3D-Pangel

May I direct you to Vue's own version of Cineversity: e-on software Learning Center I must say that the amount of content has expanded considerably since I last checked a few months ago. I wonder if Daniel has any idea why (wink...wink...nod..nod)? What I like about this content is that given the newness of the content, it reflects the latest version. This would be my first choice for learning about Vue and Plantfactory. Another site is Geekatplay™ Studio, Resources for 3D Artists. Tutorials. Unfortunately, the only free tutorials are the oldest tutorials. Another great source for free tutorials is from Nick Pelligrino at AsileFX: (1156) Nick Pellegrino | asileFX - YouTube Again, they may not reflect the current version. What is MOST interesting is that a true master of Vue was Dax Phandi (aka Quadspinner). He was an amazing artist because he studied erosion and weathering patterns terrain and new how to produce those same results in Vue. Everyone one of his tutorials was a Vue master class. Unfortunately, while old Vue tutorials can be found at AsileFX or Geeks-at-Play, every single one of Quadspinner's Vue tutorial is gone. And for good reason.... Dax went on to develop his own landscape package called Gaea . Even when I google "Quadspinner Vue tutorials" or "Vue tutorials Dax Phandi" and follow links that look like they will bring to Vue content, you are only presented with Gaea tutorials. The only thing I can find is his book "Realism in Vue" at GitHub: GitHub - QuadSpinner/RealismInVue: Official open source version of the critically acclaimed book, "Realism in Vue" Dave

I do have to wonder why the majority of tutorials on scene nodes cover things you could create much more easily with MoGraph or fields. So maybe the lack of adoption comes from something as simple as this: People watch a tutorial, see a primitive being applied to matrix object and yawn. They walk away thinking "why should I learn a whole new system to do what I can already do with far less effort. Show me something "amazing" I cannot create any other way". Now, "amazing" can also mean "unique". What I see coming out of Blender are some pretty unique tools. While I have watched a few scene node tutorials, I must say that none have ignited a spark of creativity in my brain. I do see more amazing things coming out of Xpresso and that is why I have learned Xpresso. I can also understand why everyone got excited over the prospect of Building Generator being a creation of scene nodes because if it was true, people would be exposed to what scene nodes could do! Interest would have been created as that much needed spark of creativity would have been ignited. The best thing Maxon could do now is to get their best and the brightest together to create something amazing with capsules and splash that all over their news section. I checked---nothing there though Buidling Generator was listed. If that was actually done with scene nodes, then it would have been mentioned. Dave

O.....M.....G Well...as an ex-Vue user, this is a no brainer then for getting me back into the program. Congrats to e-on! Dave

I left Vue in 2016 right after the Bentley acquisition and the site hack. Those were dark days as Vue was struggling to find their place in the new org. To lose your entire account history AND not see much (if at all) development activity prompted me to stop sending my money to e-on. Now Vue stand alone was a solid app on my system. Vue xStream was not. Operability within C4D was a nightmare. So, when you feel there is no development going on to fix that, and you are locked into to only working within Vue when you were sold on Vue working within C4D with xStream....well....it was very easy to walk away. But that was 2016. Fast forward to today and you see a completely different AND MUCH SMARTER approach: complete and open exportation of all assets plus they are working on Redshift integration. That capability for export only existed at the higher priced professional version which they are now "smartly" extending to the lower cost creator versions. I will be keeping an eye on this page on the difference in capabilities between the different licenses after the 2022 release. Personally, I like the C4D interface much more than Vue's, but Vue is not that difficult a tool to use. Eco system painting is a lot of fun and has slightly more capability than C4D's scattering tools. If I can export eco-systems, which was not explicitly mentioned as being added to the new export capability in Creator, then at $199/year you do have a hell of a lot of cheap capability for creating and exporting fully evolved environment assets into C4D (clouds, terrains, plants, skies) plus the ability to render them quickly with Redshift in C4D. Remember, this also covers Plant Factory and right now the next best option for plant creation is Forester from 3D-Quakers, but their annual maintenance plan is $125 which is kind of expensive. So, this change of Creators capabilities by e-on bears serious consideration given the alternatives. I would start with 1 year just to see how things are working and if Vue is a going concern (e.g., evidence of on-going development and improvement on a timely basis. Sorry, I still have PTSD from 2016). If all seems good, then you have to admit that $600 for a 5-year Creator license is not a bad deal. I would love to see that type of deal with C4D. Dave

