TyFlow Car Crash Demo

Couldnt agree more. Poor Max user. Poor me :((
Max dev team cannot be smaller than Houdini dev team. So the reason is definitely that

Max has a better particle systems than maya. more if you take in to account available plugins.
Bifrost board will come in to max and maya.
Bifrost 1 was focused to bring some of the features in an easy way in maya and in max. Bifrost 2, what its knows as Bifrost board will bring astonishing fluid simulator and more to simulate spaceships going out of the ocean.

To me make sense than Houdini has a bigger team of devs than max or maya, it cost significally more.

Everybody already knows your reasons and motivations, Juang 😉

You’re borderline out of place, Juang. Markets don’t self regulate because people talk about it. It self regulates because people are free to vote with their wallets.

Every dollar is a vote in this regard. And no, please, no one is “hostage” of ADSK products (as some like to say) or this business model is made to “milk users while making research and development stop”. If you were in the Beta, for example, you’d know better instead of repeating this ready-made text.

How do people, for example, in a free market world, “vote” for Blender? You don’t pay for it. You can pay (or donate) if you want, and many do so, but the absolute majority do not give a dime for it. And that is hardly a vote, since Rosendaal himself said they don’t need money – so even if no one pays, Blender still exists.

That brings (to me) many questions. How does Blender Foundation pays for their developers? Don’t they need to eat? Don’t they pay mortgages? Rent? Is all work done “out of love”? Do they receive food and shelter out of love too? Again, Rosendaal said he does not need money… Sorry, if you’re rich already and do not need it, good for you, but the majority of us need to work (a lot) to earn enough to even survive.

It’s nice and fair to use blender, it’s an awesome tool, hands down, and put Max and Maya to shame in MANY areas. But I don’t believe Blender proposes a healthy development model for the industry, as a whole. Why doesn’t VRay launches a version for Blender, or Corona, or FStorm, or Arnold, or Thinking Particles, or DMM, or RayFire, or Ornatrix, etc, etc, etc. I mean a PROPER plugin, not a bridge…

Many people who develop for Blender are young coders, people still on the Uni, self taught people and freshmen. There are seniors, of course, but they are not the majority (AFAIK). If a developer wants to survive and build a career (also earn money) his best bet is NOT develop for Blender IMHO, and I think if Blender becomes the de facto software in the future, I fear we will see fewer and fewer workflow defining plugins like VRay or Corona.

I really do like Blender, and I use it, but I won’t, for a second, believe this talk that one company is “evil” and the other is “the savior”. This is too cartoonish to barely resemble reality, and diverges the conversation from a logical, rational standpoint to an emotional, moral one.

People freely vote with their wallet, that is obvious, but if the only information people have is the marketing com the company, what do you think they will “vote”?

Markets self regulate because of communication, and decisions are being made because of communication, but if you understood something different, I’m sorry, what I meant was specifically that.
In the past was easier for Autodesk marketing to convince everyone about the awesomeness of the Egg Spline, right now it is much much harder, so it’s easier to force customers to pay no matter what they do with the software, and right now customers cannot freely “vote” with their wallets because no matter what they have to continue paying, at least until they manage to shift their production to a different package, that is not “freely” voting, that is having customers as hostages, no matter if you like the next version, if it’s benefits you or not, you have to pay for it,is that ok for you?

I hope that “borderline out of place” is not an insult, I try to avoid insults, English is not my native language so in this case I’m not sure.

Who is saying Blender is great because it’s free?!

Eloi I don’t know with what people do you talk, but everyone in my live streaming’s, in the main blender forums and in Blender chat disagrees with the fact that the others are better or worse because you have to pay for them.
For some people in developing countries having Blender as something free is great, they can access a great tool that they could be unable without using piracy, and there are people out there that really cares about avoiding piracy, not because of business but because of honesty.

David, I pay for Blender, I’m on the Blender cloud, and I supported the code quest, and I’ll Support other initiatives, others pay for them by hiring developers, like AMD, others pay to the Development Fund, others simply pay with it’s collaboration, programming parts of Blender, testing and giving design documents for free, and others simply don’t pay because they can’t or because they don’t want to, they are not forced to pay.
The Blender Institute is a non-profit organization, the Blender Animation Studio is a profit company that produces open movies + handles the Blender Cloud, giving inside the cloud two services for the time being, a production tracking system, and a de-centralized renderfarm system.

The main question here is why the B.I. Is doing such a great piece of software (FOR ME, you can hate it if you want) with such a low amount of monthly money while Autodesk is doing what is doing with their amazing super subscription system that is giving them tons and tons of money.

Just a word about the developers, if you use Arnold, you know you are using features developed by a Blender developer, right?

Developers are paid, and no one thinks they don’t deserve to get paid, of course!

Blender is free, and will continue being free, people will pay IF they want, and studios using it will continue contributing to it in many ways, while Blender professional user base continue growing blender funds will continue growing, blender collaborators will continue growing, and you know what is the best thing? When you pay to the development fund you know that your money is going towards improving your tool, not towards giving you stingray, something you did not asked for.

And BTW in my previous post I said that people is going to different places, not to Blender, in the end I said that I love Blender, but others may prefers other packages, but you can see a growing movement of people jumping out of Adesk boat.

By the way I did a question about Adesk cloud, someone wants to answer it?

Cheers.

P.R.: Eloi I did not bring Blender to the table, just in my last comment, but it seems that I cannot say a thing in general without people thinking that I’m just talking about Blender, that was not the case, and that was why I did the last comment, to try to prevent people from thinking that I was talking about Blender specifically, but it’s not possible, I’m the Blender guy around here LOL

Let me try to reply to you, on a point to point basis:

1 – About the “rental is hostage” (not gonna quote on you everything or the text will blow up through the roof)

A. Yes. That’s a ready-made sentence with a narrow mindset. Rental (or SaaS) is a trend the *whole* market is driving to. It’s just another way to pay for your product. You already do that with your phone bill, your electricity bill, your water bill, your internet bill and there are initiatives to do the same with transportation, with housing, etc.

The fact you now rent your software does not make you hostage of it. Unless you want to – and your specific case is a proof of it, isn’t it? If there is willing, or a need, or there is an opportunity, people will simply make changes to the way they operate, live and consume things. Many have shifted away from Adobe, from Max, from Maya, etc to other packages.

