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Maxon is following the rules and laws of economics principles. In this world, «gratitude» is a foreign word. Financially, a company lives in the present and in the future, the past has no relevance. Faithful customers may be of interest, as long as they stay faithful and generate revenue. It is obvious that the subscription model is what counts now. All over the place. For me it is a tragedy. For several reasons. I am a C++ programmer and have developed several C4D Extensions (plug-ins) which enhances C4D a lot for me. Besides of that, I am a «hobbyist» and use C4D for nonprofit projects only. My profession is programming. The subscription model means that I cannot retire, and use what I already have paid for. It is money out of the window. I jumped the Adobe ship, when they started this, and am stuck with the Adobe Creative Suite CS 6. Almost ten years old now. Additional problems arise in the software world. I have purchased several versions of the Mocha Planar Tracker. Paid versions who I own. Now, Boris has acquired Mocha, and put it on the subscription wagon. This means that the license mechanism is broken, and that I cannot move my Mocha software to a new machine, when I upgrade my hardware. This is horrible, to put it mildly. One may wonder when this happens to my C4D versions, I have them all, C4D Studio full paid from R13 and on.. There are several reasons for this change to the subscription model. One of them, not often mentioned, is that software nowadays eventually has become mature. I can use a ten years old version of Photoshop, it works like magic, and has so many nice features that I will hardly explore and take advantage of more than a fraction of them. The same applies to C4D, and not the least to the aforementioned Mocha Planar Tracker. So the customers may want to skip a version or two. Or five. Which means revenue losses for the software houses. The only way for hem to keep money coming in, then, is to turn their customers into hostages. Also called subscribers. -Ingvar

If you split it like that then i have to say that neither group has it right. Xpresso and Scene Nodes are two different tools with different purposes, one can't replace the other. Xpresso is easier to use (UI/UX issues aside) since its scope is smaller and it avoids most of the complexity involved since that part is left to the object manager and the (old) scene graph it creates. Scene Nodes are way more complex than Xpresso because they replace what the Object Manager does, they create the (new) scene graph. At this point in development the Scene Manager is just starting to try to enable users to work with the new scene graph on a level that is similar to the Object Manager. The Scene Nodes represent something the users never had direct acces to before, only serious plugin developers faced similar complexity when creating own objects. It is no surprise that not every user is comfortable with this and it is really important to understand that noone expects that every, or even a majority, of users will ever be comfortable working based on Scene Nodes. The current situation is just an artifact of the need to build up a new system from the bottom up and the decission to make this available to users early (Tech Demo). The alternative would have been for Maxon to keep this development under wraps for several more versions until the Scene Manager is in a state to replace the OM, but that would also mean that we at Maxon would not get very valuable feedback from users, something that is of high importance given the nature of these changes. So please everyone, give us feedback, but keep in mind that Scene Nodes are not the final main interface for everyday use by most users. As for the future of Xpresso, i see the need for something very much like Xpresso, but based on Scene Nodes, once the Scene Manager reaches a certain degree of maturity. We might as well call it XPresso 2.0, but it would have to be something completely new that mainly has the purpose in common with old Xpresso. A lot depends on the experience we gain from current development and the feedback we get on it.

Thanks Srek for the explanation, But I think the discussion is about something different. It looks like there are two groups that just are not able to really understand each other, as most of the arguments where exchanged multible times in this thread. - One Group tries to enplane, what scene nodes are, and that they are superior to xpresso and therefor xpresso will get obsolete. - and the other group states that it likes xpresso for ist easy usability and because it is a tool that makes skripting accessible to non coders. And that a more powerfull tool might be of absolutely no use for them if is to complex for them to learn. What I read out of the discussion is, that every one now has accepted, that scene nodes is technically something different then xpresso, that it is much more powerfull and that it can reproduce everything that xpresso can do. But what I don't really can read from this discussion is a real concept to make these complex scene nodes as accessible as xpresso or even better accessible. I read That it all is just a UI thing (It will not be as easy as that) or that node groups can be produced as new asset (which is really cool, but doesn't help when you have to find it between ten thousand other nodes, that form every function of a already quite complex program). I from my standpoint I think that it is highly advisable for the technical side to try to understand the fears of some of the users here and use this understanding to form something better but at least as easy to use as xpresso. I assume that there are already some thoughts about that, but I think, that the most powerfull tool is of no use if you can not utilize it and as sceene nodes is as complicated as the whole of C4D, as we know it, Maxon needs to put as much brain into the usability as they did with the whole UI that we have right now. Otherwise it is not much more then a API. best regards, Jops

Made some sketches for a client and gave them three options. Unfortunately, they didn't choose this guy. I really liked it, so thought 'why not just make it for my portfolio?' At the moment, it's still in a T-pose, but as I'm pretty crappy with textures, I was wondering if you guys had some tips, especially for the clothes (shirt and safety vest) The helmet maybe could use some scratches and dirt, but I always seem to get stuck when it comes to shirts, jackets and pants. Does it need stitching, folds or creases? Dirt? Do you always have to unwrap this stuff to get the textures right?