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I don't seen 3Dpangel/Dave's posts as supporting it, simply stating facts. I don't like the direction Maxon is taking in a corporate way. I still use their software, our studio still pays for it, I still test it, but I don't like the direction or how they're treating customers. For years, the users have trusted Maxon and given them a lot of leeway. We've had years of lacklustre updates with hardly a feature worth the time or effort of installing a new version, let alone having a 'must-have' release where people have clamoured to download it ASAP. With the rug pull that is removing perpetual licences, all that good will is gone and the relationship is now reduced down to a simplistic monetary one. Is the product worth the price, or is it not? Because all the good will and sense of community is completely evaporated. If I were a hobbyist, I wouldn't pay for it, Blender is a large amount to learn as a new app, but I dare say that I would see this as a fun challenge, and at the end I know I'll get free updates forever and a good pace of product updates. C4D has been waiting for this core rewrite to fix the general speed issue for well over a decade now. Capsules were only made as a way to get some use out of the new core and nodes system because otherwise the new node based core would be 100% useless. My educated guess is that we're still 5 years away from the new node core actually replacing basic functionality. Until the new core replaces basic geometry like cubes and cylinders, and basic modelling tools like bend and twist deformers, Its a glorified set of fancy xpresso plugins which has cost an inordinate amount of dev resources. If I were a new 3D user, Im not honestly sure if I would pick C4D as my app of choice. Really for the same reasons, Blender is good, C4D is slightly better, is it worth the money? With xparticles and a thirdparty render engine, yes, C4D is great. But Blender has many of those same render engines, so a lot of c4d's userbase really comes down to mograph / xparticles users and those who are just used to how the software works. This includes myself. If I could click my fingers and transfer my c4d knowledge into blender knowledge, I probably would.

As I have R25 which is a very good version, I think I will sub to Redshift, learn Blender over the next 6 months, If im not feeling it onto Maya while still using C4D during the transition. By then Id know Arnold by then. The version of Zbrush I have is more than enough, and I already have other software Im using such as Substance Painter and Wrap3D. I would have loved to have been part of Maxons future but due to their perpetual departure Im given no choice to put my time elsewhere.

Whenever you need lots of smaller pebble type rocks, I would then get the Cloner out, and clone a field of 'starter rock shapes', which will be identical initially. But if we displace the entire cloner with World Space noise, we can get a unique rock for every clone we have, like so... And if we then collapse that cloner down, we can start another one to clone all those rocks thousands of times onto a terrain object (surface mode) to make a rocky seabed. Then we can randomly affect scale and rotation and distribution to give us enough rocks that you can't notice any copies... Let me know if you need more detail on that.. CBR

From the customer's point of view, there is no real reason to abandon perpetuals. Just as there was never any real reason to make perpetuals more expensive than subscription. This decision only benefits Maxon as a company. And the end of perpetual licenses was planned from the beginning, that is my conviction. I made sure that they earned much less from me than the previous years with MSA. Even if that gets lost in the noise, of course. I do a lot of work for customers with their own licenses and I can handle my projects well with R20 and octane. And if I really need a new version (like just now) then I rent it for a month. Emotionally, Maxon has suffered with me similar to Adobe, from which I have also as good as detached. And shall I tell you something? for 3D compositting Resolve is simply much better imho 🙂 Let's see what I discover, thanks to maxon's decision to give up perpetual.

Time for Volume 2 i think, kicking it off with a classic , keeping it clean as always 😄

This is awesome! Thank you so much.

Thank you for looking at this dispassionately, logically and without emotion as I did. The more telling numbers were the overall growth in revenue for SaaS within Nemetschek -- though a very good point was made by Babumol regarding acquisitions. Nemetscheks revenue is growing but so are their profits as well. Unfortunately, I can't break those numbers down to business segments such as Media. They increased their last quarter dividends (held to 25% of their free cash flow) as well which is the only indicator that matters regarding profitability: How much is Nemetschek sharing what they are earning with all their shareholders? So if you were a Nemetschek stockholder from 2017, you would be quite happy with the direction of the company. You are getting pretty good stock growth and dividends. If they told you it was all due to ending perpetual licenses and a move to subscriptions, you'd be asking "what took you so long?" You definitely would not be hoping for the ultimate demise of Maxon via a massive walkout to Blender if you made close to $88 Euro's per share of profit by buying 2017 at 24.95 and selling on 12/31/21 at $112.80. No. You would be praising Maxon for the move to SaaS. So while I have said in the past that SaaS sucks for the consumer, shareholders love it. And you know, anyone can be a shareholder as it is a publicly traded stock. That was my point. Remember, it's not personal. It's business. And business tells me SaaS is here to stay. So storming off to Blender or Houdini or modo, etc. should be personal decision based on your needs as an individual artist or a company and I do firmly understand that those decisions will be financially motivated. But do NOT do it just to show some strange solidarity against Maxon. Trust me! It will have no impact on Maxon. Dave