And this is the mindset of SaaS. It’s not “versions” anymore (just like windows 10), but a single version that gets updated continuously. There’s no “if you don’t like this version you pay for it anyway”. You continue to view this with the vision of the 80’s or 90’s, this is completely different. And here is where the customer “vote”. If they want to dive in and pay for this new model, it will succeed. If not, then ADSK will have to review their tactics. Adobe did already, and it seems it paid off pretty well (and it also seems it is paying of for ADSK too).

And why are they doing that? In your vision, because they want to make the customer hostage. But from their side is safeguarding somewhat minimum constant influx of resources so they can manage roadmaps and product development. Don’t we all remember the 2016 big layoffs? You really believe that was because “they are evil and want their profit”? I suggest you to open your own company and have to face your workers when you need to lay them off. No CEO, Director or PM likes to do it, or does that out of some sick pleasure. They do because it’s a simple matter of mathematics – you need to make your balance stay on the green side, or you and all your company can go bankrupt.

And laying off is one of the worst moves any of them can make, and are pretty aware of that. It destroys the company morale, makes the user base insecure, makes for terrible press releases and paints doom and gloom. But you either do that, or risk sink everything. As I said, open your company and look at the face of an employer when you’re telling them to go. No one likes doing that.

2 – “borderline out of place”

This is not an insult (well, I hope you didn’t feel offended). It only means you’re so out of touch with the reality that you’re, well, almost out of any place where we can find common ground.

3 – “Who is saying Blender is great because it’s free?!”

You talk about your personal experience. Well, that’s anecdotal. Eloi’s youtube channel (and many, many others) who put forth tutorials or showcase work done in Max/Maya/Houdini/C4D,etc almost ALWAYS receive “that” comment. This is a copy paste from Eloi’s channel. The text between [] are my additions for clarification:

“well …one is paid [max] in the thousands the other is free [blender].I mean….”

Blender has awesome tools, and is very capable. Both, Eloi, and I guess pretty much anyone who is serious on the industry knows that.

4 – “For some people in developing countries having Blender as something free is great, they can access a great tool that they could be unable without using piracy”

That’s HALF true. You CAN access Max (or any other ADSK package) for free if you qualify as student, for example. I surely love that Blender is free, but I did access Max for free as well, legally, while at the University. And I’m in a 3rd world country, and on one of the poorest regions of it (northeast of Brazil). So, your argument is not that sound.

5 – “I pay for Blender”

That is completely OUT of the point. It’s not a business you’re talking about here! You pay for your electricity, right? Well, what happens if you DON’T pay for it? Does the same happen if you stop paying Blender? There, you got your answer.

What Blender has is a “pay if you will” “””business””” model (under heavy quotation the business part). Rosendaal time and time again talked about how he dislikes a standard business practice, how he is almost delusional by saying “ADSK representatives tell that if you make work with Blender, it’s not your work, but it belongs to Blender Foundation” or when he said that “ADSK sabotages FBX so we can’t access it properly”. This looks way, way too tinfoil hat for me. FBX is proprietary, and the owner has all the right to protect its IP. The fact he is rich (made money on the internet bubble), is somewhat ironic to me.

6 – “The main question here is why the B.I. Is doing such a great piece of software (FOR ME, you can hate it if you want) with such a low amount of monthly money while Autodesk is doing what is doing with their amazing super subscription system that is giving them tons and tons of money.”

Because ADSK, unlike Blender, has a MUCH heavier overhead. They have re sellers all around the globe, support channels, legal and fiscal departments, customer service, stock holders, etc, etc that Blender can easily get around or avoid entirely. Those things are VERY expensive, consume a lot of money, time and resources. Your comparing completely different company models, and the hint is in the name – one is a “company” and the other is an “institute”. You even acknowledge this difference in company model when you say that “people will pay [for Blender] IF they want”.

Going specifically on Max, the development of this software is far, far from being a trivial thing. It’s around for quite a while already (has a ton of legacy baggage) and it’s used in almost all industries that deal with DCC you can name. Making changes to it, even the smallest and apparently inoffensive, can potentially alienate or break the workflows of hundreds of paying companies (your customers). Blender, on the other hand, can make changes and adapt much more swiftly, and give little to no reason to anyone (the vast, absolute majority is not paying, anyway). Yet, still, even Blender kept for YEARS its quirkiness and crazy stuff (hardcoded defaults? select with right-click? Confirmation warning box before delete? Don’t they know there’s a thing called “undo”?…).

7 – “Developers are paid, and no one thinks they don’t deserve to get paid, of course!”

No one said they are not paid, but not ALL Blender devs are paid! Many stuff that is merged on the branches come from students and graduates in the universities. Not even counting the devs that want to contribute out of passion or seeking to build a carrer/portfolio.

Developers under B.I. do get paid (AFAIK), but not all Blender devs are under B.I.

And what happens if people paying for Blender begin to stop paying (for any reason), will blender still survive? What if devs want a raise? What if the costs are not covered as they should. Rosendaal said several times he “does not need money”, but if his money starts to dwindle, what would happen to Blender development? Another point of contention is that Blender is Rosendaal’s baby. He actively kills and buries forks of Blender (something quite strange for an “open” mind) so there is only ONE blender, as much as he can help. So, you’re only considered a “blender dev” if you swear by Rosendaal’s vision of it.

8 – “but you can see a growing movement of people jumping out of Adesk boat.”

That is a hard call – you’d have to be inside ADSK and have access to their sales numbers. By their publicly available information (that they have to give since they are on the stock market) the number of seats of all their software is up, not down. People said the same about Adobe when it went full rental, and look where it is now.

9 – “do you remember 3dsmax XBR initiative”

ALL softwares have failed initiatives. Blender Game Engine? NaN? This is what happens when you make plans – you’ve also just defined the exact terms by what you can fail. And failing occurs, of course.

That was another time (when Ken was around) and I’m afraid MUCH of the problems Max development faced at that time was not the devs fault, or Ken’s fault, but some shady stuff that was happening in M&E. That is past now, and development is on another kind of mentality, completely. I guess I need (as Eloi did) to also thank Blender for that. One of the key factors to drive development is proper competition, and I’m more than happy that Blender is making the pressure to also make Max better for Max users.

