Academic license

[skysurfer]

I'm just wondering if there's any change in the academic license.
The cost of one year lease it's too much, at least for the school I know.
It's this a way to select just the richer one's?

Thanks.

[corey]

Hi Skysurfer-

The latest pricing information and academic policy can be found here; http://www.chaosgroup.com/en/2/vray_academic.html

Best,
Corey

[wcmansp]

Let me add some additional perspective to Skysurfer's comment. We are also an educational institution and in 2008 we purchased a 30-pack of V-Ray for Rhino 1.05.29 from a US distributor for $800USD. We added another 30-pack in 2011 for roughly the same price. When 1.5 was released in 2012, educational institutions were able to upgrade their 1.05 copies for the cost of the new licensing dongle:

University V-Ray 1.5 for Rhino Lab Bundle - 30 licenses - 610 Euro/
850 USD/ 530 GBP
* Educational clients can receive a free upgrade at any point in time
after purchasing a dongle

To provide some point of comparison, if we create a metric called "copy-month" -- the number of copies available each month from our original purchase until ~now -- we end up with about 3000 and, with a total cost of ~$1700 over that time, this produces a cost for providing one copy of V-Ray for Rhino each of these months of about $.56/copy/month. Comparing this with the current pricing for 2.0, the copy-month cost for one year of 15 copies is $1,250/(15*12) or ~$7.00/copy/month. If we want to maintain our current level of 60 copies, the metric is $3,370/(15*12) or ~$18.75/copy/month. Regardless of the reasons, the new pricing produces a rate increase for us of ~3400% ($18.75/$.56) over what we had been paying for the last several years. If 2.0 had been released as a 30-copy Lab Pack at $800USD, and we had bought two of those, our cost/copy/month would have been ($1,700+$1,600)/3000 = $1.10/copy/month, a much more manageable number.

There are some other aspects of the subscription model and educational environments that also come into play. One is that the subscription model tends to assume and value a regular release cycle. There hasn't been that history with V-Ray for Rhino -- releases have been far between and even more so for educational customers who have not had access to the "daily" builds between official releases. I will temper this by saying that there's also a limit in the ability to incorporate changes into the educational environment, which, in general, runs more on a yearly cycle. Still, when Rhino 5 was in beta, we pushed out new versions when they were released.

The rate of change brings up another challenge. When 1.5 was released we had to spend some time, and needed assistance from experienced Forum participants, to conclude 1) Rhino files once modified in 1.5 would no longer work with 1.05, where we had both versions in the environment (wonder if 2.0 changes this as well); and 2) it was necessary to set a V-Ray variable -- setbatchrenderon=True -- to continue to use our renderfarm software (Deadline, a well-known package). Although 1.5, overall, did not seem to be fully baked when it was released, there has still been, over the time we have used V-Ray for Rhino, greater reliance on having to test features to see what has changed than assuming things would continue working as they did in the previous version and this introduces a lag time in adoption and a post-beta approach to deploying new versions.

It will be interesting to see what the uptake of the new plan is going to be, as clearly the big money would come from the 3DS Max, Maya, and SketchUp arenas -- VfR is not as popular. Realistically, it was a pretty good deal through 1.5, better for education than for Chaos Group. The subscription plan seems to have swung too far in the other direction, as even comparing a 30-copy one year price at, say, $900USD ($900/(30*12))=$2.50/copy/month vs. the subscription rate for 30 copies of ($2160/(30*12))=$6/copy/month shows a 240% increase. Some vendors, like Autodesk, have moved more towards giving their product away to students; Adobe's push in selling their Creative Cloud subscription approach to education is by trying to show that it is "not much more" than they're already spending on individual purchases (but they're still getting a lot of push back). The Chaos Group approach, on the other hand, seems more likely to generate a re-evaluation of the product -- how important is it in the curriculum, how many do we actually need, what else is an option, ie. how can we reduce our cost. There's not a lot of "spend a little more to get a little more" approach that I see in higher education (US) budgets -- the emphasis is on spending less.

[skysurfer]

I perfectly agree with you.
This new license method doesn't fit with schools...

[wcmansp]

I need to correct the math in my original response. The copy-month pricing for 60 copies of 2.0 is $3,370/(60*12)=$4.68/copy/month, not $3,370/(15*12)=$18.75/copy/month. Even with the correction the increase is still, for us, 835% over the previous pricing policy. I'd expect that was some projection on the rate of adoption and revenue and the assumption that some would drop but that the new pricing would offset those losses. It will certainly put more pressure on education to make choices and it's a gamble to see which way it goes. This new pricing also alters the market position. Flamingo nXt and Brazil still follow McNeel's 30-copy bundle pricing (~$700-$900/30) and become less expensive alternatives; even Maxwell Render, considered a fairly high-end renderer, is now less expensive ($1,285/20). On top of this, Autodesk has gotten into the Rhino rendering business, with "Realtime Renderer Plug-in for Rhino". This has no useful educational pricing yet, and, given the success of V-Ray with 3ds Max, doesn't mean it will be a big seller, but you have to wonder why they would offer a plug-in (and actually it's the third plug-in -- T-Splines and Shape Modeling are the other two) for a program they don't own. That's unusual for Autodesk -- they normally buy a product first, as they did with 3ds Max, Lightscape, and Ecotect, and a renderer doesn't do anything for bringing a Rhino file into an Autodesk product. But that's a different topic.

[DmitryMJA]

Academic license

So how do they qualify for the "Elite" team. I read to be on academic all state they have to the meet the minimum requirements that you posted. But I wasnt sure how they got 1st, 2nd team, elite, etc after that.

Is it by SAT scores? Athletic ability? Ive known some valedictorians who were on honorable mention team while others from same school were on first team.