I am a sucker for these types of plugins as I tend to favor environment creation. But I will wait for the Redshift version to come out. I will admit, I am quite impressed with the work from Florian Renner. He does have 3 plugins now devoted to building/city creation: CityBuilder Pro - Arranges buildings (R21 minimum, Octane and Standard) City Rig - Build and Arrange buildings (R20 to S24, Octane) Buidling Generator - Creates buildings and their surroundings (streets, sidewalks). (R24 to R2023, Octane, Standard, Redshift coming) It appears that Buidling Generator has more capability to create buildings than found in City Rig, but while City Rig can do some arrangements of city blocks, there is more capability for that found in CityBuilder Pro. So, what works with what? Is some interoperable capability planned? Will they all be upgraded to R2023 and work with Redshift or are they meant to be stand alone? Each is a great tool, but you can see that they were all created at different points in time and with different progressions in building creation and arrangement capability. Ideally, I wonder if CityBuilder Pro can work with R2023. Honestly, given how often Maxon breaks plugins with each release I just don't trust statements around "minimum release capability". I have no confidence that R21 "minimum" means that it is R2023 capable. That needs to be explicitly defined for CityBuilder Pro like he did for Building Generator (e.g., R24 to R2023). I suspect Florian is watching this thread as he did check out HappyPolygon's profile 15 hours ago (and joined Core4D right before that) so maybe he can shed some light on the future plans on these plugins and whether or not they will work together as a suite of tools. Some really great stuff here that has the potential to be on par with their more expensive cousins in other applications! Great stuff. Dave

Given the size of some simulations, I have often wondered if the amount of VRAM begins to be an advantage over the speed of the card itself. I have done some TFD simulations clocking in at well over 24Gb which is easy to do when you decrease the voxel size to anything less than 1 cm. Now take that simulation and put it in a scene with other simulations (cloth, more fire, etc) and then pump all that cached data to Redshift and you have to wonder what becomes the most significant factor in GPU selection: speed at processing, VRAM or the speed of the CPU and the SSD at moving all that data to/from the GPU. Not knocking the 4090 - it is impressive, but I am just wondering what really the priority is when designing a workstation for handling not just one single simulation but a whole scene of them and then passing it all to the render engine also on the GPU. I ask because I only hear single use examples concerning a specific simulation...not a whole scene of them during rendering. Dave

I wish it was a simpler solution, but unfortunately it is not. You will need to dive into Fields, Cloth, XP and vertex mapping. Not sure what else is there left to learn? 😄 Please note that I made a mistake in my explanation above by using the term "UV map" when what I actually meant was "vertex map". I did not realize until I wrote the above sentence. Dave

You would need R2023 and its new cloth simulation tools which have balloon modifiers. You would start with one big balloon cloth and create vertex maps for the pleats between the cushions and then for that vertex map area create a high cloth self-attraction value using fields to pull in the cloth and create the 6 individual pleats. To get all those gorgeous wrinkles in the cloth, you would need a pretty high-density mesh for that balloon object. Now to get the cushion to land where you want it, the only way I could think of how to do this is to run it in reverse. If you simulate it with the cushion perfectly placed in its final position and then run it with gravity pointing up while you take the air out of the balloon you may get what you want. You then cache the simulation. This is where I am not sure, but I don't see why it cannot be done: You then run that simulation backwards to get the cushions to fall down and land perfectly in the chair. Relative to the fluid simulation of the chair appearing, you would need X-particles. Create a vessel that conforms to the chair design, render it invisible and pour fluid particles into it (again with gravity pointing up). That is not exactly how it appears in the video as there is a T2 type of effect going. So as XP works with Fields, you would need 4 attractors to pull the particles to the chair leg locations from 4 separate emitters at the fluids starting point. Each emitter is tied to a specific attractor to ensure that all the liquid going to each leg is the same. Once the particles are at the leg positions; another emitter kicks in at each leg position to fill each leg column with more particles and gravity goes from -Y to +Y until the chair is formed. The seat straps that hold the cushion in place can be done with a spline extrude being animated from 0 to 100. Again, sounds easy but it will be a ton of experimentation. What you may want to do is submit this video to Chris Schmidt's Rocket Lasso website for him to work through in one of his "RocketLasso Live" podcasts where he actually breaks down and duplicates the effects of animations such as this. As this fits right into R2023's new capabilities, he may be attracted to doing it during a pod cast sooner rather than later. Now, he may not get to it in time by when you need it, but it is worth a try. I hope this helps. Dave

