So I heard Maxon is commiting Suicide by going subscription?

General Forums Blender and CG Discussions
21

I agree about everything nodes. But regarding the new Outliner, i think it is largely misunderstood. Though I do hope it gets more attention.

My impression using it now for a while is that it is a hybrid of Maya’s Outliner and Layer system with Blender’s way of approaching it.

One large improvement on Maya’s approach is that the two don’t wind up confusing each other. In Maya it is very easy for objects to fall out of a Layer or get multiple layer dependencies with no real visual clue how this is happening. When you join and separate objects and set up parenting and so on, in Maya things can become a mess and confuse the Layer system.

Blender’s improvement is to join them so that groups become collections and layers at the same time. And you can always see the hierarchy. And groups can remain visible in a scene view without having to switch to the groups view which is an improvement over previous Blender versions.

Because of this sort of transparent hybrid system it seems confusing. And seems like people want it to be something other than it is.

22

The good news is that more people are willing to give FOSS a try (it costs nothing to download to start with).

But we still have work to do because according to this post on CGSociety, the very term ‘FOSS’, when attached to anything, is a stigma and a marker of awful quality in the eyes of many people. It is the old idea that if something is free, it obviously failed to become good enough to warrant a pricetag, and in the minds of some an app. cannot be seen as truly professional-grade unless the company/organization can attach a 4-digit pricetag to it.

Fortunately, we are seeing more and more figuring out that quality does not increase or decrease linearly with price.

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23

Yeah, i want it to be NOT CONFUSING. I still don’t really get it. I am wondering if i should be ashamed that i don’t get it after decades of doing 3D or if i should blame the devs.
I also want it to be better and more useful. l think it has a long way to go.
Especially if you compare it with C4d, which is IMHO the best in the industry and i have to admit i kinda hate ALL outliners except the one in C4d.
Ironically it’s the ONLY thing i really miss from C4d.

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24

There are a lot cool things in Blender. Animation Nodes are not yet where they are in C4D, but then C4D Nodes need an overhaul too.
I’m at home in different application, and the Outliner in Maya is basically the older and need an overhaul too. Also the layer system has some issues. I agree C4D Outliner and its layer is really good, except the tine symbols for turning them off. And of course an overuse of tags. Especially selection tags still scare me.
Anyway, Blenders collections are in my opinion a total design disaster. I think, they basically had visibility groups and had to increase there number. As Blnder has everything in living in Outliner, they may thought of being a good idea. Oh man, its like they relinked the left mouse button to popup the help page.
Now they are in a dilemma and don’t want to move forward and most Blender use do not even work in scenes with large number ob objects. So I guess this will become a challenge. Converting the old users to a new workflow, won’t be easy.
I’m just glad I can choose the software I use.

25

No need to force anyone do anything… not everyone who FLOSS has good teeth and lives a healthy life.

IMO, it’s cultural thing which works both ways: studios, the industry needs to start integrating .blend format in their pipeline & Blender needs to become “insurance” worthy client, but 'till then we’ll mostly just trade with exposure. :upside_down_face:

26

The thing is, though, you can have both at once. I used to sing praise for Allegorithmic offering a rent-to-own subscription model where you could get into the software with a smaller monthly cost and then convert your subscription into a perpetual license once you’d been subscribed continuously for X number of months. As far as I know that was unique in the industry and it was very user-friendly… and then they signed a deal with the devil (Adobe) and now that rent-to-own option is no longer available for new users. Yay! Abusive Adobe subscription pricing model! [/s]

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27

Subscription can have it’s advantage.

Need AE for a project? rent it.
Don’t need it anymore? Stop renting it.

What however frustrates me is the cost of those subscriptions compared to the delivered software development / improvement.

There I feel Adobe is rightly criticized.

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28

I find Adobe monthly costs ok. 25€, even if I only need it for half a day because a client wants PS files is not that much of a problem.

250€ for a month of 3ds Max however can make legacy projects where I only have to make very small changes and therefore not take lots of money unprofitable.

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The main difference is: You can open a PSD file in nearly all related applications, without loosing to much.
You can’t open a max file in any other software. You may done the job, but you will never ever get access to your file without paying.