Because you’ve been inside (as a Beta) does not mean you actually KNOW what is happening. Even betas only have a partial view of the whole. And even if you actually knew all that was happening, it also does not mean it’s the same now.

10 – “so you know all the investment done in a software for production, so you also know that is HARD to any studio to shift from onw software to another”

That is also HALF true. On ALL companies I had contact with, the cost with software is a blip on their radar. What REALLY cost them is personnel. The money a studio pays for animators, riggers, or TDs, directors, etc, is orders of magnitude higher than their total cost with software. This is even MORE true in construction companies.

Of course it’s hard to make changes. Any change. If it was easy, people would never avoid change. But from a company’s perspective, it’s much easier to shift software than pay/hire/fire people. In reality, no one is FORCED to pay, ADSK does NOT have the leverage or the power to make it, only governments (with the force of the law, and risk of jail time) can ever FORCE you to pay for something (read taxes). If you really want to, you can jump ship (as many have done according to you).

11 – “And no, it’s not a ready-made text”

Sorry, it is. You might think it’s *your* opinion, but it’s easy to see the same idea everywhere from people disgruntled by the new business practice. The idea took a hold of you, not you of the idea. I’m NOT defending saying it’s a *good* or *bad* practice, I surely would LOVE if they kept the possibility to still buy permanent licenses, but you go a step (or several) beyond saying it’s a “scheme”:

“Rental Scheme = Research & Development Stop up to minimums = Client as hostage”

This, again, is a business model. Will it survive and blossom? IDK. I surely would love to have it as an option, but I can at least understand why they are doing it this way without having to resort to emotion (calling things a “scheme” and telling people they are “hostages”).

IF you were on the Beta, even with our limited range of vision, you’d know that R&D has INCREASED, not stopped to a minimum. I can’t vouch for Adobe (they do have some pretty cool new tech in After Effects and Photoshop, some Neural AI scaler, AE new caches, etc) but in Max itself, I can say that what you claim is objectively false.

As a Bonus Point (12) I’d like to point a discrepancy on what you claim and what you say. You did say that:

“but everyone in my live streaming’s, in the main blender forums and in Blender chat disagrees with the fact that the others are better or worse because you have to pay for them.”

Yet, you, yourself, claims that being “free” is an advantage (or at the very least, a superior point) of Blender. You try to be very subtle here, but it’s just a matter to analyze the consequence of your claims to see that you’re involved in some kind of quest to “awaken the users” against “schemes” that want to just “milk” them.

The fact that you point the business model of a company as something inherently “bad”, or “shady”, that “FORCES” users to become hostages, while at the same time pointing at Blender, shows you’re making a moral argument where there’s none to be made. This is business, as I said on my very first comment. And on business you vote with your money. Trying to move the users or the industry based on moral claims does not bear objectivity.

You’re constantly bringing the “money problem” to the ADSK camp, pointing how this is “bad”, and at the same time says “but everyone in my live streaming’s, in the main blender forums and in Blender chat disagrees with the fact that the others are better or worse because you have to pay for them.” You are saying that yourself! 😊

You see? This is the problem with mixing this kind of stuff. Bringing together your moral compass to an economic decision from a company. There’s no “evil” or “good” company, only people running the companies, trying to survive on a competitive landscape.

If ADSK in the future realizes their new practice is not giving the intended results, they will either change, adapt, or even go bankrupt. Companies larger than ADSK have gone down the drain, and history is full of companies bodies to tell that (Kodak, Enron, GM, Nokia, Blockbuster, Yahoo, Lehman Brothers, etc).

Eloi just summarized my gargantuan response 😁.

In a nutshell, your concerns are mine too, Eloi.

1.- Service means I receive something in exchange for what I pay, when I receive software I don’t actually receiving something, as for example the phone bill… I receive a continuous services of line that has to be fixed if somethign is broken, will you rent a hammer? well… maybe, but probably not everyone would want to rent a hammer, some may want to acquire it.
IMHO Rental Licensing has nothing wrong as long as one of those two points check:
A.- It is a continuous service from the side of the company, and I mean every day, every minute, wich is something software is not.

B.- An option to rent it or to acquire it depeding on the customer needs, because it’s not a service, it’s a tool. Rental only, in paper, means that you get continuous service and just one big version… in paper, the reality for Autodesk and Adobe is that you get updated (2018, 2019…) and intermediate updated (2018.1, 2019.1) with new features, and the reality is that investment in the software it self has ben cut down by a lot, because they don’t need too, a service and a tool are two different things, and max or maya are tools, not software, so forcing into rental is taking hostages because changing a studio pipeline is not an easy thing, it costs money, so even if you don’t like the path of the software you will have to continue upgrading, as I said, you cannot work with Max 2016 anymore even if you wanted to.
And the future will transform the Service part in true, how? removing your local software and giving you a username to access a remote VM where you will be able to use their software.
And yes, Autodesk has said “we won’t do that” but their CEO has said it many times, and how many times did Autodesk said “we don’t do that” and after that they did it?

2.- Thanks, as I said I was not sure, is good to know the actual meaning, it’s easy to get offended when something gets lost in translation 🙂

3.- He said ” but Im more and more worried moving around blender users, where the general idea is that max/maya/other, is bad because you need to pay for it when blender is free”

Eloi’s channel is not a “Blender Users” place, is more a “3ds max” users place, don’t you agree?
If you go over devtalk.blender.org, over to Blender.chat, over my channel, over other Blender channels, even over BelnderArtists, and specially if you hear pro people (like people from Theory Studios, from Tangent Animation, from MAD Animation and from many others), you will hear that being free or not, is not the best feature of it, and every single one of us will remark this in our live streamings, in our articles, and in every single place we go.
Of course, being free may be a leverage, and now I go there:

4.- Nope, that is not half true, that you are able to use max or maya to study means nothing, because you don’t own your work, you cannot use those versions legally to produce anything to gain money, to do freelance work, to do anything, also you have to fullfill their requirements, and it does not matter if you are a student form a private institution or an internet course, that place may not be able to provide you with a legal license for students because that place don’t fullfill the Autodesk rquirements, I’ve been there before.
You cannot even legally open your files created with the student version and use it in a non-student version, it’s piracy and illegal.

