Wowsers, Max2017 seems an unwieldy beast!

[NicoC]

The solution to this is to stop paying AD subscription

Boycott ! now we're talking

[tricky]

Doesn't he have GTX970 by any chance?

A titan z I think.

[jstrob]

In fact we can't beg Chaosgroup to do anything. If we just all start using V-Ray in blender and Houdini it will help debug and develop it faster and the faster there will be a fine tuned V-Ray in Houdini and Blender, the more Autodesk management will have to change his way of doing business or just completely abandon the M&E segment.

I know it's not easy to commit to learn a new software but Autodesk knows that and they are aiming for short term profit on the back of that. not because there are bad people at Ad on the contrary, but that's the way a stock market giant works.

We should all show them we can learn! There are now so many free tutorials to help transition to Blender and Houdini... It's surely time well invested.

So today ask for access to the Houdini and Blender version in the nightlies please! And start using them!

[eligiusz]

houdini is only 200$ anually ? Sounds good but I havent seen anyone doing arch viz in it though How about Lightwave ? looks kinda ok and affordable

[glorybound]

I don't think us freelancer bailing would affect AD much. I could be wrong, but I can only imagine larger shops are their bread and butter. Training staff over, to use a new software, would cost 10X what an AD subscription would cost. I get a lot of people wanting me to send them work, always overseas, and most always with a caveat. Most say that they use 2014 because they can't find a good release of 2016 or 2017, yet (un-apologetically). This, to me, implies that most of these people who are trying to break into the business are using cracked software. If overseas people are using cracked software I can only image that people in the states are doing the same.

[jstrob]

houdini is only 200$ anually ? Sounds good but I havent seen anyone doing arch viz in it though How about Lightwave ? looks kinda ok and affordable

The people who created Lightwave are now all working on Modo. Just saying...

Not because you haven't seen archviz done in Houdini that it can't be done. It's only 200$ a year for indie since really not long ago and my guess is if we could get V-Ray as nicely implemented in Houdini than in Max, you would see a lot more archviz in Houdini. Also having access to ready to render assets that you can buy must be a major need for archviz, so it's also a matter of growing that kind of userbase and wait a bit. There are a lot of stock models all prepared in max/V-Ray but not much in houdini/Mantra.

My guess is that for Archviz Blender would be better and there are so many people downloading Blender lately (at least half a million a month) and more and more stock models available. And the good thing is that nothing prevent you from using both Blender and Houdini for the same price!

[jstrob]

I don't think us freelancer bailing would affect AD much. I could be wrong, but I can only imagine larger shops are their bread and butter. Training staff over, to use a new software, would cost 10X what an AD subscription would cost. I get a lot of people wanting me to send them work, always overseas, and most always with a caveat. Most say that they use 2014 because they can't find a good release of 2016 or 2017, yet (un-apologetically). This, to me, implies that most of these people who are trying to break into the business are using cracked software. If overseas people are using cracked software I can only image that people in the states are doing the same.

You're probably right cause AD is acting like if indies just don't exist at all. Indies have the choice to use the free Blender or the amazing Houdini for only 200$ or use max or maya for around 2000$ a year (exclugin all the plugins that you will also need to pay)... How in the world can you justify paying 10x times higher for max or maya when you can combine blender and Houdini for only 200$?

In fact there are only 2 possible reasons: 1- you need to do something very specific very fast and you really can't do it with houdini or blender (I myself can't think of anything). 2- you just don't know how to do it and you don't have time to learn so you just shell out 10 times more bucks to.

Reason 2 is my own reason for still using max and it could become problematic once newer and wiser people start bidding on the same jobs as mine. So I just stopped paying subscription but i'm lucky enough to have a perpetual license so I have still a few years to completely transition over to a purely houdini-blender-zbrush workflow.

[glorybound]

Shouldn't have SketchUp been a 3DS MAX for ArchViz killer? I mean, it does almost everything you need to do as far as modeling. Is V-Ray as full featured for SU? Then, you have all the plug-ins that need to work, like Itoosoft.

[Lupaz]

Shouldn't have SketchUp been a 3DS MAX for ArchViz killer? I mean, it does almost everything you need to do as far as modeling. Is V-Ray as full featured for SU? Then, you have all the plug-ins that need to work, like Itoosoft.

