So I heard Maxon is commiting Suicide by going subscription?

Can you give some specifics why you think it is better than C4D?

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The M shortcut and the batch rename feature are both very cool little things. 2.81 pretty much solved everything I didn’t like about the outliner in my opinion.

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Drag’n drop materials, modifiers, constraints and other stuff all over the outliner or even into the viewport to copy or move it.
Synchronization of outliner with the properties editor. If i click on the modifer in Blenders outliner …nothing happens. :confused:
Ctrl drag or something like that to make copies/instances.
A nested context sensitive right click menu with all the functionality to manage items. The basics are already there in Blender, but i think this could go much further. Sure lots of it would be redundant in terms of a duplication of menu entries.
But if i think about distance you have to move your mouse or your arm/hand over the keyboard - right click menus are pretty economical if done right.
Things I’d like to see in the menu:
everything group/collection/parent/link related and functionality that ties into it like merging of objects (destructive/non -destructive) and converting objects.
Basically many often used items from the objects menu.
Activation/Deactivation of physics/modifier/animation/constraint etc. for multiple objects, whole collections even.
Custom colorization functionality to make objects in the outliner stand out or not.

That’s it for now, i have to think more about it.

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Cool, thanks. Have you thought about writing these things up as a feature request? They all sound pretty useful to me. :slight_smile:

The Maxon oligarchy is almost as big as the entire Blender development team!

Subscriptions gunna have to pay for all these folk before a single line of code pops out…

There’s some serious jobs for the boys in there which look like they’ve been produced in an online corporate job name creator.

https://www.maxon.net/en-us/news/press-releases/article/maxon-and-red-giant-merger-completed/

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The marketing makes a lot nose about the merge, but there is zero information about the gain for all the subscription owners. That shows how they completely ignore there interest but have all the air for promoting there business success. I have seen that happen so often and it was never a good outcome.
Hey Max user subscription, will bring you a much better development progress. Hey look again we bought Alias, this is great news for Max users. Hey we just acquired XSI, so good time ahead of us. Hey we offer switch to Maya for Max owners.

That is a funny way of putting it.
That is the the biggest advantage of the foss nature of blender. The organisation for it is not for profit with mostly developers and small management team and even though they have a business which is for profit “blender cloud” it also finance blender and have a very big interest in its development. in fact there intire business depends on its rapid development

Has any company that went to subscriptions REALLY suffered? I know the peanut gallery h8z it bad, but bottom line: is Adobe still in business?

They will most certainly lose indies and people with lower disposable income. Also I quit Adobe because how their subs are bait and switch.

That will all depend on there next moves. Changing a software in production is insane. But there is quite a drift, because C4D has a lot dark creepy spots, where you remember the early days of 3d.

On the other side, Blender got such areas too and if you ask me Blender outliner should be killed and rewritten from scratch, that’s more of a simulation of what it could be then technical be anywhere like one. I even have to say, that 3dsmax horrible outliner is a 100 times better. And that was a hard line to write.
Now Blender seem to be the perfect tool for people who disliked C4D modeling (me!) and way of making every fx an expensive plugin. Blender has a huge potential in areas others have ignored. No one has thought that zBrush can be beaten and yet there are these fantastic tools in Blender. G. Pencil is another surprise and the animation tools in Blender are already on a high level. Guess that attracts many.

So it looks like many also get driven away. Looking at how primitiv rigging tools are in Blender or how limited particles are. Its kind of strange having flip fluids side by an old particle system, that can’t even do dynamics.

Now many can’t wait for function a. animation notes to be finished tools. But that can take time and still they are not easy to use, do to a design problem of nodes in Blender. To many nodes, to many connections, that just scares away the users.

I got kind of a worry that Blender now gets too much hype and the developers scare away by the mass of wishes and requests. But that’s the downside of success.

I hate that damn thing. I especially hate how it ignores many handy hotkeys. I know this can be changed, but it’s is not an intuitive process at all.

Haha. At least I’m not a lone. Well, yes you can have shortcuts changed, but Blender its tricky. Delete is sensitive to what you want to delete and normally you may use options there. So you better use the commands in viewport.
For example: you have an object with subbranches and what to delete it all. You would need first to select all children and delete them, but then Blender only delete certain types, so the nulls (empty) would still spam your outliner, as it automatically get ordered alphabetic. (you can turn that off, but it won’t get you closer).
Blender is just a classic app that lived to long without one and people tend to use collections instead. Like Max User use groups, etc.

Because of the price, subscription is the first time I have ever even considered using C4d.

This attracts me to want to check it out. And I think each time this happens, I point to Blender.

Blender and other FOSS is the cause. But Blender in particular has driven the price of 3D software down everywhere and forced companies to offer subscription.

I would say plan on seeing more of this. And also that it is not suicide. It is a last gasp for air, which is an entirely more realistic look at the situation.

I also subscribe to the Blender cloud. And not only Adobe but many other products as well. And I will say that represents the current trend in software users.

It is the minority of users who will scoff at this. And for every one that drops out, hundreds of subscription customers will replace them. Until Blender even pushes companies to come up with an entirely new strategy that includes offering some form of a fully functioning free version, and finding other ways to generate money.

