Thinking Particle drop 6 introduces All Purpose Fields

What if XXX company which sells regular license attacked or destroyed and yout hdd is dead?

Why don’t you post this on the news for new Houdini Indie pricing?

You can not buy perpetual licence of Houdini Indie, you can only buy perpetual licence of Houdini, the non-indie one. That licence costs $4495 + $2495/year for maintenance (upgrades). So perpetual licence of Houdini with just one year of updates would already cost you nearly $7000. Indie version is rental only, no chance of getting perpetual, and at a price of $269/year, you would have to be paying that rental for 26 years, before it would add up to the perpetual licence. So here you are, defending Houdini for having a perpetual licence, while you very well know you would never ever buy it. I guess Autodesk should just introduce a “dummy” perpetual licence that exists but can not be bought, and you would be completely happy then.

EDIT: My god, this reply offset text formatting is terrible. Someone from CGPress should do something about it 🙂

I CAN acquire a license of Houdini FX, and yes, it cost 4495$… can you acquire ANY license of TP? or Max? or Maya?

The problem has never been the price, I never said a thing about something being cheap or expensive, I said that SaaS converts any expense in a cost intead of an investment, AND increases your risks as a business, specially when the tool you are renting is the main tool in your pipeline.

Please, don´t tell me you need to acquire Indy because I´m talking about indy, you now this is a nonsense of affirmation and it is a way to justify your self.

Now the sim licenses… I´ve never had a problem with that, meaining, the size of jobs we do don´t need simulations licenses, and Engine is not a sim lic, it is much more, it´s a bridge to use your developments done in houdini in other packages.

In any case, you are complaining because you cannot pay 4495$ but you need distributed simulation capabilities?

Again, if you do more than 100$k year you probably can acquire a Houdini FX license, and if you need distributed simulation capabilities you can acquire some sim licenses, but the point being that I´m not creating or accessing content with Engine, what I OWN is the software where I create content, if I run out of money, not because I´m in bankrupt, but it could be because I have 2 months with cash flux problems, I still own my software, can you say that? No… that´s it.

But of course there is no bigger deaf that the one that refuses to hear.

As I said, it is impossible to reason with people that support only SaaS model (fake SaaS because you don´t reaceive ANY service of course, it´s a rental… but for some reasons companies using rental are scared of calling it rental, maybe because if people identify it with rental then it would not be so easy to make marketing about it).

An of course it´s impossible to reason with people inside companies that do and use that SaaS madness model.

And where is the leverage if in the end you cannot RENT the software just for a month? a software that the only thing it does is to simulate particles, and not all kind of simulations, just SOME kind of simulations, please… the SPH solver is something sold as new but is as old as it can be, and the APF?! they are force fields, are they powerful? sure, are they new? NO! but they are sold as new, old tech sold as new tech, welcome to the SaaS era were evolution is receiving vintage technology sold as new technology.

Cheers.

I feel the numbers thrown around here are comparing apples and oranges.
You cannot compare both studio and indie license costs in the same calculations.

Let’s compare a 3dsMax VFX pipeline vs Houdini over 10 years with today’s prices.
1x $4,495 – Houdini perpetual license incl. 1-year maintenance
9x $2,495 – Annual maintenance plan

$26.950 Total 10-year cost + total ownership of pipeline tools. Unlimited Mantra render nodes included.

3dsMax Rental
10x $1,470 – 3dsMax yearly rental (using year by year price)
10x $660 – Thinking Particles rental
1x $495 – Frost license
9x $125 – Frost maintenance
1x $495 – Xmesh license
9x $99 – Xmesh maintenance
1x $845 – FumeFX license – upgrade price N/A
Other plugins might even be needed. Forest pack, Krakatoa etc.

$46,670 Total 10-year cost. At the end, you own a few plugins but not the program to run it.

Let’s say you also have 10 render nodes, then tack on that price on the 3dsMax package. For Arnold, it looks like that’d be $60,000 over 10 years bringing the total cost past $100k!

That being said, I’ve been working with Max for over 10 years, and it saddens me to see where it’s going. If I was to start up for myself, I would not sign up with Autodesk.

You forgot here your network rendering licenses, and the fact that at the end of those 10 years you end up with nothing, not a single tool you can keep to access those old projects, in fact you are forced to keep paying to be able to access and modify all those projects even if you don´t have a quote behind them.

And even for large facilities, rental is a great option, but to secure your investment you own part of those rented tools, if you are big you want scalability, but you also want security and good investment, a rental only model is bad investment when the tools you are renting are the main tools in your pipeline.
Also the fact that you are forced to pay for a year in advance is a joke, so you are forced to rent for a full year even when you may need the tool for a few projects over the year, in that situation I prefer to acquire the tool and let it rest without updating it if it solves my projects and I don´t need the evolutions, with the rental model you are forced to pay, no matter if you liek the new features or not, again, this is a hostage system with no escape and any analyst that dig into it will see it this way, after that is up to you to decide if thata hostage system is good enough for you because you don´t care, or if you are big enough to force and exception on you (because I assume you know that companies like Sony don`t pay and don´t have the same licensing scheme as us) or if you decide to take the risk, but any analyst turn down this model and see it as a win-lose model, out of any business ethics, now if a company decides to skip ethics… it´s their decission to make, but expeect people like me raising voices and speaking out loud what we think about this, and the abuse we see in all this.

And again, please someone do the maths with the old pricing model of max and all the plugins, will se if it´s cheaper or not.