30

Animation Nodes is more powerful and flexible than Xpresso.

Animation Nodes should be seen as a proof of concept for Everything Nodes which will benefit greatly from being a core feature and written in C++. We can already see in the Functions Branch that Jacques Lucke knows a thing or two about programming and already the new particle system is out performing XParticles in the ability to move vast quantities of particles at a decent frame rate. I’m sure the rest of the Everything Nodes project will take performance and flexibility way beyond Animation Nodes and enable many workflows only possible with Houdini currently.

The only advantages of C4D Object Manager has is a bit more consistency in operation and clarity of information presented. A continuing major issue with C4D is Priority. C4D executes the OM top down and executes the tags left to right. The user has to be aware of priority of execution otherwise objects, cloth sims and Xpresso controlled Rigs can run out of sync. Then you have to try and rearrange objects and execution priority of expressions and Xpresso to try and fix things.

I’ve never come across priority issues in Houdini nor Blender like I have frequently done in C4D over the years. I don’t know if Max or Maya suffers these sorts of issues I haven’t used them in well over a decade.

I don’t miss the C4D Object Manager one little bit. But that’s not to say Blender’s Outliner couldn’t improve, it could. Bill Reynish is doing a really good job attacking a lot of little niggles in the Blender UI and he has made Blender feel a lot more polished and I’m sure the Outliner will get some more improvements. When I last loaded up C4D R20 I thought how dated it felt compared to Blender. Not just the far better viewports but also how snappier everything feels in Blender.

31

I totally get your point and I’m surely no expert with animation nodes, I did some exercise, and it may be fantastic in the the future, but I just wanted to point out, that its currently not. I learned Xpresso faster and used It for complex rigging, which I really would do in Blender too. Its just not possible yet. There are other things possible of course and looking at the huge possibilities of nodes things will become really great. On behalf of performance I can’t see Blender being really fast. Not even close to X-Particles, which aren’t really that fast. I really would love to have a free particle system with the functionality of X-Particles, but I’m not seeing that yet. And Houdini is miles ahead in performance anyway.
And I also find C4D to be outdated and kind of chaotic in many areas. As long as you stick to motion design C4D is a good choice, but going further it has a lot problems. I had a huge fight with instances in hierarchies that C4D didn’t like to be reparented or unpainted. It really did cost my all my will to continue.
Anyhow I wish there would be more rigging tutorials about Blender, that are not about characters. I will never buy a car rigg, that’s something a software should provide with a few steps. Just did overwork mine in Modo, and it was huge joy and so easy. Hope that’s how Blender comes out one day.
PS: For Animation node, I’m so used to just move my object or the selected property channel into my nodes editor… so much miss that.

32

Clearly you haven’t tested the new particle system because it blows XParticles away in performance. I’ve done side by side comparisons on this computer.

The current Blender Particle system which is EOL will move 1 million particles at double the framerate of XParticles and the new nodal system is much faster than that.

By the time Jacques has finished optimising the Functions Branch I doubt Houdini’s particle system will be much faster if at all. Houdini will always been a deeper application than Blender but in my experience very few people need Houdini’s depth or step learning curve.

My take is that Blender will fill the void left by XSI and blend powerful nodal workflows with a much more approachable learning curve. People like me started learning Houdini because Maxon decided not to fix workflow killing architectural problems which make using C4D in heavy projects such a joyless experience. I began using Houdini to preview animation timing because I got tired of C4D’s 1 fps playback. The caching system is a joke in C4D, you can cache a huge physics sim and it’ll still playback at 1 fps! Maxon seems like it’s years away from sorting the object management performance while the Blender devs start thinking about Animation 2020.

By the end of the year we should have a high performance animation caching system thanks to the Animation2020 project. This will also mean a caching system for particles, physics sims and geometry with the goal of providing playback at the project fps.

What a stark choice, C4D playback at 1-2 fps or Blender in 24 fps? I know which I’d choose.

