BoganTW

Chris Schmidt said it took him about a week to settle with the new UI. EJ Hassenfratz said about the same. It doesn't sound like a big deal to be honest. Also, learning new things can keep your brain fresh. This is why things like Sudoku are popular. Also, the old tutorials aren't broken. They just moved things around a bit. If a chef goes into your kitchen and moves the knives to a different shelf, are you going to complain that the cookbooks don't work any more? That's just dumb.

I'm very sure about the benefits of subscription to me. There will always be cases where circumstances have others getting a worse deal. You've explained some logical reasons why subs don't suit you, and fair enough. Hey, at least you're not like IceCaveMan, going into full ATTACK MODE at people who hold a differing opinion.

By 'everything' I mean software, with people able to dive in to using the software with a minimal upfront or ongoing cost, rather than dumping thousands of dollars into getting things going. I don't remember referencing home or auto ownership, and it's unlikely a conversation on a software forum about a software release would make reference to such, but you drag them in because a software sub is clearly a 1984-style reference to something much more ominous, womp womp. Some years back I pissed away a couple of grand buying CS4 outright from Adobe, only to learn that the minimal specs were fudged and the CS4 pack as a whole was buggy as hell. Now if I want to get going with After Effects or Premiere I can just pay the monthly sub, and if circumstances change I can slip back out of it without feeling I poured all my savings down the toilet. Amazing how the term 'slave-scription' comes up about software where there's a greatly reduced cost of entry and folks can dump it and leave it at the drop of a hat, versus the ostensible bigger freedom where you had to burn thousands of dollars to get a foot in the door, and changing course any time after would make you feel you'd wasted a crate of money. I think you have things backwards. Your endless screeds about the necessity of software ownership always seem to pertain to some hypothetical circumstance at the end of one's career where a user wants to spend their Golden Years not working, but endlessly tinkering about with the software they bought five years earlier, and never notes the feelings or circumstances of students, casuals or the unemployed who don't have thousands to dump at the time they want to get everything going. But this seems characteristic of your posts, which also make syrupy reference to the 'golden years' of Maxon when they made bugger all public statements about their roadmap, but now feels affronted by their behaviour when they make frequent public announcements about software in beta and have regular Youtube chats describing where various new features are going. Again, this is a real head scratcher for anyone with a modicum of logic or common sense, but characteristic of many of your posts. I'll grant you your commentary here isn't as crazed as some of the CG Talk commentary, where even you eventually calmed down a tad. There is always Blender of course, yet the most vocal folk who have jumped ship across to it still seem mighty sore and unhappy with their lot, and return again and again to remind us how aggrieved they are with life. FFS - get over it and move on. I'm sure I had this whole back and forth rant about subs with you either two or three years ago. Yet I mention two years later how good I think the subscription process is, and even though you've 'moved on' to Blender, you're still salty and taking pot shots at people who feel different to how you do. If you're still posting rants about how terrible a C4D sub is in 2023 or 2024 - and as with the other folks who jumped ship, I can probably already set my watch and take bets that you will -it will say far more about you than it does the users, C4D or Maxon.

I've never understood the subscription hate. And I suffered through most of IceCaveMan's rants on the topic, along with the crazy house nattering of the guy at CGTalk who apparently left for Blender but is still first in line to post a negative thousand word rant every time Maxon scratches their head. When R30 comes out in 5 years time he'll still be giving everyone updates on how Maxon apparently murdered his dog or wrecked his Toyota or something. Everything should be on subscription. Which I guess should make me happy as pretty much everything is now anyway. Maxon's might be pricier than some others but I can still track the near future date I'll be jumping into it wholehearted down to the month, whereas with their old pricing the broke hobbyist was left contemplating the likelihood of a Tattslotto win to get going. I agree though that from the sound of it people that own earlier versions may as well wait until things look compelling before they need (if ever) to re sub or re purchase.

These long dumb rants keep missing the point. They’re still doing the big core rewrite/redo, and things won’t settle down until they’re done. And it started years before McGavran took over, so don’t blame him.

Happy to bring it back to R25. As I said in the other thread, Maxon presumably has plenty of programmers not working or involved with UI stuff. So you can only assume with the state of R25 that they are all deeply involved and working on other aspects of the program that are getting a polish, fix up or redo, which weren't; ready to come out this month. Some people have contrarily argued that Maxon is just paying those guys to sit on couches and drink beer all the time, and sometimes one of them is allowed to go near a computer, and this year they let a UI guy do some stuff while the others were told to just go and watch Netflix or something. This is daft and I think R26 and R27 will have tons of cool stuff, more than R25 did, which might be saying a lot or might be saying not much, I don't know.

