Vantage .......So how much is it going to be?

[fixeighted]

Sadly I think that looking after artists may be a great way to gain a fantastic reputation, but as soon as a business hits a certain stage in its development it seems that bean-counters get involved.....then all bets are off.
It is, at the root, all about money.
The more they have, the more they want, it seems.
Shareholders need appeasing, after all.
Shareholders don't care about the people who use the product, they purely want a return on their 'investment'

There are wonderful people involved in the ongoing development of Vray and I'm not necessarily pointing a finger at anyone specifically. They've done a great job over the years.
This situation, however, is something that clearly has irritated a large amount of its users.
Many of the users posting in this thread I don't recognise, so the fact that they are voicing these concerns now is saying something that I think clearly indicates a much more widely felt anger than I had anticipated.

[alex_field]

This pricing is obscene, I'll be paying over like 4x more for Vray + Vantage than I am for 3ds max? Vantage still has a way to go in terms of development and features, this really is a bold move! Might be time to start learning new software.

[philip_nel]

Got the follow up mail...was hoping the premium subscription would be adjusted as Vantage is removed from it...

[mindventures]

Just crossed my mind...
Probably more and more people will use Vantage to render their final animations, some already do and even more will do in the future, even with maybe some loss of quality, but Vantage will get better and better, so there will eventually be less need to use their cloud rendering service or more important, rent their expensive render nodes, which I bet they right now make a lot of money from.
As a small freelancer you could just buy one workstation with 4 rtx 4090 and could get by with only one vray premium license to render your animation jobs. This workflow of course is (kind of) already possible using unreal, but it's more inconvenient to bring stuff over, with Vantage it's much more easy, as a vray user especially.
I think that is at least one reason for the extremely high price for a Vantage subscription, but I may also be totally wrong about this of course

[mindventures]

I'm happy that I have not already integrated this into my workflow, soon having to pay another 50 euros per month and to add yet another subscription to the countless ones I already have is even worse. Then it's probably better to invest my time getting deeper into unreal or blender. Subscriptions really have become a bad disease...especially for freelancers/small studios. I'm still hoping for some kind of a vray indie license, that would ease the situation for everyone a lot! I think the idea of indie licenses is a very fair one. If you don't exceed a certain limit of earnings, usually around $100,000, you can get a discounted license. I mean SideFx, even Autodesk and others are doing it, you can do it too somehow Chaos, I'm hundred percent sure!
We will see...sometimes miracles happen...

[seth_richardson]

I've got to be honest here played with 1.8. It was alright, nothing extraordinary. The restrictions on materials and memory usage was a big turn off.

Chaos isn't going to win the real time race.... why? Because it's free in so many other packages. Most notably UE5 which is... wait for it free and already industry standard in many different areas including film and archviz. Octane has made massive leaps with their realtime engine to the point where it has a 1 to 1 feature set with its offline pathtracer..... guess what its also part of their subscription when it releases.

Then you have blender options which have been making big strides as well and it's all free.

had the price for premium been adjusted and vantage priced reasonably at 20 to 30 dollars with a decent feature set (which we dont even know yet) sure sucks but can be justified a bit easier.

However just flat out matching the price of their offline renderer vray without even a feature list on top of the painfully slow development only a fool would fork over DOUBLE what they are giving chaos currently.

I hope vantage crashes and burns due to pricing. People vote with their wallets.

Lastly big studios working on large projects would never use vantage over vray for rendering it simply is too restrictive on features and it's memory usage just doesn't allow it to work on those projects.

The piercing silence so far to all this tells us all we need to know, they couldn't care less. So we will be voting with our wallets and dropping chaos all together, there's plenty of cost effective solutions out there that do what vray does just as well. Way to screw loyal customers. Used vray way back in modo, 3dsmax... since 2008, moved the company I'm at from keyshot to vray (product based renders). Done.

[Pixelcon]

I think I will be moving from premium down to the basic level (if that's even possible). Removing features and not adjusting price isn't a cool move, but I'm not surprised.
It feels like a bit of a kick in the balls when a LOT of the small feature requests I make either take years to come to fruition or they just go ignored.
I feel like the shift from focusing on Archviz towards the motion picture industry was when things changed for the worse for me.

I could use vray 5 and I'd be perfectly happy if just a couple of small niggles and fixes had been made.
Personally I don't need the majority of whatever new features are coming as they seem to be serving the movie and vfx industries.

[bos]

Took 3 days to get a response from Phillip Miller on the initial post; I doubt we will hear from anyone.

Based on how they rolled this out and the lack of communication even amongst their team.

Apologies! I wasn't aware that communication was sent out this week.

It's hard to believe that Chaos cares about the artists that have supported Vray from the beginning. This is an obvious money grab because the focus is on packaging / price and not about promoting a potentially amazing new tool that will change everything for all Vray users. Not leading with new feature sets and sending out "hype" teasers was bad planning. It's clear they are more focused on the financial potential vs the creative potential.

This is all based on what we know of 1.8 and it's a toy at this point, no studio worth their salt is using this for final production. All said I'll eat my words if Vantage 2.0 is even close to a 1 to 1 feature set to Vray or is capable of producing close to BF rendering quality without jumping over 1000 optimization hurdles to get there. Unless an AI has been doing some magic programing since February there is no way.

[alen_agic]

From their email:

We appreciate that these are significant changes, but they will help us focus on giving you the most powerful and versatile...

So they knew they will receive this kind of reaction from users, forum and fb group are on fire for the last few days regarding this pricing
Sadly I don't think they will reconsider changing the pricing at the last moment even with this kind of bad reactions from users across forums and social media, maybe it will be released on the same date as Corona 10 "Planned release: EUE 2023, 22-23 June 2023"
I'm not gonna lie, I really want to see what 2.0v will bring, how many improvements over 1.8.5, and now when is paid stand-alone product it would be nice to offer users 1 month free trial period.

[glorybound]

The sad truth is, it'll be cracked in a month, so many are not sweating it. Only the honest will be paying to use it.

[Neilg]

I understand that vantage is probably being spun off into it's own product because it's got pretty far-reaching commercial applications which justify that price... but there's a good 90% of users that were just using it as an internal previz/drafts tool who wouldn't be able to justify the additional cost.

Is there any hope for a non-commercial license that allows us to still use it for pre-viz and things that never see the light of day? watermarked output would be fine for that.

[trick]

The weird thing of all these anouncements introducing new products with annual subscriptions is when talking about "monthly" costs. My only question then is: will there be a possibility to subscribe per month? I played with Vantage but I would never see me using it more than 2 or 3 months per year...and then I would rather rent 3 or 4 licenses for just these months instead of 1 license per year.

[urbanite]

I am sure you will have monthly rent option, but then again the price will be adjusted accordingly.

[trick]

I am sure you will have monthly rent option, but then again the price will be adjusted accordingly.

Hope so. Vantage is just a fast renderer with no learning curve (especially when using VRay) and some limitations. On deadlines clients always want last minute extras and changes and this tool could help a lot there. Being able to communicate pricing and limitations linearly to clients is a must, whatever the pricing and limitations are. I have been offering a lot options for interactive and fast output (Lumion, Unreal, Twinmotion, etc) but lately clients mostly choose for the best output and more the same output for ALL media. I think that Vantage may be of help there, but it's just up to the client. Personally I still prefer doing everything in Max/VRay; with output a bit slower, handling of huge files is still way faster and sometimes just possible!

[francomanko]

so is vantage 2, completely stand alone, as in vray isnt required?