Now if you want to do something professional, or to get some money with some models in a store or whatever other thing that is not use it exclusively for the University and for 100% non profit, not just now, but in the future, you cannot use the student license, so it’s not free.
It’s the “drug” technique, I give you this free now, when you depend on it you will have to pay me for it, that is not free.

If you are in a developing country and want to do some work to live, you can do one of three things, pay a rental license that could be over-priced for your contry (and it’s over priced for spain), use a pirate version, or don’t use it at all and look for other solutions.

5.- I PAY for Blender, Blener Cloud and Blender Animation Studios are Businesses that exists to maintain part of the Blender development, they maintain the production pipeline related things, like Flamenco, the render farm manager, the Alembic implementation, the Attract implementation and service (the production tracking software)
So, I actually PAY for it.
Blender is partially maintained with a non-profit organization, created to manage Blender, the Blender Institute, but apart from that, the Blender Animation Studio and the Blender Cloud are for-profit businesses that created animation productions like any other animation studio, and that provides services for their users.

6.- Have you apoke with Autodesk resellers? DO you know how are reducing their part year after year? do you know how Autodesk is directly calling customers and removing resellers as soon as they can? Because they called me directly and told me that my account was going to be managed directly by Autodesk, and my reseller was astonished, they didn’t knew it, and “overhead”? Yes, like Stingray, or like using the money you pay for max to develop other strategic things for their business that won’t fullfill your needs, but, for example, Maya users needs, and of course a big amount of marketing to make you believe that they are making you a favour with the rental only licensing scheme.
Regarding the support part, what do you think devtalk.blender.org is for?
Regarding the legal departments… what??? everyone has a legal department or person… they are big, their department is bigger, but the Blender Institute, the Blender Animation Studio, the Blender Cloud, they all have legal and fiscal departments.

Regarding the company models, yes, they are different than Autodesk, that is for sure, they work for their customers/users (it depends if you talk about the cloud or about the institute), and yes, people will pay IF they want, and what is the problem with that?

Regarding the Max development… are you saying that Blender development is a trivial thing? I’m not saying that you are saying that, but from your words that can be guessed out. Max is a product, if it’s so hard to develop, then they can throw it to the garbage and start a new one, like the idea that was flying around when they acquired Maya, but THEY decided to keep max as it is, is not my problem as a customer, is their problem as a company if the development is more expensive than others.
Now what you refer to “quirkiness and crazy stuff” is stuff I found very useful, you say Right Click Select is bad, I say is good, but it’s an opinion, is Zbrush quirky and crazy? in my opinion YES, is it bad because of that? no
Hardcoded defaults? what do you mean?
Confirmation warning box… it has an option in preferences since ages, but just if you know it, if you use it for a day, you may not know it, now… we like those confirmation boxes, you may not like it, again, it’s an opinion.

7.- ALL official Blender devs ar paid, ALL commits are reviewed by paid developers, nothing is commited if it’s not reviewed by one official developer from the Blender Institute, other people is not paid, they decide to collaborate, and is that bad? I don’t think so, they work, they are not asked to do nothing, it’s a volunteer work, done from them for us, users, what is bad about that? and others are paid by private studios that maintain their own production branches, many of the changes are commited to master, and many others don’t pass the review and are rejected or asked for changes, and many others are not liberated by the studios, because they are developed just for an specific use case or because they don’t want to, again, what is the problem with that?

Regarding the students thing, as I said, NOTHING is commited and merged in master without review and overview done by the main developers, not a single part of the Blender code is amateur or entirely done by a student without supervision of a senior developer with commit rights, and they take the review process very seriously.

8.- You have access to their sales numbers! They have to publish them every year, they are a publicly traded company, so you can know their revenue, their results, by busines, by department, etc… they are apublicly traded company, all that information is public.

9.- that shady stuff… is what is happening rigth now, and what will happen in the future with all the cloud stuff.
I don’t say what is actually happening, I know what happened when somthing was asked by a lot of users and got ignored verision after version, again, do I have to remember you the current status of all the animation tools in max? the OLD bones system (from Max4) the barely usable CAT? the abandoned Biped? the actual Skin system based on dual quaternions, and that was around 2 years ago… when dual quaternions was something old at that time already.

In reality, if you were a customer with a studio, and all your pipeline is based on Autodesk, when the licensing change came, many were deceived into the rental system, and please, ask resellers about cutomer satisfaction about that, I don’t know in Brazil, but in Spain you can see how even resellers are pissed off becuse they did not understand that they were going to be forced to upgrade to a newer version every 3 years as much, saying that a company cannot FORCE you to do something when your business is based on a package done by that company, is a falacy, not because they cannot go to your door and force you, like the government can, but because they catch you with different things, so making the change is hard for the user, super hard, and after everything you have to do a big investment in doing the change at the same time you are forced to pay to autodesk to keep working with a tool, because they don’t allow you to purchase that tool, you may like this situation, I think it is fundamentally bad, because it’s not a service, they don’t give me something, it’s a tool.
When I see the cost of shifting, is not the software cost, is the piepline development, is the personal training, etc… it’s the reason why Autodesk gives students free licenses, the drug dealer technique.

11.- Maybe you see the same idea everywhere because many people thinks that way.

When you say it’s a business model, of course it is, what I defend is that is a BAD business model for the user, only good for Autodesk in the long run, and BAD for the industry and for the users.
A business model is a scheme, “esquema” in spanish, “Licensing Scheme” it’s “Esquema de licenciamiento” that is just a way to refer to an specific organization of licenses, Perpetual Licensing Scheme is also another licensing scheme, I don’t know why do you think I use the work “Scheme” as something bad, but It’s not my intention, and yes, I will keep saying that customers are hostages.
What happens if a small studio goes out of cash for three months? they have to pay workers, they have to pay many things, with an owned license, like we had before, a studio can still reduce their costs to a minimum and keep working with their tool, because it’s a tool, with a rental scheme, no money = no work = it’s better if you go out of business.