Would those people have ever bothered to be interested in C4D? They can probably get a strong idea of what C4D can do just by watching a Youtube vid, or ten of them, or checking out a Chris Schmidt Rocket Lasso episode. If they like what they see, you'd assume most of them would find a $2.99 charge to be a bargain. Yet the argument here is, wow, I was all set to dive into this cool looking software, but there's a three dollar charge to do it. That's it, I'm out, give me something else instead, that software looks amazing but if I have to forgo one latte or borrow $3 from mum I'm not going to do it. I'm guessing a bunch of those students still live at home and can likely ask their parents to borrow the credit card. This takes five minutes. But anyone who is aghast at paying $3 to have a full version was never likely to buy a sub anyway when the (wow it's FREE!) version of Blender is also out there. So they were never going to get C4D anyway. The argument is Maxon is missing out on many thousands of dollars of future rental subs because those same future subscribers are being nudged to cough up $3. If those folks are losing their minds at paying $3, were they ever going to sub in the future? Maybe the teacher above should be pushing Blender on everyone if that is the highest priority.

They must have a ton of programmers who are not working on UI stuff at all, which would suggest there is a bunch of other stuff coming that wasn't ready for R25.

Who cares what the competitors charge. Maybe they all shifted that $2.99 fee down the track, so the students will eventually lose out. A $2.99 charge also makes sense if you want to gently encourage people to get their wallets out again in future. Maybe this is Psychology 101. Blender is 'free' yet they really want people to subscribe to the Blender learning thingo and hopefully donate extra money here and there. No one 'has' to do it, yet it is encouraged. No one 'has' to pay the C4D charges either. They can do something else with their money or time if they want. They could even avoid 3D altogether and spend their money starting a new hobby, or going on a cool holiday. Life is full of choices. For some weird reason you're blowing this $2.99 out of proportion and suggesting many many future mograph geniuses will be turned off and take a different career path with other software because they felt nauseous spending the $2.99. I'm assuming there were ambulances at the ready at the Apple store when they all went to buy their MacBooks, as those things cost way more than $2.99 and the student discount Apple offers doesn't help much. With the RED cameras, there are plenty of cheaper or free alternatives. Some kids can go to a local TAFE and use the DSLR's there, or if they're in a community filmmaking group they probably just pull their iPhones out and film on those. Yet a very small group suck up the cost and continue to pay fees to access the higher end RED cameras in fields of study. This is way more than $2.99 yet it does still happen. It's a thing. Yet by your logic the RED guys are in big trouble because they're not shaping their products to the Instagram folk who all want to shoot on their phones. All that said even though I'm broke if I was in your shoes and I had 25 students hanging around and a $2.99 fee was all that was stopping them using C4D, I would have chipped in $25 and gone to the department head and begged for another $20. That would have put the cost to near under a buck for every student. If you can't convince students that their career is worth a dollar investment then I'd be frankly surprised if you could teach them additional things like maths and English.

Adobe charges $30 a month or more for Photoshop. Or whatever the price is. I'm sure this is significantly more than whatever the free photo editing software packages charge, yet they do it, and seem to be doing okay. Some students might choose to go the free route there, whereas others will just go, nah, I think I'll learn Photoshop instead. This is worse than the $2.99 for six months, which is like 50 cents a month, or around 12 cents a week. So students have lots of options versus C4D at this point. They can learn Houdini or Blender or Maya instead. (And I know a lot of animation grads here in Melbourne who are Maya folks, and nerdy VFX folk locally who are big on Houdini - plus a pretty big mograph scene locally who all use C4D as their main package). Students who are choosing between the three likely need to also consider what they want to do. I notice the mograph folk gravitate to C4D, the game animators have all learned Maya, and the VFX nerds are using Houdini. This is well known. If someone wants to do Mograph, I'm assuming they'll be picking C4D. Maybe they'll talk themselves into doing it in Blender or Houdini instead, I dunno. Good luck with learning the latter. Nothing is stopping them using the former. Yet some still go for C4D, go figure. Blender is the amazing free software which is so great, you still can't give it away to some people, as some people still choose to go for C4D instead. I've seen a bunch of those people locally. The Blender heads locally are also really big on free photo editing, free editing, free whatever, and tout it like a philosophy, but some others don't care. And the C4D people locally I've met are all quiet happy with it. (Ditto the Maya and Houdini folk for their stuff. The Houdini folk seem particularly pleased with their lot FWIW). Anyone deeply irate about Maxon charging three bucks half a year for access to a working version of software for students is probably angry at a bunch of other stuff instead and just using it as an excuse to blow their tops in this thread. That's how it seems to me.

So what? RED cameras are really expensive too, and don't get given out for free. So the school had the bright idea of buying cameras and then making students pay for the course so they could use that equipment. The teachers weren't paying for the equipment themselves and frankly didn't care what it cost. Also, the students who found the course too expensive didn't bother taking the course. And the students who thought what the course was offering was worthwhile, ended up paying the course fees so they could do it. This also worked with an animation and compositing course, where the campus invested money in equipment and software. Afterwards, they charged students money to do the course, and any student who thought the course was good value, paid the money, came to the school, and learned the software and used the equipment. Maybe the head of the department could be convinced to put the annual fee for the students up an additional $2.99 - or six bucks for the year, I guess - to pay for the cost of that C4D subscription. I'm pretty sure at the school I worked at, they spent more than that on free donuts for the students on opening day though. This must be why they call Australia the lucky country.

