Premium Gone.

[glorybound]

I left my perpetual for a subscription to get Vantage. Then the premium removed Vantage, and kept the same price with no reduction, so now you have to buy Vantage for the same price as V-Ray. Okay, it is what it is, but my understanding was if you purchased a subscription to get Vantage, you can use Vantage 2 until your subscription expires. Well, my subscription expired (auto-renewed) pretty much when Vantage 2 came out. Now I am told that I have to subscribe to Vantage to get Vantage. Personally, I would feel stupid to subscribe to Vantage, and really feel stupid for keeping V-Ray. Am I alone? Are you guys going to purchase Vantage? Are you looking for an alternative solution? Just wondering how you guys feel?

[philip_nel]

Yes, it's a hard pill to swallow - the fact that the premium pricing wasn't adjusted when Vantage was removed.
Now I have to convince the company to pay double - but it is what it is.

Fortunately it looks like Vantage is on the right track in terms of speed and quality - huge time saver - especially if client wants an animation on short notice.
And one animation could pay a year subscription...


Also the fact that Chaos acquired AXYZ people/animated people is a positive development - hopefully animated cars will also be part of the package in future.
Would be interesting if all this added plugins pricing will be incorporated in Vray or Vantage subscription?

Alternative is UE 5 and certainly worthwhile to play around with - but Vray is so ingrained in our workflows, and to switch over won't be so easy.

[glorybound]

I guess if you dropped into V-Ray today it would make sense, but I have been here for 15 years, and upgraded to premium to get Vantage. It would be like if Chaos stripped Cosmos from V-Ray and wanted to charge for it. Would Vantage be an extension and update to V-Ray if it worked inside of 3DS MAX? To me, we would have CPU, GPU, and Raytrace, all inside of V-Ray. Therefore, the prices go up every year, so there is further development of the software. Now, we are paying Chaos to advance the software so they can spin it off into another application that they can charge for. I am tired of thinking about it, so I'll let it go. I have no intentions of purchasing it, unless I have a good need for it.

[fixeighted]

It's depressing to see the trajectory of the deal thoughout the years for sure, though it's nonetheless unsurprising, given similar changes within the (mostly) entire software-producing industry.
As I inferred in another post, it's a combination of greed (bean-counters/shareholders) and natural expansion (developer enthusiasm for growth/innovation), with long-time users being its guinea pigs.

Apparently, it's 'just business'.

[fixeighted]

I would add; even though Chaos have bought out axyz, it may be a welcome addition but surely, wouldn't it be silly to assume that we can all now populate scenes for Vantage with animated crowds?
I do hope someone will correct me but as far I can perceive, crowds will bring mostly any machine to its knees rapidly in realtime, at least with the sort of quality one would expect.

[luckett_jason@hotmail.com]

Yep AXYZ people really squeeze scenes, serious bottleneck and poor workflow at present. It's also very slow to populate scenes easily and robustly. Let's hope Chaos get them integrated very well but I have strong doubts this won't speed up anytime soon.

Jason