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Yep. Subscription can be a double edged sword: if it is cheap it can eliminate or reduce piracy (e.g. Adobe and Octane). But if it is expansive, it can increase it (my guess that's what will happen with Cinema 4D). That's not how it works for artists. You won't be successful trying to impose a Wall Street mentality to artists (and I say this as someone very successful in investing in stocks). We are artists, Cinema 4D is (or was) our main art making tool, like the pencil for an illustrator or a guitar for a musician. Ask those latter two if they would like to live in a world were they cannot own their main art making tool? They would hate it. Like we do.

Here's my take on the character to celebrate the new movie releasing today 😄

Pure node example! A beacon, radar or radio station, whatever you want to call it 🙂 Graph is not complex at all 109_Beacon.c4d

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

Maxon will follow companies like Adobe, Autodesk and Foundry who have chosen not to yield to customer's frustrations on subscriptions, pricing, or the rise of other alternative software like Blender, Houdini, Fusion and so on. I added Foundry because they've overpriced Nuke, Mari, Katana and Hiero, driving the price up each year. NukeX is now $10,268. I bought it when it was around $6.5k about 5 years ago and recently stopped maintenance because the costs were going up by about $200 extra per year. There has been no earth-shattering development in Nuke over the past 5 years to warrant a $3,768 increase over that period of time. There's no reason why Maya sub should cost as much as it does, or even C4D for that matter, but it's what the market will bear. Blender isn't taking over the industry despite what the pundits stated about 5 years ago, and each year and each release since then *yawn*. If it DOES continue to eat up subscriptions for other software, it'll take at least another 3-4 years for numbers to potentially go negative and then maybe companies like Maxon and Autodesk will revisit. However, Blender isn't the only one developing. So are Maxon and Autodesk. They'll continue to do just enough to keep their base and maybe a bit more. The world said they were leaving Adobe when it announced CC and here we are years later and it hasn't happened. CC was launched in 2012 with about 500K subscribers. Prodesigntools did an analysis and determined there were 22mil subscribers in 2020 and around 26mil by the end of last year. So much for the "angsty taking your ball and going home" like most said they would do with Adobe. They've grown exponentially despite the few people that said they don't use CC anymore. Apparently lots of others are. Do these companies care? Of course not. World crisis? They don't care. They've already counted their subscribers for the next 1 1/2 to 2 years. They probably stopped forecasting perpetual license purchases about a year ago, which is why the phased it out now. Those sales were more sporadic and not worth it to them. Here's a fun article by WIBU Systems (used to have a Vray dongle made by them): https://www.wibu.com/magazine/keynote-articles/article/detail/the-many-opportunities-and-few-risks-of-software-subscriptions0.html

The interesting thing about subscriptions which I "think" most people are missing is that it turns licensed software into a commodity. Staying current with software when the licensing switches from perpetual to subscription frees up the user from "having" to purchase that perpetual upgrade. The upside to renting over owning is that you can rent it for a month only when you need it. And that is the new way to think of subscriptions - as commodities and not assets: Paying for software at a reduced price only when you need it rather than buying it at a higher price and making it an asset is what turns software into a commodity. There are many trends in the industry that support software becoming a commodity rather than an asset to the user. The biggest one is the growth of Universal Scene Description (USD) which is now supported in C4D. USD allows you to export your WIPs and IP and bring them wherever you want for as long as you want. You are no longer locked into one application. You can drop the technology religion and become software agnostic when you have the ability to move your content and IP freely between apps that you don't own but only rent ONLY when you need it. I know many people are scratching their head wondering why SaaS continues to grow. Well, when you think about software as a commodity rather than an asset and the freedom that gives you, then you might be able to see the benefit. When you do, you come to understand why SaaS is growing. I looked at my own perpetual addiction to C4D. I mean we were all fat dumb and happy paying $720 a year for the MSA's but when you think about it, you were ONLY using that perpetual license for one year. As soon as the next upgrade came out, you plunked down another $720 and never touched the old version again. I was locked into the "never rent always own" mentality and followed along when perpetuals jumped to $950 a year for fear that should I succumb to the subscription model, that I may lose access to all my files. True, but should I decide to stop a subscription, I can always export my work prior to ending the subscription. USD now means that export/import into another app is that much easier. If I missed the conversion of a WIP out of C4D, then I renew that subscription for a month, convert it and then move on. You really are not permanently losing your work to the subscription program. Renting C4D for a month is a hell of a lot cheaper than continuing to pay $950 a year for software I am really only going to use until the next update came out in 12 months. Also, incorporation of RS CPU was huge. So why do I keep saying that? Easy. I am no longer locked into an RS subscription. But what about GPU rendering? Well, if you are a rendering a long format animation or incredibly complex scenes, then RS GPU would be nice. But as for me, I will light, texture and optimize the rendering of my scene with RS CPU and then should I need to forgo those long rendering times, purchase a 1-month RS subscription, kick it over the RS GPU and be done with it. As long as I don't need RS GPU for more than 6 months out of a year, I am saving money. I have now turned RS GPU into a commodity rather than an asset because I am paying much less for it only when I need it rather than a lot more for owning it. To help everyone get out of the "owning" is better mentality, then please understand that owning something is ONLY a benefit when the asset you own increases in value over time. Software does not grow in value over time. It never will. Dave

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.

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.

seen a few iterations of this model, never been that happy, so took another stab at it

Here is an interesting one - random text to text🙂 AM controls You can choose the text, random seed, amount of randomness plus some extras such as removal of curly braces, commas and specific characters Graph 167_Random_Letters.c4d

Here is a fun one - pendulum 🙂. This is pure nodes setup with imported geometry Top Graph Subgraph magic part There are some convenient controls 30_Pendulum.c4d

Here is a bit more elaborate setup - splinewrap prototype. Generator takes a mesh as input and in link deforming spline can be loaded. Some basic controls are present Graph The setup can be expanded to reflect current splinewrap deformer and expand on it 67_Splinewrap.c4d