Are you questioning that I’ve been in beta? ask for me to other historic beta users, like Artur Leao for example.
I left beta at the very same minute I shifted from Max to Blender and abandoned Autodesk becasue I was not willing to donate not a single second of my life to Autodesk since they did not care about me as a customer, because that is what beta users do, donate their time for nothing, testing faulty software not ready for production, and if you read the EULA of Beta carefully you will discover that you are NOT allowed to use Beta software in production, not just that is dangerous, but that you are not LEGALLY allowed to do that, even when many users do.

Development has not increased, I’m sorry, ask about the amount of developers working on max as of today, you will be surprised, how much of those developers are in the max team, how much of those developers are part of the maya team? how many of them are part of Arnold tema? and how many of them are part of the Bifrost team.

Wait for a minute, I never said that being free is a superior point, that are your words, I say that it’s a leverage for many people, don’t you think so?

I think that they Autodesk and Adobe SaaS business model are fundamentally bad, why cannot the be bad? they are good for them, but bad for users, it’s my opinion, yes, and I explained why did I say that,
Again in this business model it’s not easy to “vote” with your money, and we go back to the “hostage” idea, a “hostage” has no vote because there are several situations planned to force them to stay where they are, they cannot stay with the software as is and say “I will live with the latest version I paid for and stop paying you”
Again, it’s a business model, yes, and it’s a fundamentally bad business model designed to force users to keep paying or stop working , and please, there is evil and good in a company, when something makes damage, for me is bad, when something helps people, for me is good. If you think other way, then you have a different comprehension of what good and bad is, and saying that “only people running the companies”, I’m sorry I don’t buy that, they knew that they were going to damage a lot of small customers, Anagnost said it himself, and he just said he did not care about that, for me that is being Bad to faithfull customers that have been paying you for more than 20 years.

Of course, they will adapt, they will do something, but that does not mean that meanwhile they made a lot of damage to small and medium studios, and BTW, it’s not Autodesk what will go down the toilet, just their M&E division, when you hear about CSR made by Autodesk, CSR begins with the business model, a business model that hurts small and medium customers in the society it is against CSR, and you can still have your opinion and think it’s good, I think it is fundamentally bad, we disagree, but that won’t make me shut up my self, or do I have to shut up because others think I’m wrong?
That don’t sound good to me.

Also, I don’t move the users based on moral claims, I say that they were rising prices while they were saying they were lowering them, that is, in my opinion, lying, and that is not a moral thing, it’s a marketing lie, agian, in my opinion, if you are happy with a company that lies to you as a customer, go with it, but go with it with all the information.

What do you think about forcing permanent licenses users to go to rental increasing the price of theis subs? and what will you think when they terminate the hability to update a permanent license?

Regarding Adobe, really? you know that they removed the multithread ability of AE, right? that it performs way worse than before, that new features come after many years and are half baked, that in general Adobe upddates are a minimum to say “hey… an update” and that’s it.

Regarding this:
“You try to be very subtle here, but it’s just a matter to analyze the consequence of your claims to see that you’re involved in some kind of quest to “awaken the users” against “schemes” that want to just “milk” them.”

NO! I’m not subtle at all! I say it loud and clear! Is what I think, I give my reasons, some will agree some not, but of course, I’m against that type of licensing (rental ONLY, let me stress ONLY) I think it’s bad for the customer in the long run, I really think it is, and I say it loud and clear, but that has nothing to do with Blender being free or not, I don’t think Houdini, wich is more expensive than Max, has a bad licensing scheme, for example, I would like to purchase a full version of it as soon as I need it, right now I don’t need it, and I may keep the same version for three years and renew after 3 or 4 versions, it will still be cheaper than maintaining it, but they giev options to the customers, so I can keep working for 5 years or more with the same version of Houdini if it fits my needs, I know companies that were still using Max 2010 last year, do you know some?

“You’re constantly bringing the “money problem” to the ADSK camp, pointing how this is “bad”, and at the same time says “but everyone in my live streaming’s, in the main blender forums and in Blender chat disagrees with the fact that the others are better or worse because you have to pay for them.” You are saying that yourself! 😊”

What??? I say that being free is a leverage for many users for many reasons, you disagree with me in this?

Now, that does not implies that the software itself is better of worse because of that, I disagree with that assumption, Max or Maya or whatever software you want, will be better or worse because of their features, and for some Max is useless, for example ask Catia or Solidworks users about their opinion of max, many will see max as a toy, and as something useless, but being free does not make a software better or worse.

Now, I think that being able to access the source code, adapt it to your needs, implement the features you need, and many other things is a leverage too for small/medium and big studios, for me as a super-small studio is a leverage, imagine for a studio like Tangent with their own developers team.

Don’t you agree with me on this?

On the other hand if you find a show stopper bug in max, as a small or medium studio, you will be told to wait until a service pack is released, if you are big, you can pay A LOT of money to Autodesk to fix it for you, but you won’t be able to see the actual source code of max or Maya in your life, no matter how much you pay (unless you purchase the entire Autodesk division), is this a leverage of Blender or not?

I don’t understand why do you think that saying that some inherent features to open source and blender are a leverage is the same as saying that “Blender is better because it’s free”, I don’t agree with that.

That does not mean that i DO think that Blender is better, but as I said MANY MANY times, it’s MY opinion, I will share it, I will defend it, yes, but it may not be your opinion, I won’t shut up because someone does not agree with me, I really think Blender is better, yes, do you want me to repeat it? Blender is better than max and maya, it is better, another time? It’s better, far far better, far far far superior, astonishing better, like light years better… hahaha It’s my opion, but of course we can speak about if it’s better in modeling, or animation, or VFX, or crappy particles, or plugin availabilty, or plugin necessity, I have my opinion on all this, and for me, it’s way better, for Eloi, or maybe for you, it’s not because you don’t have Thinking Particles, ok, then for you Max and Maya may be way way better, far superior, astonishingly incredible because you have a plugin that you have to pay for after you paid for the software, also in rental model, but… it is what you need, so it will be lightyears better because you need it/like it.
Others shifted to Houdini and their permanent license scheme and are happier with Houdini than with thinking particles, it’s a matter of opinion.

But no, I don’t say Blender is better because it’s free.

