"Vray registered legal users list" AKA "Lets make life harder for warez monkeys"

[rivoli]

do you remember renderdrive?

wow, I forgot that even existed.. there must be a reason people don't even remember, let alone use them.

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Remember spheron ray tracing hardware that u could buy extra that was accelerating raytracing - now they dont even make software any more just HDRI stuff... I cant imagine a 2 000 000$ render farm investment that then had to be upgraded for 100 000-500 000$ to support brazil - its suicide now days for render engine.

[instinct]

Look at what Caustic has done with Brazil...is that the future for preventing piracy? Not so easy to pirate their tech due to it being reliant upon a proprietary piece of hardware.

The world's economy seems too disperate for competition. Services and products that have the capability to travel over the internet are only as valuable as the lowest common denominator decides. Welcome to the gloabaliz(s?)ation age?

I don't think so. I neither think they went this route to prevent privacy, nor that this is the future. For the former, you do not need the card, it just makes the renderer faster (using OpenCL, hence also uses your GPU/CPU etc eventually). There main product seems to be the SDK in addition, and the renderer more of a use case . For the latter, do you remember renderdrive? There have been a bunch of similar products, and there is a reason they were pretty much abandoned.

Regards,
Thorsten

[beestee]

Look at what Caustic has done with Brazil...is that the future for preventing piracy? Not so easy to pirate their tech due to it being reliant upon a proprietary piece of hardware.

The world's economy seems too disperate for competition. Services and products that have the capability to travel over the internet are only as valuable as the lowest common denominator decides. Welcome to the gloabaliz(s?)ation age?

[glorybound]

they were talking about this on a Twit podcast today. Apparently someone (I think Aereo) told Google, if they can stop child porn, they can stop piracy. I think this is the episode: http://twit.tv/show/frame-rate/76

[PIXELBOX_SRO]

indee a valuable addition to the post Sawyer.
I think that so called western civilization can only blame itself for not being agile and hard working enough decades ago. Lots of people seem to work in services but the labor and skilled workers are more and more hard to find. Policy of "we will think int he west and you will work in the east for our well being".....seems to be "paying off"
Every highscholl rat nowadays wants to go to university....there is more and more people with title wanting nice and warm seat in the office for perfect starting salary...i d happily choose to be a plumber if i had to make a choice again...
where did we come to? Look at Europe...on the edge of an abbyss...so sad.

[lukx]

hmmm I never thought about it this way... but you're totally right everything is made in china so why not renders well I guess it's time to accept things as they are.

[Sawyer]

We seem to come back to this issue every few months. I know when I ran my business I would go to a meeting give a presentation a huge number would end with the client showing some work done by a company overseas that would charge at most $300. My proposal would be around $1500. I did get one client that had been using overseas talent but most of the time we thanked each other for our time and I never heard from them. Its frustrating. Incredibly frustrating.

This is an issue that has nothing to do with software prices or pirating. Its part of it and it does give us a bit of legitimacy to our argument but almost every industry right now faces this same issue. Doesnt matter if you are working on a computer or assembly line or construction. I dont know if I would have charged that much less if I would have used 100% pirated software. Maybe a couple dollars an hour. Thats all. And I know people in our industry who thought I was undercutting them by charging what I did. The undercutting argument doesnt really hold water. Part of what we do as business is market our services at what we think is fair not what our peers who are our competitors want. But it sucks. Meeting with a client who thought you were worth $10 an hour - its crap. And it has nothing to do with our industry - everything we touch has been made overseas. The computer you render on probably was. Keyboard I am typing on - monitor I am looking at and even the Simpons episode my kids watched all were at least partially products of overseas talent. I cant imagine how we can address it for our industry when its really the norm for business in 2012.

[trixian]

There is a middle ground. Do what mmorpgs do.
You log in to a online service to authenticate. Software is still local, as are resources, but the only issue is you need to be online and the servers need to be running.
Not to knock VRay, but I don't think the possible "VRay Authentication server" would be hit by the kind of traffic the big games generate, even though we like to think we are a large community , so you won't get the insane DDos effects like blizzard is getting with diablo3.
Bonus is that vray can finally auto patch continuously without needing to run any installers. This again opens for ChaosGroup to enable some nifty DRM that can be updated faster than the pirates can crack.

[voltron7]

Maybe this guy is a legit vray user but he thinks that we're all pomptious asses here on chaos group forums so he doesnt post

lol, I know a few legit excellent 3d artists that don't post here for that exact reason! (Their opinion, not mine )

[instinct]

And how does this affect the rest of the artists? It doesn't. My heart does not exactly bleed for autodesk. If you are willing to risk unreliable software viruses etc. go for it. As long as you're not undercutting the market because of this, its fine. When you use warez, and charge 1/10 of the going rate, that affects all of us.

It does affect you too indirectly. It means they can offer MORE for the money. It means they can afford better Hardware and more people to be faster etc. So even if they charge the same price, they will have the better package to offer. You can not separate Price, Quality and Time. If you are able to save on one, it affects the others on one way or another.

Regards,
Thorsten

[pailhead]

The difference is that the a-holes that do this here tend to charge as if they bought the software, so the difference is less obvious

/b

s

And how does this affect the rest of the artists? It doesn't. My heart does not exactly bleed for autodesk. If you are willing to risk unreliable software viruses etc. go for it. As long as you're not undercutting the market because of this, its fine. When you use warez, and charge 1/10 of the going rate, that affects all of us.

[adamf13]

There's some good stuff in that link, Bobby. Thanks!

[glorybound]

I would question that. It is one of those things that sounds good but I am not sure it's actually true. I couldn't find anything to support that, and my guess would be that it would vary quite a bit with different market/services anyway.

It's probably more accurate to say that in most cases people will tend to choose the best deal that *still gets them what they want*. Some may, but most will not choose the cheapest if it doesn't give them what they want. That is the majority that makes up our potential client base IMO.

It's not always true the cheapest supplier is not giving them something that meets their needs, and often the difference we might bring to a project simply doesn't warrant the extra money. If it doesn't measurably affect incomes for the clients then there may be little incentive for many companies.

b

I will see if I can find the resource to the stats he quoted.

[MoonDoggie]

thanks for the link bobby. Checking it out now.