I envisioned, I wanted to do laser explosions, spaceships and monsters. So, I kept on building my own business and studied, all on my own, newer programming languages as well as direct assembler coding.
Achim Smailus and Edwin Braun, founders of Cebas
This was also the time when I met Achim, my business partner. Achim at that point was looking into new career and business opportunities as well. He was running already a business but he was also attracted to the modern computer age that was just about to be happening.
It was just a perfect match of Achim’s business skills and my fascination and knowledge of software and hardware.‘cebas Computer Heidelberg’ was born and made its debut in Heidelberg, Germany, year 1988.
Our goal was, right from the start, to offer fast and capable hardware and software solutions for a graphics industry that didn’t even exist yet – or was just about to begin.
In those years, the only mass produced and affordable graphics technology belonged to Commodore Amiga, Atari and the very first Apple Computers, like the hippies of technology. I found that mainstream PC’s were hardly attuned to a robust graphical system at all. Although, Commodore Amiga and Atari offered the best possible affordable graphics on the market, the processing power was not really up to par. Say, a Motorola 6502 CPU could only touch 64 Kilobytes of RAM in an Apple System or on a C64 or Atari. Graphics and processing power soon got a bit better with the use of Motorola 68000, 16 Bit Processors and 512 Kilobytes of RAM (but this was still only half a Megabyte!).
The existing mainstream hardware just did not cut it. Even though it was extremely successful and the Commodore Amiga along with the Atari sold several millions of systems. Imagine what you would be able to do today with 512 Kilobyte of RAM and a processor with a maximum clock rate of 8Mhz!
Achim and I did not give up on our idea of offering the fastest, best hardware and software graphics solutions to create animations and impressive immersive virtual reality solutions. Our constant desire for more processing power lead us into concentrating our efforts into a new technology called RISC.
RISC technology sounded like the absolute holy grail ! – RISC was like the answer to our prayers for more processing power. Reduced Instruction Set Computer (RISC), that’s what it was called, is a microprocessor that leaves out all complex heavyweight instructions in favor of simple short commands that can be lightning fast – a so-called back to the basics concept. Sun Microsystems with their SPARC microprocessors and Silicon Graphics MIPS processors all understood that the old processor technology could not deliver what was needed for advanced computer graphics.
October 1990 – newsletter announcement on the Acorn computer system
Then, a British company, Acorn Computers, invented the ARM (Advanced Risc Machines) processor. Based on the ARM chip, a personal computer system for the masses was created for an incredibly affordable price tag! Now, everyone could afford the processing power of a million dollar supercomputer! We had to ride the wave and decided to import and support the Acorn Archimedes computer systems in Germany. The system was very successful and we became an official authorized International Acorn Distributor.
With RISC OS, I started to develop software applications that would help us in managing our business and everyday tasks. We soon added people to our development team and we started offering our very first RISC OS based software application, the ‘cebas Modemaker’. Cebas Modemaker was a powerful application that allowed the user to freely program the graphics chip in any Acorn Archimedes model. The graphics resolution and color depth we could achieve on that hardware was unmatched at that time. In addition to our software development we started to develop our own hardware, offering a scanner module and software for the Archimedes computer systems.
For several years, PCs had not the slightest chance to enter the graphics market segment as they were too slow and had no graphics, no colors and no memory. This has all changed now. In the company history of cebas, we have always had the best, upgraded technologies but our hunger for processing speed never ends – this is the spirit of our company. In our company history, we saw companies come and go; we saw them rise and fall; we offered Silicon Graphics workstations and Sun Microsystems workstations along with the very first versions of Softimage and Alias Wavefront as well as early versions of 3D STUDIO R1 and 2 on a PC. The market has changed a lot over time, so now the PC is dominating the hardware and Autodesk has replaced – or bought into – all major players in the 3D Graphics field.
Cebas’ 27th anniversary showreel
What first attracted you to writing graphics software?
Good question. I was always dreaming about making 3D special effects and animation. Back in the good old days, there was just no way to afford the processing power and software for such effects. This is when it all started. We wanted to achieve affordable self-made solutions, so we started offering custom made hardware and software solutions. POV ray compiled on a Sun Microsystems workstations could create impressive and powerful 3D Images. The time was becoming ripe as the PC was able to catch up in speed and then, Autodesk started to open up their programming interfaces so we jumped right in !
Nice interview. Thanks CGP for asking the rental question. Unfortunately, there’s so option other than rental or go to other software.
As for 3ds Max, I do hope Eddie and the other Max devs read this and work on making Max faster and more able to produce faster FX.
ICE maybe came later … but it had a gigapolygon core!
