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Which then begs the question why the Blender developers are able to add major enhancements and new interesting functionality with every new release? And why plugin developers for various 3DCCs continue to innovate and come up with brilliant original features? Why indie developers still pop up with original 3D related apps? And why the industry keeps innovating as a whole, requiring new workflows and techniques in 3DCCs? Nope, 3D software is FAR from matured. Stating this is just not true (begging the question indeed). This argument is only used by software rental proponents, as far as I am aware. And as @Cairyn also mentions: the state of a number of C4D's core functionality could see massive improvements. Quite a few areas have been languishing for years, and consequently other companies and software have taken the lead.

Regardless of what action developers do or do not take to improve their software, the point that really needs to be made here is that subscriptions reduce the competitive pressure to improve the software. This is my biggest concern over subscriptions because before "maintenance" meant "improved" whereas "subscriptions" now just mean "rent". And with all rentals, you can have good landlords and bad landlords. Adobe and Autodesk have shown that for some of their subscription products, they are not the best landlords. The updates are light, bugs remain unfixed and long standing user requests are ignored. So in this discussion, we also need to rethink the term "mature". Here the software is definitely NOT mature.....but the user base is very mature. Mature user bases have grown comfortable with the software. The software is embedded in their pipelines. There has been a lot of investment of both time and money in that software. The customer base can be mature with the software but the software itself could be very far from being fully matured. Mature customer bases are inclined to stay with a software that is not improving as fast as they desire simply because of the effort required to move to something else. With perpetual licenses, you just decide not to upgrade....but that meant no revenue to the developer. Subscriptions simply remove the financial penalty for not improving the software. Prior to subscriptions, developers worked to earn your upgrade dollars. Now they don't have to because if you stop paying the rent you get locked out. The user now get's penalized -- not the developer. Plus, in those early perpetual licensed years, new and innovative features grew the customer base. But at some point in a product's lifecycle, the market share will stop growing or the cost to generate new features far outweighs the additional sales they generate. It is at that point that a company switches to subscriptions because it is the best way to preserve revenue without additional development expenses. Innovation is no longer a priority in a subscription world. Honestly, where I want to see innovation is in the seamless import of scenes from one software to another. Imagine if a competitor developed a program that converted all ALL of your C4D assets to their platform without error or any lost information (sorry but there are always errors or lost data with the file transfer formats currently being used). Shader trees are perfect. All geometry comes in exactly how it was modeled -- no triangulation and all quads intact. All rigs, UV's, weight maps, bones, and animations come in perfect and ready for continued editing -- just as you left them in C4D. And it could do it in batch mode. Just point it to a directory and off it goes. Break down that barrier to move your assets and you re-introduce the need for the host application to stay competitive on features regardless of their licensing model. In this world, when you stop paying the rent, you don't get locked out from using your work. You just take it with you. Dave

As soon as I heard about volumetrics changes in 2.93 using Eevee, I wanted to recreate the looks of one of my favourite games for PS4/PC/Switch - "INSIDE" And after 6 hours (and a character I had rigged already in Blender before) I think it got pretty close 🙂 Here is a test, using only eevee, combining the toon look with a more realistic shade for the rest: https://vimeo.com/591316074/2c3f8c0e15