Maxon survey
Added 2024-11-12 13:26:42 +0000 UTCHello everyone,
just out of curiosity, how happy are you currently with Maxon and it's development?
Comments
I will indeed start in January with Houdini!
Vincent Schwenk
2024-11-17 10:20:18 +0000 UTCThanks for sharing your thoughts Vincent. You'll enjoy sticking with C4D until the day you truly dive into Houdini—then there's no going back 😈 (kidding there, I know how important C4D is for your work and your community)
Benoît Texier
2024-11-16 09:50:36 +0000 UTCInvention, innovation, and standardization
Jack Colby
2024-11-14 19:05:29 +0000 UTCThey already offer cinema 4d lite for free though. Why should all features be free?
e me
2024-11-14 15:41:45 +0000 UTCFirst of all thanks for all your thoughts and comments. I wanna start with the money point, as this was mentioned a lot. So if you are a professional artist and you are earning your living with that, then the price is totally worth it. But if you are just starting this price tag is hefty. When I started my career as a freelancer I made 400€ a month, I lived very poor😂. If I would be at the same situation again the temptation of 0€ (Blender) or 250€ (Houdini) is very high. They are loosing the new generation with that. I am also teaching at universities and no one is teaching C4D anymore. Overall I think Maxon's marketing and strategy is not good, because they are a stock based company (Nemetschek) they try to squeeze out every penny from their community to make the shareholders happy. There is another example for this, I am a beta tester and therefore I got a free license, in addition to that I was paying for a second one, because switching licenses is such an annoying hustle, plus I very often render and work at the same time (which only works with 2 licenses). But just recently people have to pay now for a beta tester license. If I would be Maxon, I would have given me a free one😂 But overall I have to say that I really enjoyed the last 10years with C4D. It was easy to use, it had a great development, think about the version where we got a volume mesher and fields and more in one release. Even though I am struggling with many issues and bugs which are not getting fixed, I am still happy with that software. For me it will be hard to make a change because on the one hand as I said, I really like it and on the other hand, I am super fast now. As a business perspective I totally understand Maxon's moves, trying to buy all competitors and become a monopolist (like Adobe) but I have the feeling that there is less focus on C4D now. Less progress (especially compared to their rivals). But in the end it is just a tool which helps me to express my colorful and fluid imagination. For now it is still the industry No.1, but the question is for how long. One of the most important things is and will be the ability to be creative, to have a good eye, to find interesting stories, colors, contrasts, overall just be a good designer. That's also why I am teaching not only C4D and RS here, I always try to tell you what I think, my creative process or why I like certain colors and so on. Thanks to everyone here for their support! Cheers Vincent
Vincent Schwenk
2024-11-14 13:43:09 +0000 UTCI paid 350€ for 2 years of Houdini Indie license, would be 2k€+ for C4D + Redshift. I understand people saying that as a professional, you should be in the ability to pay for expensive licenses, because that's the way it's done in the industry. But let's be honest now. I live in France, and price of living has increased a lot. In the mean time, budgets are absolutely not going up, projects are getting canceled everywhere, some industries are getting very fucked up because of AI (cinema, video game...). It's becoming tough to earn your bread (French expression), and I'm getting quite angry to Maxon and Adobe especially for increasing their prices, while having a complete fucked policy (Adobe with AI, Maxon with capabilities that are, apart from simulations, not much better than 10 years ago). On the other way around, I also don't like this "Blender-ish" tendency to want everything for free, because it doesn't work like that. But the thing is, working in 3D is very expensive, you have to pay for assets, textures, for softwares like Substance, Redshift, C4D, AI tools, UV tools, and let's not forget buying a powerful workstation, which is becoming a mountain to climb with the crazy graphic card prices (no one paid for a 2K€ graphic cards 10 years ago). I'm glad Houdini is less expensive so I can pay for a Threadripper for example. So yes, you should be able to pay for your tools as a professional, but let's put some context here, and let's take a look around and see what other softwares companies are doing (Blender and SideFX especially).
Benoît Texier
2024-11-13 07:22:21 +0000 UTCMy subscription is 300€ more a year. (Maxon One) But for me personally, that doesn’t matter. I will write me thoughts later under this post.