I’m sorry for anyone that can find my comments unconfortable, but I’m not going to stay quite here.
Again, they repeat the same history again and again, I’m sorry but the licensing part of the interview (wich is the only one I’m interested in because I was hoping they could open their minds a bit) is full of subjective points of view and, IMHO things that are not true at all.
– “you can say it has never been cheaper to start and use our thinkingParticles effects system”
* That is true, as is also true that it has never so expensive to continue using it, also, you have to pay for a full year in advance, not just two months for example…
– ” Owning software is an outdated concept; it is not promoting progress and technological advances.”
* That is completely subjective and IMO it’s not true, if you provide interesting features and a great list of new features in every release people will keep upgrading, if you don’t do that people won’t upgrade, now you want to force people to upgrade, whenever they want to or not, because they have to pay you to be able to work.
– “Nearly all the tools that we use ourselves have moved on to the subscription-only-models.”
* Really? Besides Autodesk and Adobe, name more, because except real services (wich software is not) I don’t know any other product under a RENTAL-ONLY licensing scheme, but of course I don’t know all the software you use, and I may be wrong, maybe the software have a rental option side by side with the owning option, but RENTAL-ONLY? I only know Autodesk/Cebas/Adobe, ah! and I forgot about Office… again, I can be wrong.
– “Everyone wins with such a licensing model and in the end the user gets more value instead of owning an outdated version of a software that does no longer work.”
* Again completely subjective, and not true by doing some maths I already did in the other post, but I will post the maths here again:
OWNING LICENSES AS OF THEORETICAL TODAY:
Entertainment creation suite Premium – 1400€ subs
TP – theorethical cost with a yearly upgrade – 600€
Adobe – theoretical yearly upgrade – 600€
Corona upgrade if you are not in box+subs (theoretical)(that is a sibscription BTW) – 250€
So yearly cost = 2850€ /user, and BTW this is optional, I can decide what to upgrade and what not, because I OWN my licenses.
RENTING LICENSES:
Entertainment creation suite Premium (max and maya, basic tools for a generalist studio) – 453,75€
TP – 55€ (if I don’t have the upper software I don’t need TP)
Adobe Suite – 60,49
Corona – 60€ for 1 workstation / 10 render nodes
This is a basic package and we are in 629,24/month = 7550.88 / Year
So, again can you tell me how is this better for the user? How is this cheaper?
I can keep talking but a lot of people is going to be upset and will acuse me of trolling, when what I’m doing is defending something that every user should be defending, that is not good for users, and Cebas know it, so to survive the increased costs of Autodesk software I imagine that Cebas did this because they know this it isn’t cheaper, it’s a lot more expensive and remove rights from the users, we loose the right over the modification of our work if we don’t pay them again and again and again… we won’t own our work anymore…
OWNING – 1 USER – 1YEAR: 2850/year
RENTING – 1 USER – 1YEAR: 7550/year
I’ll say that I agree with you.
And while I also agree that TP is an amazing tool, this interview sounded like TP is the only good FX tool out there. If that was the case, most studios would be using … instead, they are integrating Houdini deeper and deeper.
Anyway … I hope Adobe and Autodesk someday rethink the rental only strategy. Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem it’s going to happen.
Juang3d – great points, and agree with all of them.
I purchased Thinking Particles years back, and did an upgrade several years later. I don’t think I will continue to invest in this product though. I don’t agree with paying for the right to re-open my old projects to work on them again. In essence it’s holding my projects and work hostage financially, which seems fundamentally wrong to me.
I agree with paying for upgrades if I want access to the latest and greatest technology. *That* is the incentive for Cebas to continually improve their product so that is something I *want* to upgrade. But why should I subsidize Cebas in 2015 just to open and render some work that was made with their 2011 technology?
Adobe and Autodesk are near monopolies in their industry niches and they can absorb the financial impact of turning a bunch of customers away. But it seems a highly risky finacial strategy to alienate the small and highly specialized customer base that Cebas has.
Just my perspective as an alienated ex-customer.
Except Autodesk and Adobe can’t afford to take the hit for very long if they want to keep their shareholders happy. Both of their markets are fairly mature and once they convert existing permanent licenses to rental how much growth can they expect from new customers? Once they miss a few revenue targets do you think they’ll pour more money into software improvements or will they slash staff, acquire competitors and raise rental rates?
You just forgot to do another math:
1 x Houdini indi license that can replace everything in your package (even comp) = 200$ a year! That’s why anyone who know how to count is buying houdini right now.
I did not bring out the Houdini Indie license because is limited to a small subset of users, but for those who enter inside the conditions of the indie license you are more or less right, maybe not everything IMO, but you can complement it with Blender or Modo for things like modeling or character animation/rigging or for rendering.
