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What is really scary is that Greyscale Gorilla is now going the 100% subscription route. All perpetual license sales are ending. As an owner of their plugins (Signal and GorillaCam) they will only support perpetual users through the next release of C4D. If I want their plugins to work in a version of C4D after that, I have to purchase their entire subscription service for $400/year. Honestly...that is outrageous. I always appreciated their tutorials and what they did for the community but now they are as evil as Adobe (IMHO). I personally hope GSG fails at this venture and realizes that a good portion of their market is filled with people who reject all forms of subscriptions or who use C4D subscriptions begrudgingly. Even if you are forced into C4D subscriptions, you do have a choice for their plugins, libraries and tutorials. GSG is NOT the only game in town in those areas. So I want them to fail because imagine if EVERY plugin developer, tutorial maker, or library developer went to a subscription model? How much are you willing to pay EACH year for access to HDRI images you may not even be using on a regular basis? Overall...ridiculous and down right greedy. They are dead to me. The best part of GSG was Chris Schmidt so I am very glad he left GSG and is now running his own show at RocketLasso. ...and now a short plug for RocketLasso (Disclosure: I am not an affiliated with RocketLasso, Chris Schmidt or anyone who works with RocketLasso) Great site....clear well thought-out instruction. Chris simply is a great teacher. Yes...it tends to be a little heavy on the MoGraph side, but EVERYTHING you learn is ALWAYS very practical that can be applied to ANYTHING. Chris also personally responds to email (having contacted him relative to some Xpresso courses). He is extremely knowledgeable in just about all the areas of C4D. Definitely a site worth checking out. Plus RocketLasso is starting to make plugins (Recall seems very cool). Dave

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.