If I remember correctly, Maxon bought Red Giant in 2019. In the following years they bougth Forger and ZBrush. With this in mind, revenue had to go up. If not, they would have done something utterly wrong. Revenue is just income, not profit. But I agree on your main point: It won't go away. @Icecaveman Yeah, I could tell some other sad stories regarding subscriptions. Anyway, it's always good not to cling to one software or the other. In my career I used 3DS, Lightwave, Softimage, Modo and Cinema 4D. Maya is on evaluation for some specific jobs, Blender already used in parts.

At the start of this year Chaosgroup dropped Modo for VRay with a grace period of 1 month after the announcement. After the Subscriptions ended, the software stopped working. I don't know if this was bad news for hobbyists, but for me, as a professional, it sure was. We had to convert a hell of projects in a very short amound of time. Some clients understood the problem, others didn't. Whenever I think about subscriptions it's not the money (MSA was nearly 600€/year too - so what?). It's about reliability. Because reliability is key in a sustianable business model. They can keep their subscriptions, I don't care. But I would like to have an alternative, just in case the sh*t hits the fan.

While I get the reasons some people are angry, we really need to stop with comparing other software's 'indie' version prices to Cinema's full subscription. I work in a small-medium studio & NONE of the projects we work on qualify us for Indie versions, not Maya, not Houdini, not Nuke, whatever. Cinema's FULL subscription is 1/3 the price of Maya's full subscription. Now Maya probably is worth more than Cinema, but it's very hard to argue it's worth 3x as much, especially for our use-cases. That said, Cinema should definitely consider an Indie licence to keep the 1-man-bands & hobbyists on board. I'm not up to date on the educational stuff. but it would seem dangerous not to make life as easy as possible for institutions that want to teach Cinema. On a personal note, I had been stubbornly upgrading my perpetual all the way to R25, even after they made it terrible value for money to discourage it. This despite my work being happy to pay for a subscription for me. So Maxon have done me a favour tbh - instead of me giving them £1000 this year, my boss will give them £600.

Sadly, I think you're being too generous Chris. It's sleazy, dishonorable and nasty to the nth degree. Maxon is a company I no longer want to do business with.

It's kind of sucky that they didn't use the most recent version to announce the end of perpetuals so people knew from then on this would be the last, rather than just all of a sudden not have perpetuals, say basically nothing about it, and have the previous year's be the last perpetual. It's a bit of a sleazy way of doing it imo.

Oh...how I wish they would take a cue from Houdini and offer Cinema 4D Indie (a subscription at Houdini prices of $270 rather than $720 a year). Heck I would even opt for Maxon One if that price dropped for Indies as well to half price. Maya and Houdini have indie licenses for less than $300 a year. Blender is free. Not sure what is keeping Cinema 4D immune to this type of competition unless indies are just not that big a market for C4D. Dare to dream. Dave

Well, we all knew this day would happen. The saving grace to it all is that Maxon is delivering the goods and that causes me to place more trust in subscriptions. My initial fear with subscriptions was that you would be paying for software that was not improving. That really has not been the case. Plus, they are integrating their acquisitions into C4D. That is huge (IMHO) and again leads to trust in subscriptions. Maybe I had Adobe fears from the "Adobe guy" but he is actually turning out to be quite the Maxonian in terms of the trajectory that C4D is on. Does he deserve ALL the credit? Sorry but no, that would be unfair to rest of the product managers and developers. But to be fair, he does deserve some of it from the acquisition strategy and the team he is building (they are still hiring) to support their internal development strategy. Enough said. So for how long will they make upgrades to R25 perpetual available? Let's say for kicks and giggles that R23 to R25 perpetual upgrades are always available. Honestly in 5 years will they still be selling it for the same price? That is not a good look. My hope is at some point they have a "fire" sale on an R23 upgrade to R25 before closing it out forever. A good way to end the perpetual run. Also, they should take the R25 new license purchase option down from their website. Imagine being a complete newbie to C4D, excited by the option to get R2023 perpetual as an upgrade and spending $3495 in an on-line purchase ONLY to find out it is not upgradeable. I actually added it to my cart and there were NO warnings directing you instead to a subscription. That will create some issues (I would imagine) for the Maxon customer service team. Hopefully, they see that problem and take action. Dave

Hi there! Sorry for the late reply but yes, I've found the culprit and I felt so dumb after, you need to go to the TP settings and make sure to set the "Max Particles" to a number higher than what your sim has 🙂