And the most important thing, you can always ACQUIRE. and OWN a full license of those packages.
“if you provide interesting features and a great list of new features in every release people will keep upgrading, if you don’t do that people won’t upgrade”
I agree totally with that. For me thats a fair situation.
The Artist should be able to decide whats the best for his current situation. Maybe some new features in a newer version are not of interest for him. So with a owned version you can wait if there are some updates which are relevant for your work. I think the biggest problem is the rental only thing. Leave the decision to the artists…if the new model is so much better everyone will use it and you have your rental only.
One question, have you ever seen someone 2 or 3 versions behind before TP went all subscription? I’m asking this, because I haven’t! Everybody I worked with always was on the latest TP or max 1 version behind. All new TP versions were gamechangers and had huge advatages over previous versions. Which makes your calculation kind of pointless. I think I paid like 1600€ for the TP3 full version, with upgrade costs of like (I can’t really remember exactly but something like 600€) every year. So now with this in mind tell me how is the new subscription model bad for users? +I can substract my costs from my monthly taxes. No offence but if you don’t make 45€ a month with TP alone you probably shouldn’t get a subscription in the first place.
“No offence but if you don’t make 45€ a month with TP alone you probably shouldn’t get a subscription in the first place.”
This is the most elitist comment I ever read. Who are you to say what he can or can not use? He’s fighting for options for US, not only himself. What’s the problem with options? Sure, for you 45€ maybe a piece of cake. For someone else maybe not.
You shouldn’t be so egocentric to level artists just based on your opinion. I truly hope you never hit economic difficulties, because I don’t wish that for anybody. But it appears you have no clue about how hard the economy can be in some countries.
I for one have given up. I already downloaded Houdini 15 Apprentice and I’m learning it for FREE. No need to pay $150 for a license. For me the choice is done. But I do support Juang3d “fight” and I’ll continue to do so.
As I said before – It’s up to cebas to decide if they want to have this model of subscription/rental or not, sadly enough the user can’t decide for them, the choise is made and as far as I understand, they won’t change it.
Also, cebas is a rather small company and many of the core programmers have worked there for many years, they need to earn money, and with this price model, they will for sure earn more money than with the old price model when you acctually owned your license because of many users maybe didn’t upgrade to every new version before.
Also worth mention here is that cebas aims at smaller and bigger studios/companies, not single users who sit home alone playing and learning.
I also think that they should change it to what they had before, but then again, it’s not up to me/us as users to decide, it’s up to cebas.
I do think that thinkingParticles is one of the best and most powerful plugins available for 3ds max, there is nothing like it, and together with FumeFX/PhoenixFD, XMesh, Frost and Krakatoa, you have what you need in forms of VFX Tools due max itself doesn’t bring us something new regarding that area, and sadly enough, I don’t think they will either.
Think of how many lines of code thinkingParticles holds, how many hours of work there is behind the scenes and how much new features thinkingParticles gets each version. They need to get paid in one way or another, else, we wouldn’t have thinkingParticles at all.
But, again, I do think that they should add a license option that you own 100% for lifetime and then it’s up to you to decide if you want to pay for an upgrade to the next major release or not.
Last – I don’t think none of us can make them change their mind about this by typing our wishes here – Again, the choise is made, and that will leave you to decide – Are thinkingParticles worth the money for your work or not? Yes, pay them and be happy, no, don’t pay them and find another software that fills your needs and that can do the same thing as thinkingParticles can, if that excist (Houdini then maybe).
It is on mine belief that people will update IF and only IF the update is good enough. 3ds Max had a row of crappy updates and a lot of people skipped because of that.
Take a look at the upgrade of Houdini 15. If you were a user of Houdini, would you want to skip this upgrade? I doubt that.
http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=3138&Itemid=422
Congratulations to Edwin and Achim!
FinalRender was one of my first ever bought plugins, back in 1995 (i think).
I still have here the CD with Serial number, as well as OpticalLens & PyroCluster Boxes. In that time there were only few 3d artists here in Germany, there was no academies to teach you 3d and a very small user base. If something does not work, there was almost no one you could ask for help at all.
Just imagine the time and circumstances: Year 1994, MentalRay and Renderman cost $18.000,-, trash-renderer like RadioRay and Lightscape were offered with 3dsmax V3, no Vray, and the Corona developers were in that time probably attending the grammar school (just to illustrate how much time has passed). Far away from present Octane, Maxwell, Lux, Nox etc diversity.