Very interesting video recently posted by Adam Savage (from Myth Buster's and an ILM modeler in a previous life) on making a sci-fi panel. While done for real and not in a computer, the principles are applicable to 3D modeling as he discusses the process in 3 steps: Basic Form Panelization to break up that basic form: with a sub-step of then added notches to those panels to break up their pattern. Adding greebles --- and this step is also done in two passes: first the non-descript smaller panels on top of the larger panels and then the real fun part -- kit bashing from pre-existing models. Very fascinating. Dave

Where are the beautiful soft cover quick start guides? Around a year ago, I threw all that stuff away. Broke my heart but you can only hold onto to things you never look at for so long. 18 years of discs, boxes, books etc. all went into the recycling bin. Honestly, it felt more traumatic than was warranted. I think that is when I started to rethink what "perpetual" really meant relative to licensing. Dave

I also gave into temptation and created a similar image (but instead used the 2001 Obelisk). One thing about using such a high-resolution image is that what appears to be grain is actually stars - which in itself is kind of amazing - but a real problem for anything beyond a still image. Those individual and tiny stars will flicker when used in an animation unless you increase your ray counts to obscenely high levels. What you would need to do is to create a blurred copy of that image for the luminance channel but do not enable rendering for that background - here it is just a light source. Over that in the color channel would be the full resolution image but with its illumination values turned way down so that the smallest and dimmest stars completely disappear - thus removing the potential for flickering when being rendered in an animation. An interesting comment about the 2001 obelisk. In the book, the ratio of its dimensions (to the 6th decimal place) were 1:4:9 - or the squares of 1, 2 and 3. But in the movie, the on-set Obelisk was built as 1.25 x 5 x 11 - which had a ratio of 1:4:8.8. I will admit that in my own attempts to model the 2001 obelisk it always looked "off" to me. A simple 1:4:9 cube just did not feel right based on what I was trying to copy from the movie. Very frustrated that I could not even model a 1 x 4 x 9 cube and get satisfactory results!!! Pretty confident that Cerbera and Vector never had days like this. Well...now I know why. Dave

OMG! A 35K x 16K HDRI sky map of the Milkyway!!! How can you beat that!!! Dave

An interesting product that was just released by The Pixel Lab is a VDB data set of Nebula's. Might be useful if you want to replicate the battle in the Mutaran Nebula from Star Trek 2. Otherwise, a 360-degree sky map works best as given that nebulas are lightyears in size, chances are you won't be needing an animation that requires 3D parallax of the nebula as you move through space.

Wow!! Congratulations. I have never met anyone who had a film nominated at Cannes. You know,.....Peter Jackson started out this way. Just saying. Actually, you are one up on him. He just crashed Cannes, set-up a table and started handing out copies of "Bad Taste" to anyone who walked by. You just have to admire the chutzpah!!! But then again, Steven Spielberg crashed the Universal lot and took over an office without anyone knowing until a producer for the original "Night Gallery" TV series gave him an assignment to direct an episode with Joan Crawford. Not a bad way to start. Morale of the story....I think you should crash Pixar and take over Lee Unkrich's office. (Toy Story 3, Coco) I understand he is not using it anymore since he retired in 2019. Dave

So my RS maintenance expires on 6/23/23. Based on this the second bullet "You'll be able to renew your Annual Maintenance Agreement up to August 31, 2023" there are two interpretations given my expiration date: 1) As my maintenance ends before 8/31/2023, I can still purchase another year of maintenance on 6/23/2023. - OR - 2) Any renewal of existing maintenance plans will only provide maintenance benefits UP TO August 31st, 2023. Given that my maintenance plans ends on 6/23/23 and Maxon does NOT sell a 2-month maintenance plan, I cannot renew maintenance for two months and get full maintenance benefits until 8/31/23. I believe option 2 is the correct way of interpreting the FAQ page simply because my license page gives me this message: So...am I upset? Not really. Here is why: R26 and I am a hobbyist who really sticks to single image renders. Now that RS CPU is released, I can light, texture and optimize my scene for RS. If I decide to render an animation and need the extra power of RS GPU, then I purchase RS 1-month subscription and move on. I month of RS GPU is a hell of a lot cheaper than annual maintenance costs for hobbyists who only work with single image renders. Please note that this is my own personal perspective as a hobbyist and I understand everyone's situation is different. Dave

