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What is buried in the Insydium fused announcement is that ONLY XP will be remaining perpetual in the new Fused plan. New plugins, like Meshform and Terraform, and Cycles 4D will go to subscription. Cycles 4D perpetual licenses are no longer being sold. If you have Cycles 4D now under maintenance then you can still get perpetual updates through the end of your original Cycles maintenance agreement. Redshift is also no longer perpetual.... So this is what would be a HUGE surprise for me with R25: Maxon offers indie licensing. R25 perpetual upgrades are still being offered. Yes...I would be more surprised if C4D stayed perpetual with R25. Sorry...but for me it is only a matter of time. If they can make that announcement for Redshift, then C4D cannot be far behind. Now, here is the big question: Will Maxon drop the price of its Redshift/C4D subscription bundle to soothe the crowd of removing C4D perpetual licensing? Would you jump on the C4D subscription if you knew it came with Redshift at the same price? I bring this up because I just find it funny that in June Maxon offers a 30% sale for a Redshift and C4D bundle. 30% off that bundled price drops the price to only $2 less each month than just a C4D subscription. Hmmm....where they possibly testing the market demand on now including Redshift with the C4D subscription at the same cost of 59.91/month? Just a thought. In any case, I find myself more interested in Blender 3.0 than C4D R25 given my fears that perpetual licensing is coming to end. Kind of sad statement of affairs on where my head is at with Cinema 4D after 16 years of using the program. Dave

I would love to see some particle and fluid love since Red giant is now part of Maxon. This would make it so we don't have to rely on other expensive plugins for such. Also including Redshift as a default renderer would be very welcome since Maya comes with Arnold and Blender has Cycles. I would also welcome an Indie license and that they keep the perpetual license and make a yearly upgrade or Matainance option available for a reasonable price. c4d is just too expensive for hobbyists or smaller freelancers. I am tempted to dedicate my time to either learning Maya indie for a paltry $280 a year or blender. $719 a year for a c4d subscription or $983 every year for c4d and redshift is insane compared to other options. As much as I love c4d. I just can't fathom paying that to rent software. I will need to switch or keep my R21 and subscribe every year or so to use some of the newer tools like the UV tools I want.

Hey, I feel you. Can't justify it. I luckily still have an R21 perpetual... and I gave up on waiting for an Indie license. I doubt it's ever going to come. For me it's too late. I'm learning Blender right now and thus far I don't see anything that it can't really do, compared to C4D.

What I miss the most from Maxon are the big fresh ideas like they had back in the days with Bodypaint and Mograph. Both feature sets were really unique in the 3D world when released. But for a decade now Maxon is just playing catch up with other software concepts. For example I hoped they would jump on every fast rendering technology on the horizon like gpu rendering was 7-8 years ago because for the basic C4D artist who is a designer or artist in archviz, product viz and motion design fast rendering is so essential. I thought C4D would be the first realtime renderer in the offline rendering market becasue it would have made so much sense. But sadly the opposite happened. Completely lost track of rendering.

Houdini = $1995 / year rent Maya = $1700 / year rent Max = $1700 / year rent Modo = $750 / year rent C4D = $719 / year rent So by other options you mean blender?

These other options also offer indie pricing for those that make less than $100,000 a year: Houdini = $269 / year rent Maya = $280 / year rent Max = $280 / year rent Modo = $14.99 / month rent (Steam)* It would sure be nice if Maxon offered an indie version of C4D. Not every user makes more than $100k a year… * The only indie version of Modo I was able to find is on Steam, and it appears to be an older version, released in 2015.

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

Are they really?... Xpresso is a basic, easy, clear piping of position X into position Y that mortals can comprehend. Scenes nodes is.... decomposing a global matrix, splitting a matrix into individual vectors, swapping the x vector into a y vector, combining the xyz values into a vector then recomposing the vectors into a matrix before feeding it into the sphere and finally sending the op output back into the scene.