Vincent Schwenk
2024-11-12 19:46:09 +0000 UTCVery well said
Vincent Schwenk
2024-11-12 19:39:50 +0000 UTCAt the core, totally agree with Jack Colby. I have the feeling that we are watching Maxon's market dominance in the creative sector crumble. For years they have failed to build a positive creator space, instead everything is massively fragmented with paywalls. The incredible simulation system, the node system, the render fidelity, they are going in exactly the direction the market needs. But they make it terribly narrow-minded. Hiding pulling factors like premium assets behind paywalls, failing to make the node system ART FRIENDLY (while blenders geometry nodes are turning the industry on its head) since years; They promote community exchange on one side (Capsules for example) but create ZERO community on the other side. Where is our marketplace for all kinds of assets? Where everyone could contribute and also sell. Does Epic have to take over this now with Fab? I also don't have the feeling that Redshift is getting more competitive, rather more bloated and slower, it used to be the fastest GPU renderer in the world. The massive memory leaks and very slow response times in complex scenes make the Unreal engine much more attractive. The competition is sawing away at Maxon's chair more than it has for years. I'm not going to switch to Blender, but Unreal is so much fun in the creative flow that I'm already splitting my projects between the two tools.
mike
2024-11-12 16:40:10 +0000 UTCThe way redshift handles materials having to constantly “render them” is abysmal working with redshift intuitively requires significant modifications to experience any degree of performance on semi advanced scenes overall redshift needs to be optimized also the way c4d utilizes the cache across the entire software package is cumbersome and clunky and needs serious attention and reworking as of now c4d asks an extreme amount of idiosyncrasy from the user to maintain creative flow and realistic working times to get to hd final outputs this is a huge hinderance despite the actual mechanics of its wonderful simulation system it doesn’t mean much if you have to constantly redistribute your system resources to get to a final presentable render.
Jack Colby
2024-11-12 15:49:20 +0000 UTCI think all apps are tools and there is no reason been to critical. As Christian mentions, the price is not the issue. For a software I use everyday, it's the equivalent of 2 days of work. I also pay for 3dsmax and Houdini. If you're working in the 3D industry you can afford any of these tools and then just pick the one that suits you best. I'm currently diving deep into Houdini :-)
Yann Verbeke
2024-11-12 15:45:32 +0000 UTCAll software should offer a full free version but people like Maxon still exist in the old world where they think in terms of supply / demand when in reality its ONLY a race to /standardization/ which they are doing well at a top level (adobe-zbrush-rshift) but on the ground level (the only level that matters) they have lost to blender and will suffer for it. unless they can shift focus to building a more diverse creator economy (outside of product centric advertising and VFX) they will ultimately lose to the extremely efficient open source blender community. They need new people with new ideas to use their software. They will likely double down and squeeze existing users until it hurts but let’s hope they can recognize the need to look at the world differently because the actual software development itself is by far one of the most versatile high performance packages out there. They still need to dramatically improve render times and if they found a way with redshift to do realtime like eevee (which again here they are hurting themselves not having a thriving creator economy) they could become the standard and they would basically do what Adobe did with 2D in the 3D. We’ll see they don’t have a lot of taste and actually you specifically gave them a significant new aesthetic life which I would argue now this Eurocentric minimalist aesthetic has more or less run its course and the spiderverse machinima virtual influencer demands to be reckoned which is predominantly a blender phenomenon at the moment unless you count the like 5 figureheads from momentor the next five years will be extremely important for Maxon and getting new people in the door that aren’t trying to zbrush a grotesque maximalist monster or do a tight lit bottle render will be make or break for their life cycle.
Jack Colby
2024-11-12 15:27:22 +0000 UTCHold up. Whats 300 more a year exactly? You mean its 300GBP more a year since they added: REDSHIFT RED GIANT UNIVERSE ZBRUSH FORGER Or you mean C4D is 300 more a year?
Christian Vilderman
2024-11-12 15:26:34 +0000 UTCYes, exactly! That's unfortunate for us Octane users. I see it as a attempt from Maxon to get us to ditch Octane.
Joakim Ulseth
2024-11-12 14:58:50 +0000 UTCit's 300 more per year
Vincent Schwenk
2024-11-12 14:57:18 +0000 UTCI believe I got a notification about a slight price increase. But my subscription isn't due until May 2025
Joakim Ulseth
2024-11-12 14:54:56 +0000 UTCHas the price actually changed though? RS now comes default with C4D.
Christian Vilderman
2024-11-12 14:48:10 +0000 UTCAs a Octane user I'm not a fan of bundling Redshift together with C4D and rising the price. But I kinda get why Maxon want to lock you in, and their incentive to get you to use their render engine.
Joakim Ulseth
2024-11-12 14:45:37 +0000 UTCPeople saying its expensive arent really Maxons customers (or customers of anything) and are earning very low income. I just paid 700GBP for 1 year of C4D&RS. Current average UK day rate is 400GBP. So it cost me less than 2 days work for the software for 1 year. Plus I can claim tax back on that 700GBP. Time to get a grip of reality folks. Good luck.
Christian Vilderman
2024-11-12 14:36:21 +0000 UTCi dont want the whole suite, just c4d but then i miss out on content, bit mean . . .
Terry
2024-11-12 14:28:22 +0000 UTCCompared to Blender & Houdini?
James Conkle
2024-11-12 14:25:57 +0000 UTCThe way Maxon is splitting the community and customers with tiered versions of their software is rather alarming.
Tobias Lind
2024-11-12 13:41:39 +0000 UTC
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