Cost of Vantage

Vantage Requests
1

I am currently running a trial of Vantage.
With all of the excitement around AI and realtime, I’m looking into software that is likely to be most streamline and cost effective to my business. (D5, Unreal or Vantage seem to be the most credible for high end rendering). Not sure if Envision should be considered -- i can’t keep up.

I appreciate that Chaos ecosystem is rapidly growing and fast becoming the new Adobe (of the 3d world)… but please don’t become Adobe - overpriced subscriptions, with unreliable updates and features.

That being said, based on my limited exploration of D5 and unreal, the cost to get on board the Vantage bandwagon is SIGNIFICANT!

If vantage proves to be a seamless and invaluable transition from 3dsmax / corona / realtime, then it is money well spent. However based on my initial impressions, it has a lot of bugs to overcome (ie: live-link not working, crashing files etc).
Until i can push past its shortcomings, I am yet to be convinced that adding vantage to my CHAOS ecosystem is beneficial?

I appreciate that if Vantage is used as the primary rendering software, i could understand the AU$81.90/month is a manageable cost.

However if corona remains my primary render solution, the additional $81 per month seems eyewatering. (considering D5 is $30/month, and unreal remains free)

Surely there must be some consideration or incentive for users wanting to stick with the chaos ecosystem?
I am currently subscribed to the corona premium plan. Perhaps you need to consider financial benefit to users who remain loyal to the ecosystem? - ie: give users the option to add additional products to their premium plan at a discounted rate?

Just a thought. Would be interested to get other users opinion.

2

I think everyone probably agrees the price is too high apart from the people who control the pricing

Vray monthly solo is 74 euros
Vantage monthly is 99 euros

174 a month for a reduced set of CPU features spread across two GPU products Vray GPU and Vantage…

Now that they are trying to support Corona this makes the above even more of complicated issue as it’s just another engine they are trying to support which will take away time from new features, or completing outstanding ones they already need to find solutions for.

However, Vantage has significant benefits and it has seen lots of improvements and features added since 2.0, but the price is clearly too high as it stands for wide-scale adoption especially without it being able to do everything you need.

Personally, I think the pricing is years ahead of itself but even then is it really competitive with other options? Probably not.

Octane render which comes with multiple GPU kernels and more advanced features without needing to worry if something is supported is 23.95 a month
Cinema 4d + Redshift + Zbrush is 118 a month
Arnold is free with Autodesk and has GPU available
Blender is free with GPU Cycles available
Unreal is free
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3

I think they should incorporate the full Anima license for premium subscribers - and with that an Anima build in feature in Vantage to animated people/crowds/cars etc.

4

not apples to apples but I saw some images from D5’s beta pathtracer implementation and it looks very promising.

5

In fact, Chaos is already becoming Adobe.

The price charged today for vantage is exorbitant as it is practically BETA software, lacks many features and the major updates are slow compared to other software.
Instead of devoting its energies to fixing this, chaos goes and creates another piece of software that is practically the same with a different UI.
D5 is leaps and bounds ahead.​

6

Following up on my original post, I think it’s important to give credit where it’s due. Chaos clearly listens to its users, and the release of the new pricing structure for The Archviz Collection at $91/month is a great step in the right direction.
I sure Chaos receive a lot of grief about pricing, so it’s worth acknowledging when they respond with something genuinely positive.
While I’m still on the fence about whether Vantage will fully evolve into a must-have in the real-time space, it’s definitely offering smaller studios a valuable way to tap into the full Chaos ecosystem at a much more accessible price. Thankyou.​

7

I’m gonna defend Chaos and Vantage here. For me the speed of Vantage trumps all the negatives.

I only use Live Link, and very rarely have a crash, and I’m not on some super machine, just a 4090 and 32gb ram locally.

So the speed, setting up lighting is a joy. Compositing it fast, and iterating is a breeze! Using Vray could take me 5x or 10x longer to get the same look. And the rendering itself is so fast too!

OK I still get flickering in animations, and there’s no render queue, which are very annoying and should be a high priority for Chaos to make Vantage a great rendering alternative. From what I understand, Vantage was only intended as a pre-vis tool, and you should use Vray for production. And that’s exactly how I use it right now. Set-up, pre-vis and drafts in Vantage, then Vray to render the animations.

The price change is a big move too.

8

Thanks @suzanne_doherty . I can’t be too critical of vantage at this stage as I haven’t been using it in production. I was initially most critical of its price - but the new collection price point makes it very palatable.

I think there are a lot of features missing, but I’m willing to overlook that in the short term. I anticipate corona will remain my primary render package for stills, but I hope in time vantage continues to refine its features and seamlessly elevate scenes from corona and vray.