Edwin was a kind of visionary developer, fast, aggressive, but in any case a game-changer and a mover. FinalRender was (and still is) the most “compatible” renderer of all: you can throw anything in it and it will render. Also the delivered shaders and FinalToon, all in once package, are something you would search for a very Long time in other packages.
We can disscuss now the licensing model of TP, and how expensive it is and so on, but we should not forget that FinalRender was an important mile-stone in the 3dsMax history.
Of course it was, that is why Cebas making this is so sad, they are ignoring A LOT of past, present and future (well, that last one most probably not) users.
It’s sad to see a company that grew up with us, users, is now wanting to trick on us calling things with other names justifying themselves saying that they cannot maintain their evolution without this economic change, how did they manage to live the past years?
-(RENTAL_ONLY is not a SUBSCRIPTION)
I do NOT Upgrate my TP to a rental system for some reasons:
-I can buy software in good times and still use it in bad times. With renting, I can´t use it when I need it most without extra payment: in bad times I want to overcome.
-My clients want me to sign that I can go back to my backups for a certain amount of years. With a renatl system I CAN`T sign such a contract ! What happens if Cebas would close its doors in 1 year and shut down the license server ? I would have NO access to all my old scenes, my pipeline, to everything with would be part of the TP!
And I would by TP for the double price, if it just would be possible !!!
Make it 5 times more expensive, but let people buy it !!!!!!!
Houdini indie have restriction
Commercial usage of Houdini Indie is limited to following:
The annual gross revenue of commercial entities and contracting entities does not exceed $100K USD
Commercial entities and contracting entities can purchase a maximum of 3 Houdini Indie and 3 Houdini Engine licenses
Houdini Indie cannot be used in the same pipeline as commercial versions of Houdini
Houdini Indie uses its own file format for saving scenes and assets
It is restricted to 1920×1080 when rendering out animations
Houdini Indie does not work with third party renderers.
You can use Houdini Indie, create a digital assets, use Houdini Engine and render in Max with V-Ray or whatever. (if I’m not mistaken)
You are completely right Guillermo, but you have the option to make an investment and acquire Houdini FX… the lack of that option is the problem…
Hey, thanks for the comments. I juts wanted to correct one thing that is not true about our licensing.
THERE IS NO COST OPENING AND RENDERING OLD SCENES. THERE NEVER WAS. We always allowed network rendering, or rendering in slave mode. You can re-render your old scenes as they where without any cost. even if you had 3ds Max 2008. But this means you have to properly achieve your stuff.
Just so no one miss this, this is not about re-rendering old scenes, is about modifying old scenes without having to pay Cebas again:
——
“we loose the right over the modification of our work if we don’t pay them again and again and again… we won’t own our work anymore…”
——
this is one of the key things, if anyone is interested there is more info in another answer a bit below this.
Hi Edwin,great to have you here.
It is not about rendering, it is about getting back to old scenes, old setups and scenes build up on that. There are studios which want you to sign this contracts. And if you can´t ensure to open the scens when they are doing Part 2 of a movie, you have a real problem. And you can´t guarante that cebas is avilable in 5 years. So I have to sign contracts I can´t count on or do not use a rent software. It is sad, but simple. And if we would build a particle library on TP, we can not be sure to be able to use this in one year, would mean we would loose all investments into it.
Or what about a project running over a year and at half of the project our license has to be renewed, but Cebas closed it doors because of a finacial problem / earthquake, whatever ? We would have to stop in the middle of a production and tell the producer that we can´t edit the scenes from yesterday anymore ? Do you think we will take this risk ?
As I told you before, we would pay more to get a full lic and do not rent, but it is not available. If you change your mind on day and offer a choice to your customers, we are in again. I still hope for that day…
Pete, the message was – that you can not re-use or re-render old scenes as soon as you are no longer paying subscription. This is not correct. I was referring to this.
If you want to work with the software you need to pay the proper fees. It is that way right now. I tried to explain, this is the way for us to get future developments done and paid for.
Your argument about not being there anymore, I do understand this but this is the same for everyone in the market including you. You are signing a contract and you are not able to guarantee that you exists in the future as well; fulfilling this contract in 5 years.
Many of our customers welcome the subscription model; some of them do not like it. But with our latest release 6.2 just after a few months 6.1 came out; we delivered a smoke solver to our paying users. Such an update would usually have taken more than a year to show up in a new major release! Now, users can enjoy right away the very first evolution of our smoke solver and we can continue to enhance it and add more new stuff in a much faster and better way. This is all impossible with an old and outdated Major release update mechanic.
I’m not here to preach and convert, I just want to make clear we are not doing something evil or unique here. Licensing software as well as artwork of any kind is a common thing.