And that’s it for today, all this is my opinion, what I think, my conclussions and my reasoning, nothing is written in stone, and tomorrow I can change my mind, I don’t care, but as of today, this is what I think.

Cheers!

Just to go full circle and end this. Your first post:

“No matter if TyFlow is awesome, you won’t be able to use it unless you keep paying Autodesk, no matter if it’s free or not, you will have to keep paying Autodesk forever if you like the tool, no matter if they invest in max or the lock it up as it is with very few and small improvements form time to time, you will have to keep paying them, not Tyson Ibelle, which is doing a magnificient job, but Autodesk.”

What’s the inherent problem with that? I see zero. We’re on a thread talking about TyFlow, and you come with an argument to put it down, using ADSK as your fulcrum point. What’s the problem with paying ADSK, to use the software they develop in order to produce content and get paid because of it?

Can I assume your quote/price per hour should be lower than a Max/Maya artist hour? I mean, you got less overhead to account for, you don’t have to pay for you software, so you should charge less from the customers when compared to a Max or Maya artist with the same level of quality and experience as you since they need to account for the price of the software on their quotes. 🙂

Food for thought.

Let me try to address fast (not comment beyond this, this thread is turning ridiculously long 😛 ).

1A and 1B – you’re not getting the concept of SaaS and is depicting it as something it is not. Continuous development means what Windows10 is doing. I also gave you several other examples (that you chose to ignore completely).

“It is a continuous service from the side of the company, and I mean every day, every minute” – yeaaah right… Talk about mis-characterization. Why stop there? We can go all the way to femtosecond.

“reality is that investment in the software it self has ben cut down by a lot” – you’re wrong, it has not. Are on on Beta? Are you in contact with a PM? Do you know how large is Max dev team? What are the initiatives? If you do not know those, you can’t make such a claim.

“And the future will transform the Service part in true, how? removing your local software and giving you a username to access a remote VM where you will be able to use their software.” – I’d love that indeed! Imagine running on a cheap machine I don’t need to give support to, even on mobile devices, in any place I want. That only sounds good to me, honestly. Sorry if you want to be stuck in an era pre-internet 🙂

Imagine that for a big company. Slash the cost of machine maintenance. Have several headless displays that are all connected to multi-core multi-gpu machines, all seamless and that you can scale up and down as the need arises? That is the future IMHO. Maybe it’s not for everyone, but for many, many people, it is.

3 – “like people from Theory Studios, from Tangent Animation, from MAD Animation and from many others), you will hear that being free or not, is not the best feature of it”

That is also HALF true. Tangent CEO simply HATES ADSK. That’s his PRIMARY reason for adopting Blender. He has a very emotional agenda for wanting to push Blender as much as possible. I tend to make decisions based on rationality, but if this fits him, I’m ok.

4 – That IS half true because your claim was:

“For some people in developing countries having Blender as something free is great, they can access a great tool that they could be unable without using piracy”

And now you’re just changing goals by citing ownership of produced art (which does not change if you’re a student or not, you just can’t make PROFIT out of it, does not mean it’s NOT yours). The point where you’re half true is – you CAN use Max without resorting to piracy. Point.

5 – All you said, that’s STILL not the same. You’re NOT paying for Blender – you’re paying to sister companies that help MAINTAIN Blender.

And again, you’re not involved in a exchange relationship (I give something in order to have access to something). You are in a donation relationship (you give something independently of having access or not to something). That is not sustainable from a business standpoint and companies in a large part know that.

6 – Do you have DATA for that? Or you’re making claims based on your personal account? I have a re-seller, and they are where they’ve ever been. You’re sounding more like “TinFoilHat”Rosendaal talking like that.

I can’t believe you just said “a big amount of marketing” is making my mind or perception about ADSK. What marketing, please? You mean all the TV ads showing people working with ADSK software? Or the trades shows that I never went to? Or T-Shirts? Or Demoreels? Oh please! I work with advertising, you are sounding really, really out of touch again.

Regarding support, yes. If you think support is a forum, sorry. Try again. Support involved people trained to visit a costumer or company. To organize training events. To have a proper phone number the client can call to. You’re giving me a semi dead forum? You have no idea what you’re talking about!

Yes, legal departments that deal with software licensing, does Blender has that, for example? Oh, sorry, forgot Blender is free, so no licensing is needed. What about a legal department to deal with technology licensing? Forgot again, in Blender it’s all Open Source. And what about a legal department to deal with cases of customer refunds, international re sellers, etc? Oppps. Forgot again! But Blender got this awesome support forum that was update the last time 3 hours ago.

Sorry. No. Not the same thing, not by a LONG shot.

“Regarding the company models, yes, they are different than Autodesk, that is for sure, they work for their customers/users” – again, moral high ground talk here. This is your emotion talking, not facts. ADSK so works for their customers/users, if they had NONE of them, or did not provide them with what they need to run their business, they are OUT of business. Blender Institute does not have the same overhead or responsibility – you can count with ONE hand big companies that are totally dependent on Blender. What happens if Blender underdevelops and start to just linger? Very few people would even care of feel. The same cannot be said about ADSK software – if they let their users down, they lose them, and if they lose them, they close doors.

“are you saying that Blender development is a trivial thing? I’m not saying that you are saying that, but[]” – Always a BUT, right? Way to put words on my mouth.

I’m pointing harder than Blender, hands down. I made the point VERY clear why, and it’s not because of code legacy problems or bugs only (even though they are serious problems). Let me paste again what I said, maybe reading again will make it more clear to you:

“Going specifically on Max, the development of this software is far, far from being a trivial thing. It’s around for quite a while already (has a ton of legacy baggage) and it’s used in almost all industries that deal with DCC you can name. Making changes to it, even the smallest and apparently inoffensive, can potentially alienate or break the workflows of hundreds of paying companies (your customers).”

When/if Blender get used on as many industries as Max (from medical to architectural, from movies VFX to saturday cartoons, from off-shore engineering companies to AAA game studios) then we can talk again how being tangled in so many industries makes development harder. ArchViz ALONE is larger as an industry than games AND movies COMBINED, so you get a perspective.

And yes. Quirkiness indeed because in no sane place on earth a right mouse click is used as a selection method. It is so in Blender just because of Rosendaal’s hard head and his loyal followers.