I predict we will see this sometime within this decade.

It’s still really early to tell but I see certain trend.

First of all I’d love to move away from Photoshop for 2 reasons:

  1. Despite many, many flaws it’s still a highly competent software for professional photo manipulation with true alternative.
  2. Affinity is very good in many areas but it’s still young software and I can’t move my workflows there despite it being better in some critical areas than Photoshop but lacking overall. My personal opinion. I know many swear by Affinity Photo but they probably doesn’t work with as complex projects as I am.

So back to the trend. I believe Adobe shot themselves in the foot with subscription long tern. And the reason is not the price but the access to the software. As soon as you stop paying for a subscription you can’t use software and loose access to you work. It aggregates many professionals. Not the price of subscription.

Adobe forced subscription on people and then looked at the results and based on the user base said that users liked it. Sure, when there was no other options. It was Adobe or nothing else for many of their major packages as Photoshop.

So you can see real desire to move to better option. Lots of people migrated to DaVinci Resolve from Premier and they won’t get back. First of all because it’s really good. Secondly because it’s free or only $300 for studio version with no strings attached. It’s a really great deal.

I can see a slow leak of Photoshop user base to other packages. People who don’t need full power of Photoshop and today there are actually good options depending on what you do. Affinity Photo is the best alternative. I have a license. Yet it’s still not there for more professional users. But I’m hoping it’ll get there eventually because I really want to move away from Photoshop.

Photoshop became extremely stagnant as many industry standard packages in 3D. Photoshop’s core is very old. It can’t use modern hardware at full power. Photoshop’s team doesn’t develop essential features for professional users and ignore it’s requests for years. Well it’s basically 3ds Max or Cinema4D but in photo manipulating/retouching :grin:.

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Actually the big problem with subscription is, that there is no company that has delivered better or more updates after switching to subscription, it’s the opposite. So, it’s just a nicer term for ‚rental Software‘. And who ever know that for a longer period has learned it.
I still don‘t trust subscription anywhere, not on my phone, not with software, not with resources and not with plugins. Still I got forced into it several times. That’s thievery!

Adobe killed his competitors and dreamed of a pile of money, now there dream lies down in scatters and Affinity is the murder. And they can do that for less money than Adobe needs to maintain there huge variety of useless apps. So funny.

And it wasn‘t Blender forcing anyone. Autodesk started to drop price on Maya, making it cheaper then Max to take out XSI. First ruined there income then killed the software. No Blender was involved.

Foundry on the other side still earns brilliant on Nuke subscriptions. Natron hasn’t made it yet, probably won‘t ever. But they still can‘t see the danger from doing lousy updates. Quit mine a while ago, for that money I bought a Mocha and Syntheyes, It still feels like Xmas.

I can say one thing for sure!! Users from C4D won’t be only one who will be moving to Blender. There’s 3Ds max and maya users who are moving from that software to blender for the same reason. These softwares already have took action to change their product to a subscription product. There was even a user from 3Ds and have been user of that software for 2 decades. now he is a user of blender.
I’m not surprised with how things happened with Maxon or 3Ds Max or Maya… Sketchup, too. :thinking:
There is no doubt that ti’s just the beginning… not the ending.

Edit:

another thought is why would these products choose to use subscription method? well let’s think this way

Method 1: a perpetual licence. Sure they could make $500 per user but that’s all they can make.
:thinking: Even they only get less than 25 new users with more than hundreds or thousands of customers who already have perpetual. The company doesn’t make money from customers but make money from new users who bought the product for business or whatever purpose.

Method 2: A subscription licence. Even with new users joining, the customers will still be paying for the product with limited time… that can give the company a lot of money or profile… both new users and customers paying for the product or give up.

which one is more profitable. which one is better for the company? yeah, That’s why things have changed. To be honest, I am really glad that Blender existed and it’s free. Even people can still donate to the people who develop blender can develop it more further. There is nothing we can do about it. Even hundreds thousands of customers complained about the changes… and it won’t change anything.

Honestly, I think there should emerge new kind of offer where software is of high quality and free but company makes money on subscription from additional services that doesn’t limit the software but expands user expirience and adds value.

I think Epic is doing it now.

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Just ask yourself, what was the last BIG INNOVATION since they went subscription, that versus the era where every new version is perpetual, if you look at Adobe and Autodesk objectively, comparatively speaking, they are just not trying anymore, COMPARATIVELY SPEAKING.

Green green composition in 3ds max ? WHO asked for that?
And what was that new feature in Photoshop that you use that was not already in the last Photoshop CS6 ? No really, if you have to look up “what’s new” to reply, baby, you ain’t even using it ;-p ha ha ha

iClone’s character creator is storming the CGI world, Adobe on the other hand had Fuse and they KILLED it like Autodesk KILLED softImage. This is SO CONFUSING.

It’s like…they like burning money…just to show that they can…

How is it “storming” the CGI world?

Check out their artificial intelligence head shot technology, for someone who exclusively create characters poly by poly (edge extrusion) it makes me cry.

This technology is far far ahead of make human/poser/whatever that came before.