Why are other 3d modeling programs so insanely expensive?

What exactly makes 3ds Max so incredibly expensive that Blender doesn’t have? I believe it’s around 3000 dollars, a price for which you can get 3 entire workstation grade computers or a nice used car. Modo is slightly cheaper, it’s “just” 1800 usd, Cinema 4D is apparently even more expensive than Max, it’s 3695 usd! Even Sketchup pro is 695 usd.

Just the fact that these programs are “supposed” to be used by large budget multimedia studios or is there a more normal explanation? There is just no way that 3 or even 4 high end computers are worth less than a single 3d modeling program, no matter who it is intended for, especially now in 2018, when there are tens of different programs and companies to choose from.

You might want to pony up if -

  • it were your responsibility to deliver a large team project on schedule to the extent that you absolutely needed a warm body on the other end of a phone line when you ran into issues.

  • the artists you were hiring all had expertise in 3ds Max and they convinced you they could deliver a quality product quicker.

Put yourself in the position of the person who has promised a delivery date to the company who has promised to pay you.

Personally, I’ve always preferred open source libraries and applications for commercial software projects I’ve managed. There is a certain excitement to that, but under the right circumstances I wouldn’t hesitate to ask for money for commercial software and support contracts.

They ask whatever they think is the right price point to support their software business. Or are you denying the developers their right for salary?

Use whatever you feel helps you do your job. What is worthless to one is treasure to another and vice versa. If you need a hammer, no amount of free open source jigsaws is going to make hammering nails easier.

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Keep in mind that Blender doesn’t cost less. There are significant donations of money and time behind the scenes which allow for the program to be provided to the end user at no cost to them.

You might want to evaluate how much of your own work you providing free of charge.

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Some of it is contractual agreements that the companies have with different studios, then there are also in-house software used by some production companies. However blender is moving up the ranks as being used in industry even if most of the time it is just for the conceptual ideas, which then migrate over into " industry standard " software. So if a high end production company is willing to pay high dollar for the software and others see what was used for that project then they tend to want " the latest greatest" which is why they are as high cost as they are. No different between buying electronics you going with a 800.00 phone or do you go with a budget 150.00 phone that can do " most " of what the 800.00 one does? Do you get the 300.00 shoes that a all star sports player wears or do you get the knock-offs that look the same minus one letter for boy one get one free 29.99?

To you, that is. The problem: An object’s value is not inherent.

It is instead worth more or less to different people based on how much they desire or need the object. And if there weren’t enough people willing to pay that amount of money for those pieces of software, the prices would surely fall, following the rules of supply and demand.

Salary is one thing, but look at it this way, if 3ds max costed 20.000 usd, do you think that there wouldn’t be any buyers? Doubt it. Of course there would be, a lot of them. Even if it was 50k, there would be some rich folk, studios and so on that would buy it, but that absolutely doesn’t mean that it should cost that much, it shouldn’t.

Photoshop is a great example of how things should work in comparison, it’s an extremely powerful piece of software, someone also has to develop it to feed their families, pretty much every multimedia studio of any kind uses Photoshop in at least one segment of their work, yet it costs way, way less, around 200 usd anually, so both “the industry” and the average Joe can buy it and…how did that turn out? Let’s just say that photoshop is now an actual word that even a old person that never used a computer knows the meaning of.

The fact that you are the only one that makes something (a industry standard software) doesn’t mean that you should overprice it just because there will always be buyers, in that case the OPEC can do the same and raise it’s oil prices by 10, or why not, a 100 times, other countries and industries need oil, so they will still need to buy it, the oil companies would have larger salaries, but that doesn’t mean that it’s a ok thing to do.

Gimp is free, so should be Photoshop. 200$ annually is way overpriced for MS Paint on steroids!!!

But seriously, software can be priced whatever the hell the vendor prices it and if for someone it is ridiculously overpriced… so what? High price is actually one major factor that helps to weed out annoying customers and lower support costs. Blackmagic Design lowered the price of DaVinci Resolve from 500K custom solution with hardware to free/999$ average Joe level and they are overflowed by “why doesn’t my cat video render at 1000fps” questions while professional users are left without proper support and are discussing actual paid support possibilities. Because, for some people software still is a tool that costs some money to make more money, not something free to make something for free.

PS. Comparing Photoshop to 3D software is like comparing notepad to Word. There is an order of magnitude difference in functionality and development difficulty between a proper 3D package and a 2D paint software.

You seem have a rosy view on the price of “high end computers”. A high end pre-built PC with a ton of RAM, a good GPU, an Octo-core CPU, and an M.2 SSD/Hard-drive combo will cost just over 2000 dollars. That is actually more than some of the commercial 3D apps.

