hm, the render licencing is sweet. I have real problems rendering larger jobs with the mr/softimage licensing situation. Not because of mr itself, its renders everything I throw at it and fast enough. But the scalability with a renderfarm is a problem for me. Mentalray standalone is no option and 5 batchrender licences shipped with XSI is simply not enough. I will stay to softimage for a lot of reasons but,… the rendering side is awful. When I look over to the 3dsmax based studios I could cry. Did they still have unlimitedrenderlicenses™ for mentalray? Ah lucky guys, those cockroachers, ay!
cheers, sven From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Thomas Helzle Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2012 23:51 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: uk subscription pricing I would subscribe to what Tim said. Some things are different (often in a good way, sometimes not), some things need a bit of refinement (601 is the first release with real CA tools), so it really depends on what you do if it could fit your bill. With me doing mainly illustrations and stills, there is little to complain about and I actually look forward to digging deeper into the CA tools - the available tools like full body IK and the posing system are pretty sweet IMO. As for the rendering, it replaces MR, Vray and some Schwarzeneggers quite nicely IMO. Together with Thea Render for unbiased, I'm all set when it comes to rendering. If you take the price of the package into the equation (that includes 50 render nodes), I don't see much else that can compete (other than Blender). But yes, it is NOT XSI, which in some areas I find pretty relaxing - many things in XSI are overkill for what I do and others are broken for so long, it's not even funny anymore. BTW. there is now a more complete SDK to go with the app. I already wrote my first shader in one long 24 hour run of coding and GUI wrangling (XML based). I enjoy learning something new actually and my XSI 2012 will be good for some years as a companion app. 2013 contained nothing I want anyway. But I threw that into the discussion mainly since I don't see Autodesk making any sensible moves in this century and for some people, modo could be a way out of it's stifling embrace... Cheers, Tom On 2 May 2012 21:26, Tim Crowson <[email protected]> wrote: The deformation system in modo 601 is very powerful. The actual animation tools (animation editor) in 601 are not yet on par with what you get in something like Softimage, although they let you get the job done. The developers realize this. The alembic support is there, but is not ready for the riggors of a production pipeline. The developers are aware of this also. There are some stability issues with 601 (although SI 2012 has taken the gold medal in crashes for me lately), and Luxology is quite driven to get rid of those and make it very reliable. They're aware of the areas in which their software needs to grow, and are pretty passionate about getting it there. As for the renderer, it's hard to not gush a little. The thing is sweet. Smokes Mental Ray consistently. I'd sooner put it toe-to-toe with Arnold than anything else. That would be an interesting comparision. If Alembic support in 601 gets where it needs to be, I could see modo being used to render more productions. Modo 601 can do an awful lot that you might not expect. It has its own way of doing things (render passes are very different!). But is a very useful tool to have access to. Tim Crowson Lead CG Artist Magnetic Dreams Animation Studio, Inc. 2525 Lebanon Pike, Building C. Nashville, TN 37214 Ph 615.885.6801 | Fax 615.889.4768 | www.magneticdreams.com [email protected] On 5/2/2012 1:38 PM, phil harbath wrote: do you have any thoughts on the character animation tools, they don't seem to be "there" yet, however, I haven't had the opportunity to use it yet. ----- Original Message ----- From: Thomas Helzle <mailto:[email protected]> To: [email protected] Sent: Wednesday, May 02, 2012 4:36 AM Subject: Re: uk subscription pricing Have a look at modo 601. Depending on what you do, it might be a nice alternative (it is for me, I'm no longer on subscription as well - partly because of the price increase). You can import ICE particles via realflow .bin and alembic is built in (didn't test that one really though). The renderer is brilliant, and while the layer based approach has some cons compared to nodes, it also has some things that are impossible to do in MRay out of the box like instancing of materials and textures. I already start to really dig it and would prefer it over MR in most cases. For me, the alternative would have been to buy Vray for XSI. Modo is actively developed in all areas (SP1 came out yesterday) and the community is very open and welcoming. The main thing I miss is the modifier stack for modelling, but I still have XSI 2012 if I should need it badly. With all the things that may be missing, you also get a load of nice and well though out things not available in XSI to this date: you even have a color palette (yay ;-) ), great tools for measuring and exact work, it comes with a nice library of USABLE presets, and it's way more tailored to the small shop or freelancer without a herd of TDs. I bought it while the crossgrade offer was still on, so it was way cheaper than another year of subscription for XSI would have been. Overall, 601 is the first version of modo that I personally would call pretty "feature complete" as a package... The demoversion is said to be out end of this or beginning of next week. May be an alternative for you, may be not. For me it is pretty much the only alternative, since Lightwave still has a way to go (although v11 is pretty good) and Cinema doesn't agree with me... I keep a very open eye on Blender though. http://www.luxology.com/ Otherwise I think Raffaele nailed it. And I'm not interested in making Shareholders happy if they don't make me happy in return ;-) Cheers, Tom That's because they want you to buy the suites, instead of being on one of the smaller products. That way they can make "new seat" money, look good in front of the board of directors, and present figures that (artificially so) suggest their market isn't completely stagnant and deadlocked. The joys of being out in the stock market and having to grow in revenue and potential revenue every quarter, or suffer an onslaught of sales and stock depreciation. On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 11:01 PM, Daniel Sweeney <[email protected]> wrote: yeh I have not renewed my subs either because of this as i cannot justify the increase. bit of a joke. a friend said its pretty much the same price for the bottom subs of the creation suite. Daniel Sweeney 3D Generalist Mobile: +44 (0)7743429771 <tel:%2B44%20%280%297743429771> Email: <mailto:[email protected]> [email protected] <http://northforge.co.uk/> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 1:36 PM, Matt Morris <[email protected]> wrote: I remember bringing this up a while back, talking about the lack of a silver subscription and an imminent uk price jump. I believe Maurice replied to say they were looking into it. However, since then it appears its been basically shelved because softimage customers are mostly on subscription and it could mean a revenue drop. So that leaves UK customers with a 70% price increase from last year's subscription. 70%!!! That's a huge amount, and will directly lead to me cancelling my second licence (which was only used periodically) and thinking hard about renewing the other. Given that commercials have had budgets slashed I just can't justify spending that much on a yearly basis. Its a shocking decision. Way to go Autodesk. -- www.matinai.com -- Our users will know fear and cower before our software! Ship it! Ship it and let them flee like the dogs they are! --
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