7 – See how you resort to something being “bad” or “good”? My point with developers integrating things in Blender without being paid (doing donation) ties with the overhead ADSK has that Blender does NOT. EVERY piece of code integrated in Max came from a PAID developer. The same cannot be said of Blender. This alone make cheaper to develop for Blender, and if you sum the other things I said before you might start to get a clue on why they are on a different league, and how their responsibilities as companies are different.

8 – I know that. And guess what? Their own numbers go against what you said:

“but you can see a growing movement of people jumping out of Adesk boat.”

And that is my point – there were many users who did drop (you being one of them), but the net result is still positive – they have more seats every year.

9 – Maybe you’re just out of the loop, but CAT is NOT “barely usable”. Check Miloš Černý channel on youtube. Many game companies use extensively CAT and Biped. The animation tools surely need some serious love (as in many places at Max).

You are indeed very very out of the loop. Max got not only DQ, but Voxel, HeatMap and Delta Mush skinning.

And then you go misrepresenting what SaaS is and how hard, difficult and horrible it is to change workflows. You did, didn’t you? Did it cost you much? Did you go out of business? Falacy is putting on the same level a free choice a user can make to a no option choice. The choice might be difficult, but it is still a choice. You can’t choose out of a tax. You might use the word FORCE as much as you want, but that does not make it real, or truth.

11 – It’s not a “bad” or “good” model. It’s just a model that might work or might not work. And will definitely NOT work for everyone. You like to put adjectives and emotion where there’s no place for those things. Strange…

You can keep saying customers are hostages, as people can say the earth is flat. Saying does not make it real, though. That’s your call.

If a studio goes out of cash for three months I say that’s a poorly managed studio. If you’re on a free market you gotta know how to run your business and be prepared to every possible situation as best you can. Like in all competitive environment, if you go out of business it’s better to think where you did wrong instead of putting blame on the others. It’s the closest thing to accelerated natural selection we have.

You say one thing that I’d like to pinch to attention:

“you are NOT allowed to use Beta software in production, not just that is dangerous, but that you are not LEGALLY allowed to do that”

And do you know why? Because ADSK does not want to be legally binded to loss of data, malfunction, or damages you or your company might suffer because of the use of Beta software. Again, this is the kind of legal burden ADSK has to bear that Blender don’t. They have a responsibility and can get sued by their customers, something I’m note sure Blender can ever get into since they provide the software “as is”.

“Development has not increased, I’m sorry” – Wrong. You’re just factually wrong hehehe 🙂 You can ask around, maybe you still have a contact with someone from the inside ?

And I’m gonna refrain from going further. I did already pointed where your arguments fail, but you are in the end resorting to your “opinion”. I’m trying as best as I can to point to facts, to data, to information, not to some empty claims that “this is bad, this is hostage, this is milk the user”.

Of course I pay ADSK. I earn MONEY with their software, it’s just fair I pay them. So far, we’ve been able to pay without any problems, the cost of the software itself is WAY lower than what I pay in hardware, in taxes, with lighting, water, internet, etc. That’s a blip on the radar, and we’re a VERY small company.

At first I was more on your side of the camp, but as soon as I finally opened our studio, my perception on how business work changed a lot.

And ok, that’s more than enough. You already stated, and re-stated that it is your “opinion”, so let it be your opinion.

Cheers.

BTW, here you go, rent your cloud workstation and stop paying Autodesk, according to you is going to be cheaper!

https://athera.io/pricing-and-packages/

https://www.stratuscore.com/virtual-workstation-pricing.php

https://fra.me/pricing-business

https://simpleanimation.com/virtual-workstation-configuration/

You will have to keep paying Autodesk for some of them because they don’t give you licenses, others will handle the licensing topic for you.

Why don’t you use them right away?

Do you know how much bandwidth you may need to have a full studio with 20 people working 8 hours/day in parallel with a remote VM?

Cheers.

The evidence is present in all the releases since 2017… have you checked the latest one from Maya?

Or Max… new features… a new cool spline toolset and bifrost…

You decide to avoid all the questions I ask you, you did in previous posts, you preferred to ignore them.

No beta rules forbids you to publicly tell what is the max development team size, that’s something that ties only to Autodesk employees, are you an Autodesk employee? If the answer is negative you can tell the amount of developers inside the max team, in case you know that information.

“All the rest of your post is misrepresenting, misreading, and plainly straw man fallacies from top to bottom.”

So I’m the one that is doing all those things, but you are the one saying that “you can legally use Max. Point” yes… sure.

You know what.

YOu are right, is not half of a salary, but nearly a quarter of it, does your minimum wage take into account the real business cost? or just what the artist receives in their pocket? Becuase a person receiving 1700€ here cost to the studio around 2300€, a intermediate salary is around 1500€ wich is around 2000€ for the studio, so more or less 20% of the salary just in rented software, no actual investment, just pure cost.

So, for you, paying 4854€/year per artist is awesome, specially when after those nearly 5k per artist you get nothing, no software that you can use without paying to Autodesk, or Adobe, or Cebas, you pay that for 1 year, that’s it, and let’s forget about additional costs, like rental licenses for the farm, etc…

It’s awesome, in the past we had to pay waaaaay less per year per artist and we had our licenses to keep as a permanent license, now we pay more than double and we own nothing, enjoy 🙂

Now, you say that Blender is better because It’s free, that is what YOU say, don’t blame Blender followers for saying this, you said it.

Also, YOU say that Max is worse because of it’s price, again and again, I think you are the one that thinks that, and you hope to be able to go to Blender at some point to stop paying Autodesk LOL

I don’t recommend you to do that, nothing is better because it’s free, even when you seem to think so.

I already explained that it was simply not true, but well, you like to think that, maybe you are more comfortable thinking that you are paying for somethign better, because the only thing that makes Blender better is that is free… you pay for max so… it MUST be better… but others keep saying that Blender is beter, and this is because it’s free.

Anyways, why is it better?, according to you Max can be used legally for free too… oh, maybe that was one of many fallacies.

I will maintain my statement in any case, I will not say that Blender is better than Max for Maya for everyone, it is better for us, you can think differently, but of course it’s not better because it’s free.