Edwin, you got it wrong, I think I’ve put it very clear, the message was and is that “YOU CAN’T FURTHER MODIFY SCENES WITHOUT PAYING CEBAS AGAIN”, sorry about the caps, but I want to set things clear.
Allow me to quote myself:
[QUOTE Juang3d]
we loose the right over the modification of our work if we don’t pay them again and again and again… we won’t own our work anymore…
[/QUOTE Juang3d]
As you can see I said “MODIFICATION”, at least if it was an answer to me, if it wasn’t, well it may clarify things.
Now regarding this:
“This is all impossible with an old and outdated Major release update mechanic.”
And how did you manage to survive for 27 years?
Also you can reach a REAL SUBSCRIPTION model, so people own their licenses but to upgrade they have to suscribe, or a RENT-TO-OWN model, it’s similar but in the end if you don’t want to upgrade you may miss bugfixing and/or future max releases support, or even publish a more expensive version to own it as many users are asking, so you can own your license and not depend on Cebas, no matter if Cebas exists or not.
But as always you ignore all this and keep saying:
“If you want to work with the software you need to pay the proper fees. It is that way right now. ”
So you want me to pay you to modify a project I did a year ago with a software that was a year old, EVEN WHEN I DON’T WANT/NEED TO UPGRADE or EVEN WHEN I DON’T WANT/NEED YOUR NEW FEATURES, in the end, you want me to pay for things I don’t want, and you want me to pay to modify my own work with old software… and after that you say:
“I just want to make clear we are not doing something evil…”
Yeah, sure, and specially when you ignore all those users that don’t want rental, specially some of your old users that don’t want rental…
Hi Edwin,
sure, licensing is a common thing. And I payed the proper fee for you TP in the past, but for a full license, not just to borrow it a few months. I have to license my work to my clients also as a FULL license, I cant say, hey Paramount , this vfx shot is just allowed to show in cinemas for one year, than you have to pay me again.
This is just not working.
And sure, there is no guarantee that I am on the market in a few years, too. But this is MY problem and MY risk. You want me to take YOUR problems and YOUR Risk as an addition to MY own ones. Why should i do this ?
And you did some great updates in the past, too. My argument is not to pay you less !!! I want to pay you MORE if you want, I just want to keep a full license. So your argument is not working, it is not about money.
Very well said, you nailed it…
Of course it’s not about money. The Corona guys (a smaller venture than Cebas) have options. You can buy the .0 versions and that’s it, you can buy if and pay for a subscription, which entitles you to all the updates or you can just rent.
Options … three actually. Funnily enough, they said that the option to only buy is the least sold. People actually like to buy + subscription, which entitles you to OWN the license and also get the updates. This way there’s a constant flux of money to the Corona devs and you have the guarantee of owning the license.
So yeah … there are roads to be taken, but it appears they don’t want to. It’s all good actually. Just don’t say that is because you can’t.
Is anyone happy with any software that has gone rental only? Is the golden age of software development upon us? Will new and innovative bug free features spring forth from our yearly tax?
Nice explanation. I never thought in that direction with rental system.
Even Office Proffessional 2016 has a NON-RENTAL-ONLY option.
Even Microsoft is giving options, so it makes just Adobe, Autodesk and Cebas, and Adobe is not having better revenues at all, instead of that they are having to “invent” new subscriptions at low cost, to not give options to the users is non sense…
Does anybody remember how much of a PITA it was years ago when you got a missing cebas.dlu message on files that had been saved (just saved not actually used in the scene) by someone who had fR installed? Good times.
rental = not for me.
as an option i’m all for options but as THE only option…not a fan.
A reminder of basic rules of the house: personal attacks are not allowed, do not take comments to a personal level. You’re welcome to express criticism and disagreements in a respectful way. But always keep in mind that courtesy is a requirement on this website, everyone should feel comfortable here.
Thank you all for helping keep the discussion civilized.
I think any misrepresentations have to be corrected in an objective and unbiased manner by CGP.
I agree with you, completely, but what I don’t understand is why do you say this here?
What is misrepresented or incorrectly explained?
@Cedar Please let us know what needs to be corrected.
+1
Sorry everyone as I am working and not always popping here. Well, I am not going to repeat. Edwin has replied and to some of the comments aforementioned that were factually incorrect – I replied similar to such misrepresentation. Please read them yourself.
That is incorrect.
That theoretically misrepresentation was incorrect, please read the answers.
Now after that was clarified, CGP and myself have asked you about the theoretic “correction” that should be done by CGP staff, please clarify this because it’s important to understand why do you say CGP is not being objective and unbiased, and if it is in an specific manner, it could be best.