I priced up Maya a while ago just to see what it was worth. Below is pasted from another forum i posted in.
Maya cost $2170.00 per year here in AUS. On top of that I have 20 render nodes. Redshift is $700 per node (maya dosnt have any network render licences anymore) So just to buy into maya and get some rendering licences I have to fork out $16,170 AUD.
Then each year I would have to pay another $2170 for Maya and $351 per node update for Redshift. $9190 Per year it would cost me to use Maya and redshift. Blender costs $0
You would also have to buy a network render controller like Deadline. Not sure what that costs but a few more grand I would say.
C4D cost just over 8k to buy here. Then maintenance of around $900 per year. You also have to by a network licence of about 1k if you want to network render with it using a third party controller like Deadline.
If I can get the same about of work and quality of work out of Blender then I cant think of a reason not to. And then I can use the money I have saved on other things to do with the business or holidays for the family.
It all depends on what you need, I need to have a renderfarm so maya or max can get pretty expensive.
If you dont need to render out animations then Maya may be good as it comes with one user licence of Arnold.
Not sure about the indie licence as to weather it lets you network render but its not available in all areas.
It is good that Autodesk is adapting by slashing prices for indies, but if they really want to hit Blender hard, they should show Maya doing 60 FPS on the editing and deformation of high-poly subsurfed models (and then show Blender doing 1 frame a second or even crashing). The title of the marketing could be Autodesk does what Blendonāt.
I know that Blender has pretty good momentum now, but as the commercial world adapts it will put to the test whether the development is truly robust (because of factors like the long-awaited collapse of software ideology) or if itās just because of the increasing trend of people just wanting to save a few bucks if possible (as long as the free software can do it, especially in a Covid 19 world). Iām personally a āsave a few bucks if possibleā guy, that is why my post software is GIMP (as I only needed something capable of light retouching, since I already have Genetica for more intensive texture work)
I know that the full maya has a licence of arnold that can only be used within maya. So it wont count on a farm, so if you have 10 machines including your workstation you would need to buy 10 licences of arnold rather than 9. If indie is the same as maya and not a lite version then I would guess its the same.
And I am guessing from your comment about the areas it is available that they are going to expand it ?
Are you sure about that, From what I understand it comes with a user licence meaning that you can use it withing maya but you cant use that licence as a network licence. Or have they changed that now.
Considering they own Arnold you think they would give out a few free ones considering how much you have to pay for maya or max.
A network node means one render node. Maya comes with one render node. This is similar to Maya if you bought it as a stand alone before. It had one node of Mental Ray. But if you bought Maya as a network version (a little extra) you got 5 nodes of Mental Ray.
The way it works now, there is no reason to make the distinction between a network and stand-alone license unless you are buying for a team/company, for Maya. But the Arnold license is basically a network license with one node included. And you can ramp up, rent etc as needed for your render jobs.
This version of MAXtoA renders wtihout a watermark any time you use Arnold within an interactive session of 3ds Max. However, command line and network (offline) rendering generates an image with a watermark unless a separate offline render node is licensed. You can purchase Arnold render nodes directly from Solid Angle.
Arnold was bought by Adesk, but Solid Angle still develop it themselves. The Arnold dev teams are seperate than the Adesk teams. Adesk are just using plugins and Arnold is still a stand al9ne renderer.
