Shipments of computers, with the exception of gaming systems dropped by 8%-10% in the last quarter so that alone would suggest that there is a change happening with the use of computers in general. That change could affect any 3D software in the long term.

Over the last few years there has been a massive change the 3D hobby market place, not only the obvious split in the market but the introduction of new lights, Sub Surface Scattering and Weight Mapping to name a few. Sure many of these things existed in other software but they are now in the reach of users on a fairly tight budget. There have been changes in the render engines, not just iRay and Superfly but additions of things like Reality making the bridge Luxrender much easier.

We may moan a lot as a community but we have more choices available to us, in figures, materials, render engines, software and features than ever before. This makes the whole community much more diverse and makes the job of vendors particularly difficult trying to decide where to pitch their products. The end result will either be much higher prices or less profit to go around. Arguing over which software is best is not only futile but really only tinkering at the edges of what is happening in the wider community.

 

 

I use Poser 13 on Windows 11 - For Scene set up I use a Geekcom A5 -  Ryzen 9 5900HX, with 64 gig ram and 3 TB  storage, mini PC with final rendering done on normal sized desktop using an AMD Ryzen Threadipper 1950X CPU, Corsair Hydro H100i CPU cooler, 3XS EVGA GTX 1080i SC with 11g Ram, 4 X 16gig Corsair DDR4 Ram and a Corsair RM 100 PSU .   The desktop is in a remote location with rendering done via Queue Manager which gives me a clearer desktop and quieter computer room.