Also, software like Maya have actually seen their value go down significantly (good 3D software used to cost tens of thousands of dollars). It should also not be forgotten that the companies have professional support lines and a large team of paid developers with high salaries. Then there are the features, Maya can do just about everything related to 3D (especially with the plugin ecosystem), Houdini can pump out large-scale scenes with incredible levels of detail, scenes that can all be generated procedurally (something that no other app. can do and definitely something you won’t find in Blender).

3DS isn’t making prices for hobbyists. They’re making prices for professional studios. The cost of 3DSMax is nothing compared to the price of hiring smart, educated, talented people. If the people you hire know how to use 3DSMax but not Blender, then it’s cheaper to buy 3DSMax than it is to pay your artists to train and deal with the clumsiness that’s going to persist even after they learn how to do things.

If you’re a student, there are educational licenses available for 3DS for free. $0. I believe they last three years.

I´d say a high end workstation is more around 20 000. I mean these high end xeon platinum processors cost 12 000 alone.

You also need to consider the size of the available market. There are probably 20 times as many people doing photo editing as there are creating 3d content. Since the unit cost is minimal compared to the development costs, more sales = lower price.

In this interview (https://youtu.be/qJEWOTZnFeg?t=2811) Ton is of the impression that 3ds Max and Maya are expensive in large part because they have a relatively small legal paying base, ~20,000 customers (licenses? Compare this to the million people downloading Blender each month). He bases this figure by interpolating Autodesk’s published financial statements. This coupled to the fact that many studios already have time and money invested into these software packages and can’t risk upsetting the workflow. Autodesk can then gouge these studios because it’s more cheaper to just keep going with the flow rather than risk a complete shutdown of the production pipeline if switching to different software. There is also the service component that studios rely on, i.e., being able to simply call someone when something needs to get fixed/working.

Other companies like Foundry (Modo), Maxon (Cinema 4D), and SideFX (Houdini) have all adopted very intelligent business practices as far as payed software goes. Both Modo and Cinema 4D are dirt cheap to get student licenses and then a SIGNIFICANT price reduction to later upgrade to a commercial license (Modo is something like -70%). Houdini can be used for free while learning and its indie cost is quite reasonable. It’s the right price point for indie studios to get started with industry-standard tools. Also, student -> commercial or just commercial at the outset, all three have perpetual licensing available, unlike Autodesk. Given the small % of the total revenue that 3ds Max and Maya actually makes for Autodesk, that % would be even smaller if Autodesk didn’t lock people in year-after-year by no longer allowing perpetual licenses.

So, in essence when we talk about “insanely expensive” it’s really Autodesk that fits that bill.

The good thing is, more and more 3rd-party packages are adding Blender support, and Blender is going to be considered a AAA production suite in the not-so-distant future. I can’t find the link, but I remember watching a talk where one of the creators of Maya completely switched over to Blender. All of the private/in-house R&D that went into Blender for making the film is going to be merged back into the public branch of Blender.

Blender is entering territory where there’s no longer a limitation on what you can do with it professionally, it’s just a matter of market penetration. Personally, I don’t even consider the “insanely expensive” players. It’s no sweat off my back to learn 3ds Max and Maya if I’m ever to use them in an already-established studio environment, in which case I’m not paying for it anyways. That said, I have no need to use them for personal use.

The concern over “insanely expensive” alternates to Blender is becoming less and less relevant every year.

Photoshop(/extended) was 800€(/1000€) per license(perpetual). Most users bought a license and stuck to it for an extended period, lets say about 5 years on average

Divide 1k by 5 you have 200 per annum(BTW there’s 2 n’s in the word annual). There’s your ball-park. For people who don’t need the extended features but do need Photoshop year-long it has effectively become more expensive.

OTOH for those who only rent it per-project and don’t get many jobs needing it - the SaaS model is indeed beneficial.

As for the typical perpetual license cost for fairly niche products such as these fairly complex technical DCC suites. Its to-do with the fact that there aren’t very many people(compared to say the amount of customers for say MS Word or indeed Photoshop) buying those licenses, yet they are so complex to develop that it can take fairly large development and support teams, besides of which the programming work involved itself is of such niche field that the programmers can demand high pay.

I know that @kesonmis was being sarcastic however the above quote made for a great segue.

I think the answer is fairly simple: 3D content creation suites with all the bells and whistles from A to Z is incredibly complex and expensive to develop and maintain (I’ve heard someone say it’s perhaps the most complex software ever). Divide the high cost of development by a relatively small user-base, and you have high prices per unit. It’s that simple, in my opinion.

Consider that if it were relatively easy and profitable to create 3D DCC suites, we would be seeing a growing number of products appearing, to compete and take some of that money. Instead we’ve seen the exact opposite.