I have always wondered why Luxology's ImageSynth shader was 1) cancelled by Luxology and 2) never duplicated by someone else. It did more than just make the texture seamless but actually took elements of the original image, figured out the boundaries of each of those selected elements, and then randomly generated them across the image such that they were seamless. You could also work with more than 1 original image to create a seamless new image that has elements of both images (eg. image 1 is grass and image 2 is ground dirt and the resultant image is ground with patches of grass). Now to be fair, that program was very buggy and prone to crashing which may explain why it was discontinued. But that was back in 2009. I would have to assume that more stable (and more powerful) algorithms have been developed in the last 12 years which would enable this capability to be reborn as a shader. Other than that, how about a simple tile shader that takes a square image and randomly rotates it 90 degrees as it replicates that image across a surface? I think this has been done but requires a bit more to it than simply clicking a check box in the material tag. Ideally, I would want it to be that simple. Maybe even two options that could work together or independently: random 90-degree rotation and mirror image. Dave

That is good to hear as it matched my expectations. I am expected that most other GPU enabled fluid simulation programs (Nexus, Embergen) have the same needs. When looking for a new PC to replace my 7-year-old workstation, I conceptually wanted a fast OS hard drive to move cached data to/from the GPU whether calculating the sim or rendering it. But all that data also needs a place to reside both on the GPU and the PC during these calculations, so this is where VRAM and PC RAM are important. In all these transactions, the CPU is nothing more than a traffic cop setting the speed across the PCIe bus. Here speed is more important than core count which works from a price perspective. The more cores you have, the lower the clock speed but the higher the CPU price. And of course, you want a full 16 lane highway across the motherboard (PCIe lanes) between the OS drive, GPU and PC ram. So, while GPU RAM is of primary importance (that is get as much as you can afford and you will have no regrets), there has to a limit to PC Ram because I would imagine at some point you could get more PC RAM than your GPU needs in the management of data to and from the GPU. That is how I am viewing PC RAM here - a staging place for large cached VDB files to reside as they are managed between the GPU and permanent storage on the OS drive. Is that the correct way to look at it? If so, I would imagine then that you would want your CPU RAM to be greater than GPU RAM by the amount you think will be enough to handle all open programs and files. But how much more? For example, if you get a 24Gb GPU, is 32Gb of PC RAM sufficient - 8Gb extra for programs and files? Of should you go to 64 Gb (32 Gb extra for programs and files)? The largest C4D file I ever worked with was 3Gb in size and C4D takes at most 1Gb of memory, so would 8Gb be enough? Hopefully, these considerations are the right way to look at hardware needs for the next stage in 3D computing where everything (and I do mean everything) is now becoming GPU enabled. For me, it is a whole new way to think about PC hardware. Dave

If I may, I think it perfectly okay to disagree with the points someone has made. That is what freedom of expression is all about. But when do decide to disagree, can we focus only on the topic at hand and not make a guess at the motives of the person who said it? Honestly, you can't presume to know what motives are behind a person's post. Only the poster can know that. Maybe I am tired of and a little bit alarmed by the growing political discord in America, but some of the posts being made on subscriptions vs. perpetual licensing have also been growing more disturbing over the years. It is one thing to disagree with a person's position based on the quality of the argument that is presented (the hope being that if the person's argument is sound, fact filled and of high quality --- we actually, listen and grow from it) but let's do so without inferring motives that we in no way can really know and then attack that person for those same imaginary motives. In short, focus on the points and facts being made and not the motives - and by association - the character of the person who is making them. "Big minds talk about ideas, average minds talk about events, small minds talk about people" - Eleanor Roosevelt I firmly believe that to do 3D, you must be "big minded." Therefore, everyone here has my respect, and I would hope you all feel the same way about the Core4D forum members the way I do. If so, let's focus on spreading some of that respect around the next time an argument is presented that you disagree with. Enough said...go render something. Dave