It seems you all are so great business people that you´ve never been in a struggle without cash in your pocket, and you´ve never been forced to delay some payment, and you´ve never been deceived by a client that owns you a ton of money but is delaying the payment or simply decide not to pay and forces you to go to trial, without that cash, in that situation, you would be totally sold, you are not going to be able to work anymore, if you don´t pay you don´t eat, and I don´t like this model, this is a bad model no matter how you look at it, and I´m amazed how some people still try to defend something that even in the future is going to be bad for them, unless that people is inside one of the companies that does this kind of practices.

Keep defending having rented tools, you will end up executing your tools in a remote computer and at the minimum problem you will end up without tools and being forced to pay to even access your old projects, so your projects won´t be yours, will be owned by the company that did the tool, because you have to pay them to access them.

It´s amazing… really, incredible…

And once again I’m not against as renting as an option, the problem is when there is no other option, you say is good for devs because they don’t have to keep an eye on outdated versions, and what about the users? That is why I say it’s a win-lose situation, I live in Spain, and I’m Spanish, the frustration is more than big.

And precisely because what you say, “don’t look your situation as an absolute fact” I’m all against an absolute solution like the ONLY renting option, if you would have your software you could have been able to keep working without a problem even when some clients are late in payment, of course if you go out of business after 3 months, you have the problem with rental or without it because you have to pay for 1 year in advance in some of those softwares.

I’ll repeat once again, I don’t have anything against a rental model besides a selling model, but I have ALL against a rental ONLY model, and I’m also against euphemisms that lead to miss understanding like “Subscription” instead of calling it rental.

Cheers and I hope you recovered from that bad time dealing with all burocracy and tax madness here.

Depends on what you are doing but dont forget that you dont have to equip your whole studio with FX Licences. Most people forget Houdini Core which costs 2995$ + 1,495 $ per year and integrates very well in you pipeline. You can use all your bgeo caches. You can use all digital Assets. You have Hair,Modeling,Terrain,Character,Animation,Lighting,Rendering,Compositing and Volumes. I think most studios have as much FX floating licenses as needed and for all the other stuff you can use Houdini Core without any limitations. kind regards

Where is the simulation license cost? I can not imagine using Houdini without simulation on the network unless you want to only work 2-3 hours per day while simming locally. If you add 2 simulation license, add $1,000/year.

Also $4,495 is node locked and limited to 5 per studio. The real price is $6,995 + $2,995.

If Mantra is that good, who many Houdini studio uses Arnold? It is slow as hell just like Houdini. NO matter what DCC you uses, users usually use 3rd party render engine.

BTW, Arnold 5 pack is $1500. Also if you buy collection 5 Arnold lic is included.

Now TP has implicit surface features so you don’t have to have Frost. Also many TP users don’t use XMesh, either.

I am not complaining about anything. I’ve just done an educated guess that someone who is apparently always obsessed about price above anything else will likely hardly pay $7000 for a perpetual licence of a software package.

Another point you are making is that SaaS is a rental, not a service. There is some difference. If you rent a car for 5 years, you will be driving the same car 5 years later. SaaS means you not only rent the software, but also receive updates in the process. If you were to buy perpetual Houdini FX and also pay yearly $2495 maintenance, then after those 26 years I have mentioned, renting the software would cost you $7000 where as getting perpetual would cost you $69 365.

So now you have two options:

A, Pay those $69 365 and have certainty that if after those 26 years you have some income gap, you will be able to use the last version you’ve stopped at, or

B, have paid just $7000, with $62 365 saved up on your bank account for those times when you have income gap.

Of course this comparison is heavily skewed, as we are comparing Indie licence to full featured FX licence. You can also rent Houdini FX – for $4495/year.

The point you keep making is about drawbacks of not owning but just renting a licence. But to some degree, this is just a cognitive bias. Let’s establish some more reasonable example, like either being able to get perpetual licence for $2000 and getting upgrades for $100/year or being able to rent the software for $250/year including upgrades.

After 13 years, you will have spent roughly the same money on both. $3300 on perpetual with 13 years of upgrades or $3250 on 13 years of subscription.

The benefit that perpetual gives you that if you after 13 years still end up using that software, and you will have some outage of income or you just don’t want to upgrade anymore, you will get to keep the software.

On rental side however, if you at any time from year 1 to year 13 decide you no longer want to use that software and want to migrate to a different 3D package, you will not lose nearly as much of an investment as with perpetual.

Additionally, let’s say that on 5th year, you will have an income outage: You will have already spent $2500 one perpetual licence, but you will only have spent $1250 on rental, so there is still $1250 left on your bank account. That saved $1250 gives you opportunity to pay for the software for another 5 entire years, which is more than enough time to get out of income outage. Where as if you had bought perpetual, and you would be have $0 left for your software budget, you would be forced to drop the maintenance for your perpetual licence and fall behind on the software updates.

There are certainly pros for perpetual licence, mainly depending on investment calculation, but unless the company is way off with the price to value proposition, like it is a case with Autodesk, then rental may often come as a better value, ESPECIALLY in a computer graphics industry, where technology is changing so fast. It’s quite risky to assume that you will be using same tools 15-20 years from now.

BTW I won be tired of repeating that I don’t care about the price, and such theoretical service… what happens if I don’t like the development done, am I forced to keep paying?
Also, about the rented car, if it’s a leasing or a renting, that is not a rental, but in the end you have the opportunity of acquiring the car with a big discount at the end of the contract, can you do this with Max, TP, etc… ?

Again, more extended answer later

You have Houdini Indie for that. So you shouldn’t really care more about Max and TP since that isn’t going to change. 🙂