Blender plays a major role in this trend. Having such a capable software available for free in this space has two effects: first, it’s basically slowly killing all the “low-end” competitors. As it becomes more capable, it will increasingly inflict economic damage on competitors higher on the market over time. Second, as users of other software slowly switch to Blender it will reduce the user-base of those other packages, which in turn will make those vendors have to hike their prices even more.

This is now a vicious cycle. 3D software “X” is expensive and has some major weaknesses. More and more users abandon it for Blender and other alternative packages. “X” has to either raise prices, slow down development, or both. Continue this cycle until a few years later “X” is dead. Repeat for “Y” software.

If you seriously consider the overall trend here, I feel that Blender is the only 3D DCC suite that has very good prospects of long-term survival. I think that Lightwave, Modo, and Cinema 4D are on wobbly legs (in order of wobbliest legs first). The next tier is Max, and Maya/Houdini(tie), with Maya and Houdini perhaps being several years out before Blender can compete.

However, there are two factors that limit Blender from destroying more competitors for now: one, the GPL license which prevents tighter integration of commercial plugins. Two, the lack of a contractually-agreed, paid support option for it. I think that those are the main factors that may keep some commercial alternatives viable indefinitely. Both factors could eventually be overcome though, so this is not guaranteed safety for the commercial competitors either.

PS: Does this thread perhaps belong in the general forum instead?

Houdini won’t go under due to Blender because it’s run by a company that puts a massive amount of resources in its development. The result that it is advancing faster in several areas than Blender and in the case of the VFX tools, the BF has no chance of competing ever because of resource limits.

Maya will also surely be around for a long while yet, it is incredibly entrenched in the industry and unlike Blender, can have commercial plugins attached to it. It will remain the industry leader for the foreseeable future (Blender’s chance of getting there meanwhile is close to zero because the large studios will tend to avoid GPL apps. like the plague).

Modo and C4D, it really depends on their development direction. Both apps. have seen allegations that The Foundry and Maxon are not giving them enough attention. C4D’s supposed make or break point will be this year as the dev. team ceases being bogged down with a big core rewrite. Modo users meanwhile are wondering why The Foundry continues to focus on specialized standalone apps. rather than implement those features in Modo.

Two things really:

A. The market isn’t that big
B. Software development, support and marketing costs a ton of money

Investments funds expect a good rate of return.

Houdini won’t go under due to Blender because it’s run by a company that puts a massive amount of resources in its development. The result that it is advancing faster in several areas than Blender and in the case of the VFX tools, the BF has no chance of competing ever because of resource limits.

Agreed with the general idea, except to say that I think “ever” is a bit too certain. I think that as Blender grows (more users, more and better features) they will have more resources (more user donations, more sponsors, more partnerships), so who knows how far it could go to catch up.

Maya will also surely be around for a long while yet, it is incredibly entrenched in the industry and unlike Blender, can have commercial plugins attached to it. It will remain the industry leader for the foreseeable future (Blender’s chance of getting there meanwhile is close to zero because the large studios will tend to avoid GPL apps. like the plague).

Also agreed with the general idea, except to say that I can’t think of any inherent reason why the big studios would be opposed to using GPL software.

Modo and C4D, it really depends on their development direction. Both apps. have seen allegations that The Foundry and Maxon are not giving them enough attention. C4D’s supposed make or break point will be this year as the dev. team ceases being bogged down with a big core rewrite. Modo users meanwhile are wondering why The Foundry continues to focus on specialized standalone apps. rather than implement those features in Modo.

See, that’s one of the parts of the cycle I described: slowing development. Let’s see if C4D is doing a rewrite the smart way, like Blender seems to have done so far and Maya did in the past. Contrast with a less smart way, which apparently was the case with Lightwave (abandoned rewrite? multiple times?) and perhaps XSI, which from what I hear took years to recover and is now dead.

I forgot to mention a third factor that could limit Blender’s growth. It’s possibly the most intractable one, which is patent claims. I think that Autodesk in particular will not hesitate to send patent torpedoes if they start to believe that Blender is a significant threat to their portfolio. Or they may even do it via 3rd parties. Although I don’t believe that software patents are allowed in Europe and Blender is concentrated in Europe. Maybe any patent claimants would feel that it wouldn’t be worth the ill-will to block it just in countries that allow software patents (like the US).

Shenan; We have to be extremely careful with statements that promote an idea of Blender killing off the commercial 3D apps. There are some in the professional CG field that see us Blender users as delusional idiots, and this only feeds into that idea.

The reason why it feeds into the idea is that users here in BA have been fantasizing about the commercial companies being in a panic due to Blender ever since the early 2.3x days (back in 2004). The reality was is that it’s only been in the last few years that they started to even so much as blink. Even now, they are not so afraid of Blender’s advances, that is why they feel confident in raising prices and/or instituting more onerous EULA clauses (with the exception of SideFX due to their moves to make Houdini easier to get without a huge price attached).