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Why is it that Houdini, 3ds Max and Maya all have very affordable and powerful indie versions and C4d does not? When I purchased c4D studio (R17) it came with two years of MSA free. So I paid $3500 and didn’t have to pay a cent for two years. And then the MSA was $650 which as a good deal amount of money but I owned the program, it was mine. Now you can still have a perpetual license but the price isn’t even featured on the ‘Buy’ page. And for upgrades you need to contact MAXON. I feel that it’s just a matter of time before perpetual is done away with completely. Now you need to rent the program, stop paying for the price to rent and you can’t use the program anymore. Now instead of a $650 a year MSA you need to pay $719 a year to rent it. And if you want a modern render engine like every other program comes with (redshift) you need to pay $983.00 a year or pay $719 and rent either Octane, Arnold or something else for $400 - $800 more a year. The last 4 out of 5 smaller vfx and animation studios I have worked with in Los Angeles have artists using Blender for one task of another. Nobody was using C4d, some had in the past but switched. These are generally smaller indie studios and not tied to huge pipelines so they have the freedom to choose what makes sense to them financially, ethically and personally. The majority of the younger artists coming in where raised on blender and Youtube. Or learned Maya in school. Why should they use c4d except if they want to get a job that requires it? Usually at a high end motion graphics studio? While I love c4d, as a freelance artist and hobbyist who wants to continue to play and experiment with a tool for the rest of my life it is absurd to me when I think I will be paying to rent something forever. With Blender the tool is completely mine, though there are a ton of things that make no sense to me in the program such as no logical way of copying a modifier from one object to another without remembering a weird shortcut. Bizarre unintuitive spline tools and the lack of a decent picture viewer. There are tutorials on how to make anything I can dream of whether it is a weekend spent making a spaceship, castle,dinosaur, dragon or modeling characters. There are hundreds of free tutorials for that. Or a subscription to CG Cookie or something. For c4d there isn’t a single tutorial for either of the mentioned things even after decades of the program being around. Maybe a simple gummy bear or dancing hotdog. If I want to make a hundred cubes undulate, well there are a million tutorials for that. Removing Cineversity for anyone not on the subscription was another slap in the face. Do I switch to Blender and Houdini indie and donate a couple hundred bucks a year to blender cloud with millions of great tutorials, assets, movies and tools and helping the program grow? Keep my perpetual R21 and buy a decent render engine and UV tool and be left behind in a few years? Or pay $719 - $1000 a year for a c4d subscription for the rest of my life. Offering an indie license or keeping perpetual with decent yearly upgrade prices would be a decent thing for MAXON to do as well as attract new users.

Interesting that they said they came to c4d because of the Community. I started c4d way before tit got "cool" to use. But ever since then I got the impression that cinema mainly grew a big community because of three things. First their UI and UX, basically the logic behind the user interface that is consistent through out the program. second the good accessibility. Blender was really no thing for a long time and all the other mayor packages where always more expensive. (MAXON back in the days was also super generous to students (much more than now). And Third because MAXON was really consistent and pleasant in the way they treated their customers. The UI still is great, the price is still ok even though not as good as it was. But time has changed and c4d is not only competing against the other packages but also against blender. Which of course is the reason for the indi versions in the first place. And for point Three I have to say. The treatment of existing customers got worse unfortunately, in my opinion. The Community we have now results of the work done the last 10 to 20 years. In 10 to 20 Years we will see how things played out.

Probably more likely he'll bite you tbh! 😂

yea i know the episode you mean, it's always a challenge to adapt 2d characters to 3d. Alot of what works in 2D doesn't always translate to a 3 dimensional space very well, still some tweaking to be done for sure but it's moving in the right direction. moving between several projects at the moment. I get bored ridiculously easy, so doing little bits here and there on different stuff defitely makes it more enjoyable 🙂 currently doing a re=render of the banana with some nice buttery smooth new materials so i'll be sharing that shortly 😄