Will VRay 6 work with Phoenix 4.0?

[JezUK]

I believe that Pheonix 5 is subscription only so I am hoping that my perpetual version of Phoenix 4.0 will work with V-Ray 6.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey man,

Unfortunately it would not. Only Phoenix 5 will be compatible with V-Ray 6.

[JezUK]

Thanks Svetlin,

Are you able to tell me, is V-Ray 6 going to be available on a perpetual licence or will it go the Phoenix route of transforming into subscription only moving forwards.....

Thanks

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Ah, for the time being, at least from what I know, V-Ray would keep the perpetual licenses. Keep an eye on the news, but the user bases are very different between Phoenix and V-Ray so offering is also not the same between the two.

[urbanite]

It is A bit harsh to drop phoenix 4 in combo with vray6. I understand the business intentions but phoenix 5 was released few weeks ago and some (me included) do not want to upgrade as 4 is good enough for our purposes and most important it is not on subscription base.

[Svetlin.Nikolov]

Hey,

Indeed, it's a business decision on one hand, but it has implications on the way we develop as well.

To put it simply - we are a handful of guys in the team and making every Phoenix version work with every V-Ray version has been huge for me over the past 10 years. I tried this and that, failed at this and that, finally came to a model that overall works well, does not require us to immediately stop everything that we're working on and start fixing in the hour we find that compatibility has broken between a certain pair or versions. However, V-Ray is deeply integrated with Phoenix. The actual rendering of the fire and smoke is inside Phoenix - it's that deep, and this breaks a lot and requires a ton of people to understand it well and not break it accidentally, and sadly this is sometimes not good enough and also there are breaks that just need to happen, no matter what. So this just requires a lot of time and effort to keep functioning. Sadly, this and other similar situations sometimes makes us advance the actual product we offer at a snail's pace, because we spend so much time fixing problems we ultimately created ourselves, and when we finally fix them, the result is that things are just back to their normal working state - they have not become better in any way. In an ideal world for the dev team, we would have to worry only about having the latest Phoenix and latest V-Ray work together (and the latest Corona of course). Of course this is the opposite of ideal for everyone who wants to keep an old version, and for long this has been unthinkable for me, but ultimately we have to find a balance where we can also move forward without dragging all that technical legacy we've been trying to spare people from for many years.

So one extreme would be to keep trying to support compatibility between all versions of V-Ray and Phoenix like we always tried, but this is becoming too much of a burden. On the other hand there is the universe in which only the latest Phoenix and the latest V-Ray are compatible and that's it - however, this is so harsh I won't even mention it anymore. And there is the middle ground towards which we are heading currently.

I've been taking my anti hate pills and I know there will be backlash, we've been negotiating with the business people what to do and when, and I think we've reached a compromise that will hurt the least, and I hope I have weighed all factors correctly.

That said, when you own a Phoenix 4 perpetual license, please make sure to check my.chaos.com/products and there you should see the options you have for getting Phoenix 5.

Cheers!

[urbanite]

Thanks for reply Svetlin.