Charging for render nodes

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Its more like other are playing catch up to vray... I know only of 2-3 renders that are better at certain things than vray. Other than that the reason why they are in use its because of they old anchor in industry. Not because if their innovations.

If you guys think you will just jump in to other render engine and you will have as easy time as with Vray then you have another thing coming

I'm wondering what caused that price increase, what changed this year, compared to last year ?

If you have to double the price of a product, it's because something you pay has also doubled :
-Salaries were raised by 100% ?
-Taxes exploded ?
-You had to move to a bigger building, which turns out to be too expensive ?
-???

I'm sure you have a reason to do that, could you please elaborate ?

Vray for Xsi, Vray for Maya, Vray for Sketchup + more. It all has to be paid up.

[Neilg]

V-ray is a tool not an investment,

Yeah, and every tool which is better than the old one costs more than the old one. you want a ps3 and to play online, get one for 250. you want the newest version, it's 400 w/ a subscription cost for multiplayer. Tv's go up in price faster than inflation. as do hardware tools. so do nicer apartments. workstation prices are going up. this is how literally everything in the world works.

If you want the new features and the best support, you have to pay for it. If you don't want to pay for it, keep using 1.5 on max 2010 and never move on.
only 3 paid versions in over 10 years is pretty good going.

It's ok to not like it, but to act like this is totally unheard of and completely out of order is an insane level of entitlement.

[ronald_a]

Hey, so reading through all the posts here I just wanna share my 2 cents about the whole price increase with vray 3.0.

When first reading about the increase (and we all know it is an increase) I was a bit disturbed. But giving it a bit of a thought, this is very very much ok. In our studio we have made the move to vray about 3 years ago (we are on maya btw.) coming from an all mentalray pipeline (and doing mr for about 11 years). Sufficent to say, the transition was ultra smooth and we never ever looked back. As we are just a small studio, we own 2 gui lics which came with 20 batchrender lics. So we paid close to € 2000 for three years of use. Hmmm, that sounds like a pretty sweet deal to me (not even considering support and point upgrades are also included!). So upgrading what we have for around € 1400 (if I am correct and the pricing structure of vray for maya is similar to the one for max) and having that for another 2-3 years is... pretty amazing again.

So when comparing the prices to the competition (and I mean to the actual competition like Arnold and not some newly risen raytracer that can also do gi and what not), I think we are all good (and I mean really good).

I am the last person who wants to throw money at software devs (having that disputable "joy" with autodesk amongst others every year), but for something like vray, which we use on a daily basis and is propably the most enjoyable piece of software we own, I have no problem paying them for their excellent work an absolutly fair amount of money.

So everyone who is concerned or upset about the new prices - just give it a second thought.





PS: I might be a bit biased as I am currently forced to do a project with that free mental ray and i suddenly feel that pain in my head again...

[alainfx]

Vray for Xsi, Vray for Maya, Vray for Sketchup + more. It all has to be paid up.

It is already paid by the customers, when they buy licences.

If you sell 1 product, it has a price.
When you start selling 3 products, you don't multiply the price by 3, you sell each product to its price.

[Tony_Morev]

They prevent me from doing my job to the highest level, and that's what our clients pay for.

It's ironic that, you'd mention that, lately i'm finding myself thinking the same, only about v-ray. Albeit we're clearly looking for different features.

Overall it seems like artists from large budget studios appear to be in favor of new pricing, while small and medium sized companies find it unfair. The difference here is clear, if the money was coming out of personal budgets, directly or indirectly we'd see none of them "charge me all you want, i'm not the one paying, my company is fat, it can share some wealth" types of attitude. That's just my personal observation, which i'm sure is as wrong as everything else i've said

[ronald_a]

It's ironic that, you'd mention that, lately i'm finding myself thinking the same, only about v-ray. Albeit we're clearly looking for different features.

Overall it seems like artists from large budget studios appear to be in favor of new pricing, while small and medium sized companies find it unfair. The difference here is clear, if the money was coming out of personal budgets, directly or indirectly we'd see none of them "charge me all you want, i'm not the one paying, my company is fat, it can share some wealth" types of attitude. That's just my personal observation, which i'm sure is as wrong as everything else i've said

Hmm, what are the features you are looking for that vray doesn't offer? Which renderer then would be the prefered one for you that has those features? I own a small studio and at least in our case, your observation is actually not true - no offense.