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33

Yeah you are right, the damn display of particles I forgot about. Had just an animation with 100.000 balls that fall into a container mesh. The caching was fast, even whit particle to particle collision, but the display was very slow. Kind of C4D issue. Never understood as C4D can eat a lot objects and huge mesh. Modo on the other side can display crazy amounts of instances. I often have numbers of 1 billion and more totally polygons. But it has other issues.

Anyway, it really is facilitating what you writing here. Make me hope to solve my particle stuff in Blender in the future, instead of C4D (where I use cycles too) is a dream to become true. Hope I don’t regret that line. Anyway, have you any link to example blend files for the new particle system? It’s 2.83 alpha ?

34

Sorry to butt in on the conversation. The Function Nodes Branch is in the experimental section here

You’ll find most of the Function Nodes in the Search area of the Add menu. It’s quite low level at the moment but the plan is to ship higher level nodes at the time of release.

There are a few people on Twitter experimenting with the new particle system, there may be some links there to sample projects. As this is an experimental branch things change quickly and older blends may not load.

Here’s the Developer Page for Particles project. https://developer.blender.org/T73324

35

Note that it is under heavy development, so a lot of information is outdated.
Here is a thread where you find information:

Here is some more general development information:

In the windows build thread on graphicall.org you can find some info on how to set it up:
https://blender.community/c/graphicall/Qcbbbc/

36

Well more good news for the Blender community then!

37

Oh, i totally forgot about this.
When i said i missed C4D’s outliner i meant the functionality it brings not this shit. Actually this priority execution mess when animating characters was one of the reasons i left.

You hit the nail on the head, i couldn’t formulate it better.

The last thing i did in C4D 5 years ago was trying to animate a low poly character with a simple custom made rig with IK/FK limbs. I got 12 fps max on my brand-new I7. I was like :open_mouth:
I converted the character to Maya and build a more complex control rig a couple years later and it ran with 120 fps (same PC). :face_with_hand_over_mouth:

38

I agree. It is not having it at all which is death.

For me as an example. I might buy one perp license. But for my studio it isn’t practical or cost effective, so I rent which is much more scalable and saves money over time. I am just a small time studio. Nothing big. Subscription has saved my ass many times over with my studio. And there are a lot of studios like mine.

So for me, I have no beef with the people who want perp licenses. I can not speak to their relationship with the software companies. That is business between those two people.

But I can speak to this:

If you offer software and you don’t offer subscription, you won’t get my business. Because I need software to be scalable and flexible.

Unfortunately for those against subscription only, the statistics are not in your favor. I can definitely say that. And for that reason you might not see many companies actually caring if for every 100 that leave 1000 more will come, and stay over the long run.

This is a harsh fact you have to consider. Because this is a business. I mean, you buy anything you are at the mercy of the market. And you can’t change the market with your feet if only 5% of the market will ever walk with you. It is negligible.

People want to believe that if they walk, and talk about it, others will walk. And that is fine. But statistics are not in favor of that changing anything.

What will change things is competition. But this is a double sided sword. If there is competition, that competition needs revenue. And offering subscription and perp to get the 5-10 percent or whatever it is, is probably not worth it.

Even the Blender Foundation sees the value in a steady stream of revenue.

But what will change things is strong competition - at any price - which has features the majority of people need and want. That is the only way to win the game. Because, unfortunately, if you have a monopoly on the tech, you can do anything. And business people will do what they can get away with.

The way to equalize that, is to offer a better product that can compete.

So also if you walk as a matter of principle or even financial reasons. That is perfectly fine too. But if you do that and then sacrifice the quality and speed of your work, that is something that only you can value.

My value is always in speed and quality of work. And of course this is not 100% absolute. There are trade offs. But we individually as artists, are the only ones who can make that call.

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39

Very interesting. What is it you want to see from C4D come to Blender’s Outliner? How is it that this works that you want to see?

As far as Outliner goes I have mainly Maya XSI and Blender (as well as other game apps) to compare too.

40

I sincerely don’t think that Blender’s outliner is worse than C4D. In fact, I pretty much think it’s better. If there is something I like is to manage Blender’s on the viewport with M key. It’s a very fast workflow.