AnimaThings has announced that Reindeer, its node-based render manager and scene automator for 3ds Max, is now free. Reindeer used to cost $45, but the developers have said that the cost of maintaining it as a commercial product is higher than the revenue it generates. Check out videos and find out more on AnimaThings’ website.
Reindeer render manager now free
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is it …… useful ?
Yes, I have used it to produce images for configurators and 360 viewers amongst other things. It does do much more than just render passes and configurations.
“Reindeer used to cost $45, but the developers have said that the cost of maintaining it as a commercial product”
This is very sad to hear.
For this reason why we have got GumRoad and similar platform, where a developer can throw his products with no or non-binding support.
The support is, especially by permanent licenses, few times more expensive then the product itself: if you have some obscure one hour support case, where the customer did not understand how to setup firewall for network-rendering, it will cost you all money from the sale. If this customer comes back tomorrow with another stupid issue, you will beg him to take the money back, since he costs you at this moment more then you have got for $45,-… Just throw it on GumRoad and Co. and forget it!
Hey, it seems I understand at last why all publishers switch to subscription!
Reindeer was on Selz, which only took a commision per sale (Similiar to GumRoad). Meaning no sales no costs. But you are more or less forced to pay monthly fees for essential features like Paypal support and “fancy” receipts/invoices (some clients insist). Also there are hidden costs (surprisingly high) for bank transfers, which for low volumes sometimes mean once per sale. Plus for accounting you have to click on every single sale individually to download the receipts or pay for an accounting service(and then learn and use the supported software).
If you put it on GumRoad and forget it so will probably everyone else. This mention on CGPress has generated about 130 downloads from the website so far (I can’t even see the downloads directly from ScriptSpot). Similar thing happened with mentions on 3DTotal back in the day but they stopped publishing my press releases. I bought advertising on 3DTotal for about 800 USD which resulted in a maximum of perhaps 2 sales. No mentions = no sales. So you have to work hard on the sales side.
Plus different countries probably have all kinds of laws and taxes which you would think the intermediary (Selz/Gumroad) takes care of but it is unclear if they do. So you’re probably breaking laws all over the world 🙂
It becomes a full-time job real quick. A tool like Rayfire or something looks fun and probably sells itself to some extent but Reindeer is more like an “Admin” tool. It’s not very sexy.
Thank you for this interesting insight, had no idea advertisement resulted in such few sales. Also, I’m one of the 130 so thank you for that too 🙂
Hi Haluk
Glad you’re one of the 130 🙂
I just want to be clear that the ad results are probably specific for my situation with Reindeer. It’s probably a hard to sell product and maybe the potential userbase isn’t very big in any case. I don’t know what a consistent campaign might do but I couldn’t afford one. In my situation however news-mentions and word of mouth seemed much more effective than ads. But it seems much harder and more time consuming to connect with potential users than writing the tool. Basically what goes on at the user end is most times a big mystery.
Hi David, nice to read from a fellow scrip developer and thank you for sharing some information. Your script looks really nice. There are a bunch of really good render managers on the market, which might make it hard to stand out. Have you considered making a youtube movie? Vimeo is nice, but the exposure isn’t as great.
Good luck with further development.
Hi David,
Back in the day vimeo seemed more professional 😛 Also the player could be customized a bit which I liked at the time. Obviously it doesn’t matter much and youtube is probably a better option nowadays.
What’s your experience with developing scripts?
Making your software known is a tough chapter nowadays. And a cumbersome one. The social medias has emptied the forums quite a bit. Nowadays you need Youtube,Twitter, Instagram and Facebook groups too.
Yep I believe you are right Tiles. I mainly wanted to share the tools that I made for myself, give back a little to the 3dsMax community. But even making tools available for free costs a lot of extra work which often isn’t very fun, that’s why it had a price tag (as motivation for development). But I really wanted to do 3d and scripting not promoting a product so that’s why I’m giving it away now.
This is how state sets should be. If State Sets or Pulze were node based, I’d definitely use them. Without a visual representation like nodes, it’s almost useless, at least for a freelancer.
Hi Guido,
I used state sets in production once and by the end of the production I had written what would become Reindeer 🙂
But Reindeer can also automates other things as well like submitting renders to the renderfarm, making it just as easy as rendering locally.
Is there a 2023 version of Reindeer available?