I'm confident Autodesk wouldn't have introduced indie pricing if it weren't for Blender's rise in popularity. Competition is good for everyone (except a company like Autodesk trying to get the highest returns for the least effort).

[–] Adalast@lemmy.world 3 points 2 days ago (1 children)

Gonna call you out on this, at least partially. It was SideFX, a real threat of a proprietary vendor who has sizable market share in 3D/VFX, releasing an entirely perpetually free learning edition and a low cost indie license who put the screws on Autodesk. Blender contributed to the decision, but it was absolutely not the primary pressure source.

Source: I have a Masters Degree in VFX, have studied the industry for over 35 years, and have worked professionally in it for going on 15.

[–] pemptago@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I respectfully disagree. While true that Houdini was one of the first visual effects softwares offering an indie license, it was by no means the only one. Substance comes to mind, before the Adobe acquisition.

The timeline is also unconvincing: a considerable number of years elapsed after Houdini entered the market and Autodesk/Maya offered an indie license. However, is does coincide with better blender documentation and rise in YT content that rapidly grew the blender community.

Houdini can do more than FX, sure, and I've consistently heard nothing but good things, but its professional use remains relatively [edit: departmentally] niche. So, it may seem to someone in the niche of FX that Maya is losing ground to Houdini, but on a macro level Blender has the features and price point to threaten a larger portion of Autodesk/Maya's market share. In lieu of better data, I'll refer to google trends of the three softwares in which Houdini is a flat line at the bottom. I will gladly consider data to the contrary if you have it.

Either way, my main point was that competition is good, and who is responsible for how much doesn't change that.

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 6 points 4 days ago (1 children)

3d studio was notoriously hard to crack (click 30 consecutive times on the left side of the screen and your IK gets wrecked - hard) but became easy when they understood that students and poors learning the soft was a winning idea.

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 3 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago) (1 children)

I remember it was possible to buy fully functional 3d studio max 4 copies at the flea market in 2003 or so. They came with an easy to use license keygen (or so I'm told).

Can you expand on that "click 30 times" bit?

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 2 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Cracked soft back in the day often came with some manifesto or text from the guy/team that hacked it. My 3dsmax like in 1995 explained all the loopholes they closed to make it working, and one was that if the soft detected it was cracked, and it detected 30 consecutive mouse clicks exclusively on the left part of the screen, it wrecked your IK, inverse kinematics, used to animate walking and such.

This was to make the soft unusable, and hard to figure out how to crack it correctly.

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 3 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Hahahah that's so utterly specific. One of our Maya installs was broken in such a way that activating the move tool overlaid your viewport with a red tint, the rotation tool gave you a green tint and the scale tool, you guessed it, a blue tint. Since you tend to switch those tools often, especially as an animator, this was a nightmare. Not cracking related but still

[–] Valmond@lemmy.world 1 points 2 days ago (1 children)

One year later the soft is fixed.

"Where is my red tint?!"

[–] Hadriscus@lemm.ee 2 points 2 days ago

I kinda miss the laugh inducing bugs, tbh