I have, at two different institutions in Melbourne. And I can't see the mention of a one-off $2.99 charge eliciting more than a shrug from the students at both campuses, many of whom would spend twice that much daily on public transport to and from the school. I'm talking about Australian students though and can't speak for how things might be wherever you are. Telling them they need to learn and use the software to pass the course might possibly do the trick. "Nor can you as a teacher enforce it" Huh? At the institutions I worked at, the teachers enforced things all the time. One dumb muppet of a teacher made all her journalism students use Windows Movie Maker for her journalism class as she was too stuck in her ways to use anything else. Another department charged late fees on film equipment (when it was returned late), and encouraged the students to pay those fees by telling them that if they didn't pay, they couldn't pass. Most of them paid, and also thereafter stopped returning the equipment late. "which means convincing the department at the institute where you teach to purchase a school license. And unless it's a relatively small sum (a couple of hundred $$) or a free school license is offered, the school is not going to allow for the extra cost. " At the last faculty I worked at the school seemed more than happy to pour money down the drain on the dumbest stuff imaginable, including equipment that got left on the shelf and software courses run by lecturers who barely knew what they were teaching. And they were happy buying stuff like Final Cut, Macs, Adobe subs and a bloody enormous set of computers for data storage. Again this is all probably moot though as I'm talking about where I worked, not where you work now. Come to Australia. Many things are different here.

People won't teach it because it costs $2.99? Books cost more than that yet they're somehow still used in the higher education field. There are other alternatives, sure, but if some student is looking at all the options you cited, and settling on one out of the bunch for their studies and career because it saves them $2.99 over the rest of the year, I anticipate bigger problems ahead.

Students do ask questions. It's usually the teacher's job to give them answers. And you're basically saying you spent a semester telling people that C4D is a great choice, but not great enough that they should spend $2.99 to access it. How great can it really be if you don't think it's worth $2.99? If you think it's not worth $2.99 you should tell them it isn't and that they should happily go the free route instead. If you think it is worth $2.99 you should try telling that to the students. As for why you're using C4D instead of Maya (which is free), you should tell them you thought C4D was better, and that in the long run over the course of a career you thought the expenditure of $2.99 was probably worth the long term investment.

Having been out of work for most of the past two years through the local Covid lockdown, I wish (not too seriously) that C4D was $2.99 for a 6 month period for me. At a certain point if the cost of a coffee is too burdensome for half a year's subscription, you have to suspect those kids probably aren't interested in C4D.

The C4D thread at CGTalk has stunk for the past few years because one Blender booster (not you) still bears a grudge against Maxon, and vents his anger by posting the most psychotic rants imaginable. You never see this nonsense coming from Houdini users.

The next instalment of the 3D and Motion Show - on Tuesday September 14th - opens with a morning presentation from David McGavran detailing 'Maxon News and Announcements'. Paul Babb normally takes that slot when they're just giving a general Maxon update, and Dave takes it when they're doing a bigger announcement. So you'll almost certainly be getting the details of R25 on that date next month.

When I get my Mac I suspect I'll be getting both apps. They're both actually affordable and I remain curious about each. Waiting for the Mac mini with beefier silicon and at least 32GB RAM.

Re Beeple Not sure about either / or, it can easily be both, and I'm not sure why an artist with 'issues' is more or less interesting than an artist without them. Beeple was always destined to go the super personal and slightly crazy route as doing an artwork every day can't help but reflect what the artist is feeling, and how he is that particular day or week. If he did an artwork every three months things would probably be less crazy and less interesting. I mean he calls himself Beeple and his Twitter profile pic is him making a goofy face with his tongue out, he's never made it a secret that things might go a bit nuts. Peckinpah, Dario Argento and Robert Crumb had their issues too but I still like their work. I get the feeling bigger things are coming in R25(?) when it comes in September/October.

Next Houdini version (can't be too far off) will hopefully announce support for M1 Macs. If they don't then I'd be hoping the next-next one (probably around the end of the year) will announce it or suggest it, as beefier Apple Silicon should be a thing by then. These tests are cool and encouraging, especially from a guy like Igor who previously wasn't really into Houdini.

Funny. Stu, the newly appointed Chief Creative Officer at MAXON, is not a design or mograph guy at all. He's been a heavy duty VFX guru for years. So I guess we'll have to wait and see where that goes.

It looks like this is available through every MAXON distributor, not just Safe Harbor Studios. MAXON put up a blog post about it. https://www.MAXON.net/en/news/MAXON-news/article/restart-your-engine/

This is really cool and will definitely help a few more people learn.

Here's the livestream Chris did, goes for nearly two hours. https://www.twitch.tv/videos/291897153

I also hope you get better Dan, and hope your health improves soon.