Yup. Sketch-up is already the standard in architectural firms in my opinion.
But as someone who loves 3D stuff, that makes me sick.

[glorybound]

Revit in larger firms, probably. If you get them in Revit, you have them in MAX.

[Morbid Angel]

You're probably right cause AD is acting like if indies just don't exist at all. Indies have the choice to use the free Blender or the amazing Houdini for only 200$ or use max or maya for around 2000$ a year (exclugin all the plugins that you will also need to pay)... How in the world can you justify paying 10x times higher for max or maya when you can combine blender and Houdini for only 200$?

In fact there are only 2 possible reasons: 1- you need to do something very specific very fast and you really can't do it with houdini or blender (I myself can't think of anything). 2- you just don't know how to do it and you don't have time to learn so you just shell out 10 times more bucks to.

Reason 2 is my own reason for still using max and it could become problematic once newer and wiser people start bidding on the same jobs as mine. So I just stopped paying subscription but i'm lucky enough to have a perpetual license so I have still a few years to completely transition over to a purely houdini-blender-zbrush workflow.

My biggest fear is that not knowing houdini deep enough, if I encounter a severe production halting problem, I don't have any one to ask for help Also some things in houdini are wild, like correct me if I'm wrong but you have to create your own buffer channels for things like multi-matte, or I tried creating an occlusion shader - wait I have to write one. For some reason it did not exist in the presets...haha

[Lupaz]

My biggest fear is that not knowing houdini deep enough, if I encounter a severe production halting problem, I don't have any one to ask for help Also some things in houdini are wild, like correct me if I'm wrong but you have to create your own buffer channels for things like multi-matte, or I tried creating an occlusion shader - wait I have to write one. For some reason it did not exist in the presets...haha

How about Blender? There's a large community that can jump in when time presses I think.
I'm gonna give it a try at one point

[Companioncube]

if blender/houdini/modo/C4D were equal or better replacements to Maya/3Ds Max we already be using them. They all have their own bugs and other pitfalls.

edit: although watching Houdini 16 launch event actually got me excited. they seem highly motivated to continual improve all areas.

[Morbid Angel]

if blender/houdini/modo/C4D were equal or better replacements to Maya/3Ds Max we already be using them. They all have their own bugs and other pitfalls.

edit: although watching Houdini 16 launch event actually got me excited. they seem highly motivated to continual improve all areas.

Don't get me wrong. My limited experience with houdini showed me that its a far more advanced software then anything I've ever learned before. But being a total sandbox, you need to have a much bigger knowledge of things there. For example, same tools like in max / maya exist in houdini but they are called differently. Like smooth normal is called cusp as example. Not knowing this, where there are hundreds of nodes with hundreds of attributes in each, and total ability to go down to the math level of each node is overwhelmingly complex

For blender, I'm not entirely sure. It seems like an extensive software to me. I just don't have the room in my head to learn a new software that I can "maybe" use. I'd rather learn houdini for that matter

Lastly I prefere to stay in the same software which I will be rendering in. So there is no vray in houdini (except beta) and arnold I'm not sure about...mantra just does not give the result I'm used to after vray.

To use houdini and to learn it for just the complexity of it, only to bake everything into cache and export to max / maya is too much overhead.

Large studios can afford the time and diskspace etc, but smaller artists just cannot.

[mitviz]

Don't get me wrong. My limited experience with houdini showed me that its a far more advanced software then anything I've ever learned before. But being a total sandbox, you need to have a much bigger knowledge of things there. For example, same tools like in max / maya exist in houdini but they are called differently. Like smooth normal is called cusp as example. Not knowing this, where there are hundreds of nodes with hundreds of attributes in each, and total ability to go down to the math level of each node is overwhelmingly complex

For blender, I'm not entirely sure. It seems like an extensive software to me. I just don't have the room in my head to learn a new software that I can "maybe" use. I'd rather learn houdini for that matter

Lastly I prefere to stay in the same software which I will be rendering in. So there is no vray in houdini (except beta) and arnold I'm not sure about...mantra just does not give the result I'm used to after vray.

To use houdini and to learn it for just the complexity of it, only to bake everything into cache and export to max / maya is too much overhead.

Large studios can afford the time and diskspace etc, but smaller artists just cannot.

so far 5 people have told me to start looking into houdini, i hear its really powerful