Furryball Possibly Coming to Blender?

otoy(Octane) has a commercial plugin for Blender users
http://render.otoy.com/shop/blender_plugin.php

and chaos group (vray) seems to be also highly interested in the userbase of Blender as well :slight_smile:

http://vray.cgdo.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=1252

Andrei Izrantcev, vray-blender plugin developer, hired by chaos group.

Thanks I also know about those plugins - but does it use anybody from your community…??

So Ok - is it anybody here, who can help us with plugin development?

Your best bet is to ask the question at Blender Network. Or find someone there that you think fit your dessciption and ask the question directly.

Hi - I was interested in your renderer, although my hardware at the moment is very basic. But there have been multiple commercial renderer that supports Blender. So I think there is a market.

I just checked for a download and it’s only available from cnet and when I tried to download, my security soft broke in and stopped it for being malware.

those chaacter in this video are mightmare fuel, and he is very funny

What would really spark development on the Blender front is if you offered some kind of version of your software for free. There I said it. Houdini does it with Apprentice. Get on board. Even watermarked Furryball output would be worth using for quick preview animation. But your window of opportunity is closing. As soon as Blender can do use robust shaders in the viewport for practical previews Blender will become your direct competition.

Let’s pretend that you actually went to the Furryball website and checked, and that you simply missed the “FREE/BUY” link in the upper right-hand corner of the main page.

I just noticed that the software is Windows only. That might throw a spanner that my next PC would be Linux Mint.

Furryball! Coming to Blender for the extremely reasonable price of your right arm, left, leg and firstborn child!

Yyyeeeaaahhhh… No thanks. I’ll just stick with Cycles. It’s free and it suits my needs very well. Still hoping on SSS for GPU rendering at some point but hey, I can’t complain too much. Cycles has been a dream come true for my workflow.

As far as I know, Furryball is not like Autodesk, they don’t require you to be on a subscription pack that sees consistent increases in price and their license fees are in line with a lot of other commercial engines.

This is one of the things that people chide the Blender community for, the belief by some of the more radical elements that every piece of software should be free and if not, ‘punish’ them by supporting the piracy of the software. Commercial software also avoids some of the pitfalls seen in some strictly volunteer-driven FOSS projects which is the inability to retain developers for long periods and/or an eventual wholesale abandonment of its development. I aim that statement mainly to those projects that have a volunteer-only policy because the more successful projects like Blender tend to follow a somewhat more corporate model of establishing funding sources so as to have paid developers and speed up development.

If you are making 3d cartoons to the TV (of those 3D Barbie movie quality) renderer like this is a godsend and worth their price. Not only quick turnaround, but you saved on render farm too.

I don’t know what wrong with the old real time gpu renderer that went free before went kaput. Maybe business decisions? The keyword is to understand their market.

Yes I use Octane Render (still in beta for a price of 99 euros), and I’m really happy with it.
Ultra fast, simple and with ultra realistic results (see the previews in their web site). But for now it’s missing stuffs like hair rendering and smoke rendering.

Cyles is awesome too

I bought Octane,Thea Renderer, Substance Designer, Zbrush, 3DCoat, Topogun, and many other programs.

just because Blender is “free” or opensource, doesn´t mean, that people woudn´t want to pay for programs or plugins or even tutorials! its a false assumption.
a focal minority is bragging - sure… but many others are getting itchy to use good programs with Blender in combination.

its simple for me; if it makes my life easier,and I can trust the developers (fast Bug fixing,Documentation on how to use the product, fast response time for emails, future goals which I can agree to)
I buy and use programs, where Developers are giving me security in those above mentioned points.
I also support developers working on Blender, I value the time people spend on making my life easier.

like any other potential buyer from whatever 3D program they might come, they as I want a tight integration or workability with the programs that we use.

so the question for the furryball people mustn´t be ; can I get a developer to work for free? - which was as it seemed stated at first.
(giving a free licence is not the same as giving steady payment for steady and for a user secure development)
and the qestion is clearly not ; do Blender users have money to buy a theoretical plugin which isn´t developed yet?

the right question(s) should in my view be those for the furryball developers alike potential buyers;

how well can the plugin be integrated with Blender?
will the plugin be updated steadily and kept updated with the incredible releasecycle of Blender?
what are the future development goals?
will it offer something which other renderes like Vray, Octane,Cycles and such - which are btw already offering a Blender solution, can´t give the Blender users?
what is the selling point of this renderer especially for Blender users?

I might still have the installation file on my computer if someone wants to get hands on Mach Studio Pro, I just wonder if I’m allowed to upload the file (which used to be free download) anymore because the mach studio is long gone nowadays.

“that every piece of software should be free and if not,”
I never said or implied any such thing. Free is a nice bonus but that’s not the end all-be all. There’s a reason I happily shelled out 700$ for Zbrush. I felt it was worth the expense. Last time I looked at the costs of Furryball, my immediate reaction was WOW not worth it, not when there are other products that can do the same thing for far less (not even counting Cycles). That’s my personal opinion. Anyone who disagrees can feel free to sell their arms, legs, and firstborns to pay for Furryball, especially if it happens to be cost effective for them in the long run. For me, it is not cost effective so I won’t buy it. I don’t see why I should be “chided” for expressing my opinion that FB is too expensive.

I feel that AAA studios would do well to lower their prices a significantly. There are a lot of individuals and small studios who are going to look at that 1,300$ per year price tag and merrily turn right the @#$%^&* around in the direction of something far less costly.

There aren’t any other products that do the same thing on the market. You haven’t evaluated the program in any way, but you already declare that it is priced unreasonably high. So yeah, you’re expressing an uninformed opinion, we have enough of those already.

You’re being derogatory towards the company and its customers, which is different from saying “too expensive for my use case”. If you’re developing a very niche application, you have to price it accordingly. The people who complain about it being too expensive at 1000$ likely wouldn’t buy it at 500$ either. Priced at 100$ or less, it might not even be profitable. In any case, it’s not an unusually high price for a dedicated renderer.

Because blender is open source “free” doesn’t mean that we can not buy any software,
If furryball offer some speed that can improve my workflow and save me render times with blender, I can buy it, period, every user can buy whatever they need for his workflow. Is not nice that this company assume that we can not buy any software…
I have Thearender in my list, but I am waiting for cycles to see how fast can be, before my short film is ready to render, by the way, you can learn from the blender plugin for thearender and the old plugin for Mach Studio Pro

if blender users buy your Furryball render software, don’t suppose to be the plugin included??

If you don’t mind, I’d like to throw in some of my own questions that I think the devs should ask themselves:

Will there be Mac/Linux support?
Will there be GPU raytracing support without an nVidia GPU?
Will there be hair/fur rendering without Maya?

Because until they can address these issues, I don’t think they will be able to get the demand they are hoping for out of the Blender user base.

I know this is hypothetically speaking, but I kinda doubt that. This kind of renderer seems like it would be perfect for hobbyists, specifically those here discouraged by the lack of development going into Blender Internal these days. Not sure why they don’t offer some kind of non-commercial use only version of the software for that market, but I’m no businessman.

They do offer a free version that you can even use commercially, limited to three hours of usage per day. Are people even interested in this product at all, or do they just want to leave all their uninformed opinions here?

They didn’t say anything like that. Obviously it’s questionable whether Blender users are a reasonable target market. Right now they only have Max and Maya plugins. Should they invest in creating a Blender plugin, or should they not rather invest into Cinema 4D, Modo or Lightwave? On top of that, the GPL makes creating a plugin for commercial software extra-difficult.

The Octane guys seem to think it’s worthwhile, but they’re outsourcing the work and charging extra for the plugin.