I started watching "Houdini is not scary" tutorials and was pleasantly surprised that it really wasn't that scary. It was certainly different, but I felt that with enough small attempts, I could get there. I also made sure to try and internalize how the steps in setting up a modeling operation would support a completely procedural and non-destructive workflow. I tried to get the internal logic of Houdini from those lessons, and I think I was getting there. Things made sense when viewed from that larger perspective. The light was starting to shine through the darkness. And then they added a texture, and everything went dark again. Honestly, I saw what was required to add a texture to a portion of the model and it was too many steps and totally unclear. A whole separate node tree needed to be established (I think this was lesson 4 in the training series). So I re-watched it again trying to understand again the internal logic that made this process meaningful in the long run. Nope....did not happen. I would need to get through that knothole to continue with Houdini. If something as basic as added a texture derailed my understanding, you can understand how enthusiasm went with it. If there are better training videos for this subject alone (Houdini and textures) please let me know. Dave

I would love to start hearing some well-educated recommendations on minimum hardware to get serviceable performance creating fluid simulations with each application. Or are those demands hardware agnostic --- that is, if you are going to do fluids you will never have enough no matter how much you put in your workstation regardless of the application you use? Regardless of bigger is always better, there will always be a bottleneck in your hardware selection. From the size of GPU VRAM, the number of PCIe lanes in the motherboard to the GPU, the speed of either the M.2 drive or NCIe drive for writing and then unloading the cache to the render engine (also on the GPU) and the clock speed of the CPU. For example, I would hate to spend big money on a GPU only to find out that the drive handling the cache is too slow to keep up. When you think of both rendering on the GPU and sending Gb's worth of VDB data to the GPU, I wonder if the 3090Ti will be enough at 24Gb. Most people say it is more than enough for rendering but what about handling huge caches for volume rendering? Are we in RTX-A6000 land now? I have no idea. So does CPU RAM now become an issue? Is there a ratio you need to maintain between CPU RAM and GPU VRAM to ensure that there are bottlenecks on the motherboard? Is it 1:1? Is it 2:1 (make sure the CPU ram is twice as much as the GPU VRAM). Again, I have no idea. I guess I want to get the hardware right because 1) I am looking to replace my 7-year-old workstation and 2) if I have to wait days to generate a pretty good fluids simulation, I will be going back to hard surface modeling and Redshift rendering. Dave

As a follow up to my argument above, remember that everything rests on just how well you can get your finished scenes out of future versions C4D into whatever perpetual license you are still have on your machine. Past experience has shown that a C4D export re-imported back into C4D always works better than an export from another DCC application. To re-prove that to myself, I worked with the Death Star Laser cannon (available in the downloads section) because I actually had to extensively remodel it because the FBX exported version that I purchased was horribly corrupted and needed complete remodeling. So that complete remodel was done in R23 and I wanted to see how well it would export and re-import into R19. R23 can export USD files, but R19 cannot import USD. So I went with FBX. The modelling, scene hierarchy, textures and tags imported into R19 perfectly! The reflectance was a little off, but all the textures were there across all channels. The Expresso controls were completely lost but those are replaced with far less work than if the model came in with corrupted geometry --- which it did not. Now in the future, I would be importing scenes from future C4D versions that had USD export into R23. As such, I would imagine that exporting as USD and importing USD would probably do much better with textures. Very encouraging. Dave