The conclussion of all this:

1.- You cannot touch your work without paying Autodesk (HOSTAGE)

2.- The cost of migrating a well stablished pipeline is big, and Autodesk knows it, so you cannot shift from a software to other easily, so you have to accept whatever they develop in future versions, like it or not (HOSTAGE)

3.- Your yearly cost is increased year after year, but since you need Autodesk software to access your past work because you don’t own a single license, you are forced to pay them whatever they want (HOSTAGE)

4.- The per-artist cost is more than double than in the past and you can do nothing about it, you cannot vote with your money, no money = no work (HOSTAGE)

In the end Autodesk keeps doing lay-offs, it’s hard to invest in R&D without a workforce, like for example when they fired 1200 people, or when they fired again 108 persons, and they keep firing people, quietly and slowly, quarter after quarter.

Keep ignoring my questions, keep justifying yourself, keep convinving yoursefl that Blender is the best because it’s free, you will sleep well, but that does not make your points true.

Cheers.

– “i know someone else threw the first stone”

I answered becaue someone else said this:
“Everybody already knows your reasons and motivations, Juang 😉”

I wanted to clarify my motivations because some may think a thing and others a different thing, reading between lines is something subjective and since I’ve been questioned I wanted to answer with something clear, nothing is left to guess.

– “but shitting on the software most of us are using”

That is not the case, my criticism is against Autodesk and their licensing policys, their lack of proper updates and R&D while they keep rising prices, but not against 3dsmax.
Some keep thinking that I’m saying Max is crap, it’s not what I’m saying.

– “And telling all of us how only you know whats best for all of us”

Where in all my posts I said that something is better for you than max? Nowhere.

And this is precisely why I have to specify that is better FOR ME, and may not be better for you, but once again some understand what I don’t say.

The thing is that someone here mentioned that Blender users say that it is better because it’s free, and I fought agains that, not saying that Blender is better or worse than max for any reason, but saying that it’s simply false that Blender is better because it’s free, and that it’s not true that in general, in the Blender community the idea is that Blender is better because it’s free, nothing more nothing less.

– “doesn´t make any of us feel better.”

I just commented that was a pity that a Max users won’t be able to use this awesome piece of software being developed by tyson ibelle without constantly paying to autodesk, no matter if Tyson relese this as a free plugin os as a paid plugin, no matter if you want to use it with one or another version of max, you will have to keep paying Autodesk even when it’s not something they did.

That is a fact.

I understand that this may make someone to feel bad because it’s a reflect of what happens with Autodesk licensing system, as I said in the previous post, any Autodesk user have no decission making power unless they pass through a hard (costly) transition to whatever other company software may be (C4D, Houdini…) , and of course no real vote on the future of max, since there is no option but to keep paying to keep using max.

You don’t make me feel better with your questions here, should you avoid writing your comment?

Cheers!

Sorry again Juan. All you did was misread and misinterpret all I said, yet again.

I give up. You’re not interested in conversation, you’re interested in demonizing and antagonizing, twisting the comments and observations to fit your particular OPINION (as you did state more than once).

So here you have it. Cheers.

Let’s see, the fact is that Autodesk made a ton of lay offs, I’m not sure what news you refer to, this was published in a lot of places, but when Autodesk says that those layoffs were done in side-projects you assume that those projects had nothing to do with Max or Maya, and in any case, you assume that the Autodesk representative is telling you the truth, ok, I won’t deny that, I don’t know that info, and I haven’t said it was from the Max team, I said that they made A LOT of lay offs, and in any case Autodesk is not a company known because their trustfulness in regards to their plans.

Do you remember the “we don’t have plans to go to a rental only model” when Adobe did it?

I could say that we lost the ability to have unlimited render nodes, or we have an unwanted increased cost, not just for max itself but also for the render farm at 615$/year/node.
You may ask who was workign with mental ray, well, we were, and we were also working with iRay, one of the best GPU pathtracers at the time, and we lost it.

Also the question remains unanswered, how many developers are right now in the 3dsmax team?, not bifrost board, not Arnold.

I understand you Samuel, and precisely because people like you that have to work with max for various reasons, but don’t like the rental only model, is why I try to speak against this model one day after another, there are two possibilities here IMHO.

1.- Users force Autodesk to bring back the permanent license model and the old subscription model.

This will mean that user opinions are important to Autodesk, and that users still have vote over Autodesk decissions, not just numbers.
They can do that in very different ways, for example allow only a limited number of permanent licenses per company, this way half of the problems I say here vanish, limit permanent linceses to companies below 50 employees, or 20 employees, again, the main problems I put here vanish.

They can do things in different directions to solve the problems shown, it all depends on them thinking in all their customers, not just in large studios or those that are happy paying more and receiving less.

2.- Autodesk won’t move a tiny bit from their positions

Something perfecly possible, and probably the most possible situation here.

Well, in this situation everyone has to take it’s decissions, but I won’t stop fighting this kind of practices, I won’t stop saying my opinion were users that use and suffer this type of licensing are present, and yes, it has to be where those users are present, not where there is no one using that.

I’m not here to make you feel bad, but I’m not responsible either if you like or not the current situation with autodesk software, no matter if I speak here or not, the situation won’t change becuase of that reason, but there is people that is grateful that I push in this direction, and I will keep doing it.

Besides all that, I just made a small comment, that I sincerely think, it is a pity that the awesome software being developed by Tyson Ibelle cannot be enojoyed without continuously paying to Autodesk, not Tyson, Autodesk.
You won’t hear that comment from me in a Cinema4D or a Houdini thread, but you may hear it in a Max related or a Maya related thread.

This all started, as I said before, when someone said:

“Everybody already knows your reasons and motivations, Juang 😉”

And it’s simple, I won’t leave something to a subjective understanding of that phrase, so I exposed my motivations and reasons.

Of course I write down my opinions, but I also write down facts, that are pretty for some and ugly for others, but they are facts.

Also, post after post I keep doing questions that won’t receive answer.

In the end, I will say another fact, this thread is turning into something extremely large, and I already said what I had to say, I exposed facts, opinions and asked questions that received no answer, this can just degenerate and make everyone reading this suffer or be bored, so I will finish all my posts in this thread now. No further posting here.

I’ll read you in another news!

Cheers!