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The announcement that Redshift is going to subscription only has renewed everyone's fears that Maxon may drop the bomb in September that C4D will be moving to subscription only. No one really knows but it would follow the Adobe timeline if it happened. So that got me to thinking --- what is the biggest fear to the hobbyist about subscriptions. Well, subscriptions do move the user base from a "pay to upgrade" to a "pay to use" model, which kills all incentive for innovation and software development. Like other companies in a subscription model have shown us, over time you are paying for the same bugs, same missing features and essentially the same software year after year. And you cannot break away from that trap otherwise you will loose all access to your past work. ....but is that necessarily true? This has led to me to proposing the following C4D Core forum topic - Exporting. We do not talk about exporting to other platforms enough. What is the best way to prep your scenes, your texture files, your animation caches for export? What are the best export options? How important is clean topology in your models to creating clean UV's during exporting? Are their really good external export programs that solve these problems for us? Can you export to previous versions of C4D via FBX? What are the limitations? How far back can you go? Essentially, if the hobbyist became a master of exporting, would we fear subscriptions as much? Hard drive space is pretty cheap (a lot cheaper than what Maxon charges for a perpetual license) so just export your completed C4D work to FBX, alembic, whatever and store it for future use. Sub-categories on Exporting to Houdini, Blender, modo, etc could be created as well with tips on import settings within those programs as well. Honestly a whole cottage industry around scene conversions could be built up in this new subscription only world. Tutorials on converting from one platform to another, services for converting, and/or external programs for converting could be great market opportunities. Yeah....give Maxon what they want but use the subscription to your own benefit and not theirs --- go monthly rather than yearly -- only using the "latest and greatest" version when you need it -- convert it to another platform and default back to your last perpetual license for all the other months. While I love C4D, I perversely find beating Maxon at their own game gives me a greater pleasure. Just a thought. Dave

Without a doubt in my mind: absolutely. This and previous actions on the part of Maxon seem to come straight out of Adobe's play book (which is probably why ex-Adobe management was hired to assist Maxon in this process): First, introduce the rental model but keep the perpetual license, and make certain both are initially presented as equal alternatives. This is to ensure to avoid a user uprising. Sooth any nay-sayer users, but never allow anyone in your organization to confirm that your end goal is rental only. Present it as "freedom of choice", or along similar lines. Next, with each new release clearly present the rental version as the ever more affordable and attractive alternative. Incrementally reduce exposure of the perpetual license on the website in favour of the rental option(s) and reduce access to it. Keep touting the advantages for the user of rental rather than perpetual. The goal here is to slowly and seamlessly prime and groom the larger user base to accept rental as the preferred option rather than perpetual licenses. Provide extra perks for users who rent your software. Reduce perks and updates for perpetual users. And at no time mention the end goal. Keep users in the dark. "Listen" to your users by providing additional rental options. Cater towards companies and small/medium sized businesses (which generally really like rental options due to fiscal benefits). It is important to continuously stress the attractiveness of rental licenses, while adding more and more to the unattractive qualities of the perpetual license. Convince as many existing perpetual users to make the switch to rental. And very important here is the use of language: instead of "rent" rather use "subscribe", or even better: allow for no distinction: "buy" or "purchase". (The younger generation of users is no longer quite so aware of the distinction between renting software and purchasing software anyway. This is great for software companies.) In the final stages before ending access to new perpetual licenses it is necessary to complicate the process of updating existing perpetual licensed versions as much as is possible. At the same time, it is expected that a segment of older loyal perpetual users will never accept rental licenses. This won't matter, since the less expensive rental model probably already increased revenue by a large margin. It is at this time that the company will release statements about how for the sake of continued development, the benefit of improved features of the software, and the company itself that perpetual licenses be discontinued. "if it's good for you, it's good for the company, and vice versa". Along those lines. The company may opt to keep the peace, allow this user group access to a perpetual license for the time being, but no new perpetual licenses will be available. Drastically increase update pricing, and after a few releases stop perpetual updates entirely. Or be more cold-hearted, and disallow perpetual users to update their licenses. After all, by this time that group of users is probably reduced to a small minority. Happy company! And accepting users (for the most part).

Problem with this model is that people would just get a single month and then ditch out, keeping their expensive render engine forever. A solution to this is what Allegorithmic (Substance Suite) did... until they got bought by Adobe. They had a "rent to own" model, meaning if you kept paying the monthly subscription for a year without break you would get a perpetual at the end of it with the current version at the time. It was an awesome model but sadly it ended as well, of course.

Honestly, I begin to feel really uncomfortable with the whole industry-situation. I am the master of my tools, not their puppet. The way things are going ... everyone just seems keen to suck the life out of the art. I'm seriously looking back to pencil and paper 😕

Agreed. Makes sense. If I leave C4D, I will be going to Blender and therefore will still be involved with the Core 4D site as your Blender thread is very informative. I also feel that I am not the only one thinking that way. Only the brilliant and the brave go to Houdini!!😀 Dave

Kitbash 3D just release "Favelas" --- (I have no idea what that means). Regardless, it is a pretty amazing collection of shanty buildings that you would find in severely economically depressed areas. Now, you may not want to build your own urban blight community, but the textures look to be outstanding. Given that there are 374 PBR materials, I am not sure you would be able to find material collections for what they are charging for the full model collection: $99.50. This price is 50% off the regular price and will jump up to $199 probably in a week (not sure). Dave BTW: I have found that you can go back and download purchased models in different formats as well as render engines. Something to think about as the world transitions to subscription programs (eg. they support Blender, Houdini, and C4D in Octane --- but not Redshift)

Cycles is a capable, just a little slow 😉 But for that you can purchase E-Cycles or wait for the new Cycles X... whenever that happens.

I love Redshift; I like the dev-team's transparency and openness. They should have my money -- it's a good product with good support. But -- and this is crucial -- I want to pay on my terms, and I want to be able to access my stuff at all times. An ongoing subscription feels just extortionate. It's so easy to solve everything -- let me rent the software; if it's long enough, let me exit my subscription with a perpetual license (that no longer gets updates). It should be the same for C4D (and Adobe and all the likes). They way it is -- just robbers sitting on my files. The way it coud be: A fair model that respects my investments and honors me as a customer.

still seems a bit wide open at the moment, but I think if I was doing it then I would build the building first and then use the effectors etc ( multiple effectors with animated moving falloff ) to remove all the parts at which point you could animate them back in with a bit more finesse than you used to remove them. You could use planes to set up the walls, using the width / height segments to layout any bricks / panel counts, then you can use those to clone onto in object mode, if you use a panel / brick the same size as the poly segments and hide the plane it gives you a quick way to move walls around couple of examples below, one moving in and one scaling up. Using a plain effector but with a random effector varying the clone weight. Deck Buildinblocks 01.c4d Buildinblocks 02.c4d