Okay....all those arguments over subscription costs being unreasonable and force people to lose the ability to invest in themselves or access to their art are coming from a place which implies that C4D (or their tool of choice) ONLY exists on their PC as subscription and that there are no perpetual licenses from previous versions in your possession. If that was true, then you would not be making that argument because all you would have EVER used are subscriptions - so why then are you complaining about the loss of perpetuals? But you are making that complaint because you have (or are) going through the decision process of either holding fast to your current perpetual C4D license while moving to another DCC application or staying current with C4D subscriptions. So, you have C4D. You have your artistic tool. You can still support your artistic or financial goals with C4D. You just don't have the latest version. The mental knot hole I had to work myself through was to stop chasing the shiny new ball of the current release. I started to think critically about what I will and won't use in a new release and should there be something I need for a period, then I will rent it only for that period. I can rent C4D for 7 individual months out of the year and still save money over leasing it for the year (7 x $94 = $658 < $720). 7 out of 12 months is a pretty long time. Paying $94 at a time creates a lot less financial strain on my pocketbook than paying $720 all at once. Rent it, complete the work, export it as USD and move on. That makes C4D a commodity. Remember the old MSA? Remember how Studio owners used to complain about how their upgrade costs (which they were locked into otherwise they would fall out of the program) were higher than Prime or Broadcast licenses for a release that had NO benefit to the feature set that came with a Studio license. How is that better than what I am proposing above? Now you have options. Time is on your side. You don't have to sign up for a 2023 subscription if you are not going to use its new features right away to achieve whatever goals (artistic or financial) are in front of you. Wait a few months until you really do need it and save yourself some money by only renting it for that period that you do need it. Remember, you can do that for up to 7 out of the 12 months and still be ahead. Maybe broader adoption of sticking with your last perpetual license and ONLY using the latest release for the months you need it will move the needle more on getting Maxon to adopt a much cheaper YEARLY indie license? Just a thought. It is clear by Nemetschek's financials that those few who have walked away completely did NOT change a thing. Time to think differently. Dave

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

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

One of the reasons why I felt a year ago that perpetuals would come to an end is that I looked at the growth of re-occurring revenue (or SaaS: software-as-a-service) over standard licensing revenue with Nemetscheks annual revenue reports. In short: follow the money. All of this is found on the web. Here are the numbers (all numbers in millions of Euro's) and are reported at the END of year: You can directly infer Maxon's revenue because Nemetschek breaks out their numbers by market and within the "Media" market there is only one company and that is Maxon. I went back to 2017 through 2021. If you notice, prior to 2020 and the old MSA model, Maxon was pretty much a stable 6% of revenue but still growing though by only a couple of million a year. Respectable but not at the same level of growth as the rest of the company. Pretty confident that there was pressure on Maxon to change how it was doing business. Whether or not that pressure led to the leadership changes we saw in 2018 is open to debate. As for me, I side with the old adage "it's not personal, it's business" when it comes to these types of changes, especially when the numbers do speak for themselves. It wasn't until 2020 when revenue really started to break away from its predictable 6% of Nemetschek revenue pattern with a double-digit revenue increase in 2020. Remember that 2019 was when subscriptions were introduced. Now, do not get caught up by the drop in revenue growth from 2020 to 2021 from 61% to 27%. That is just math working against them. As a company makes more revenue, then to continue the same growth percentage every year becomes extremely difficult. If Maxon was to show another 61% growth from 2020 to 2021, then that would mean they would need another $18 million in 2021 (or $86 million rather than $68). Not so easy. But 2020 was a banner year for Maxon especially considering that while Covid started at the end of 2019, its impact on global revenue of every company showed up in their 2020 reports. That was not a great year for Nemetschek as there was only 7% growth in revenue, but Maxon grew a whopping 61%. Maxon's year-over-year increase in revenue from 2019 to 2020 represented half of Nemetschek's revenue increase in that same period. Pretty sure Mr. McGavran was the well-deserved darling among the Nemetschek executive leadership board that year. Now look at sources of revenue from both Software Licensing and SaaS over that same 4-year period. These are Nemetschek numbers. I don't know what Maxon's contributions are to this revenue. But as a percentage of revenue, SaaS is growing while Software Licensing is shrinking. And this is all while Nemetschek revenue is growing year over year. Essentially, global pandemics aside, Nemetschek was doing spectacularly well over that same 4-year period and were being handsomely rewarded by shareholders. Their stock price rose from 23 euro's a share in 2017 to a high of 110 euro's/share at the start of the start of 2022. Unfortunately, this has been a tough year for everyone, and the stock has declined in value quite a bit by almost 50%. But 400% growth in 4 years was quite the ride. Look, when you are looking at this level of financial success, don't expect any changes soon unless the 2022 financial report shows a significant slowdown in revenue. But even then, that will be due to global economic conditions rather than Nemetschek's (and Maxon's) licensing strategy which has been working for them quite well over the last couple of years. Always follow the money to see what happens next. Based on that, don't get your hopes up. Dave