[Tony_Morev]

I'm not going to call names, i find it impolite to do so, despite my obvious displeasure. Let's just say, i'm not talking about "the ghost of mental ray". The features themselves are not new at all, unbiased physical lighting behavior being at the root, and the rest such as for example usable caustics and easy object and light animation stemming from it. Version 3.0 has a chance to be it, time will show.

[vlado]

I'm wondering what caused that price increase, what changed this year, compared to last year ?

The rendering business has changed a lot in the past few years. You are looking at it from your side of the fence, but we have our own viewpoint. Somebody mentioned there are a lot of other, cheaper and free alternatives - that's fine and good and artists as a whole have taken advantage of that. But, at the same time, our workload has not decreased - on the contrary, people expect us to support more and more advanced features that require ever more time and effort to implement. We had to make choices and we did. I can assure you the change in the licensing policy was a very tough decision for us to make, knowing full well the reaction that it will get.

Best regards,
Vlado

[eyepiz]

So what happens when Version 4.0 comes out...I assume we have to upgrade all the nodes too right.., I have a hard time justifying Autodesk's yearly upgrades. But V-ray could end up being an even much bigger expense deepening on how many nodes you have.

I little insight on future upgrades policy's of the nodes would be helpful.

[Tony_Morev]

The rendering business has changed a lot in the past few years. You are looking at it from your side of the fence, but we have our own viewpoint. Somebody mentioned there are a lot of other, cheaper and free alternatives - that's fine and good and artists as a whole have taken advantage of that. But, at the same time, our workload has not decreased - on the contrary, people expect us to support more and more advanced features that require ever more time and effort to implement. We had to make choices and we did. I can assure you the change in the licensing policy was a very tough decision for us to make, knowing full well the reaction that it will get.

Best regards,
Vlado

Thank you! It means a lot coming from you personally, Vlado.

[vlado]

So what happens when Version 4.0 comes out...I assume we have to upgrade all the nodes too right.., I have a hard time justifying Autodesk's yearly upgrades. But V-ray could end up being an even much bigger expense deepening on how many nodes you have. I little insight on future upgrades policy's of the nodes would be helpful.

This is a good point and I assume there will be more details as we get closer to the final release. In any case, we are certainly not in a position to release new versions every year (it has been three years since V-Ray 2.0 came out).

Best regards,
Vlado

[VelvetElvis]

So what happens when Version 4.0 comes out...I assume we have to upgrade all the nodes too right.., I have a hard time justifying Autodesk's yearly upgrades. But V-ray could end up being an even much bigger expense deepening on how many nodes you have.

I little insight on future upgrades policy's of the nodes would be helpful.

True, but 4.0 is probably about 2-4 years from now. So your one time cost, assuming you do the non-annual type, is spread out over more than just one measly year like Autodesk. PLus Autodesk tends to break more than they fix, which isn't the case with Vray.

Once the initial shock of change passed, this new licensing type isn't too bad. But we are a small place with way more nodes than users so I feel the pain from some of the folks who are commenting. 2 vray users plus 40 nodes, so we've got to make up some extra node licenses even if we get the 1+11 bundle for both of our Vray people.

[ronald_a]

I'm not going to call names, i find it impolite to do so, despite my obvious displeasure. Let's just say, i'm not talking about "the ghost of mental ray". The features themselves are not new at all, unbiased physical lighting behavior being at the root, and the rest such as for example usable caustics and easy object and light animation stemming from it. Version 3.0 has a chance to be it, time will show.

not sure if its impolite to call renderer names in here, but ok. from what i understand, you are not talking about iray (which might be the ghost of mr) or arnold (which does unbiased but no caustics and is really expensive) and certainly not maxwell (which is unbiased and does caustics - but rendering animation in reasonalbe time, hmmm). now you got me all interested in that fabulous unnamed renderer... oh wait, it might start with a V.

Sorry, had to be sarcastic. I stop now.

[eyepiz]

That's what worries me...There is nothing holding Chaos Group back from releasing yearly updates...most have done it.

True, but 4.0 is probably about 2-4 years from now.

[Christophe.Cot]

That's what worries me...There is nothing holding Chaos Group back from releasing yearly updates...most have done it.

To be very accurate, we already release yearly updates, even twice a year in general - but they are called "Service Pack" and they are free for customer owning the last version.
So don't worry