Hey folks, I'm considering signing up for a year's sub to Adobe's complete Creative Cloud, as it seems to be the most affordable option based on the software I need access to (individual titles would wind up costing me more per month combined anyway), and am wondering if anyone could give me some pros and cons in regards to the service?

No, I refuse cloud services. Hope Poser won't go this way. I feel uncomfortble using software webconnected. I don't like phone home software , how can I like cloud software then ?

I mean, everything I do in my software must somehow be sent to a server. Sounds scary to me , so no way. Never, never, never !!!

Hmm. I used to be against the cloud concept but not so much now as I've been learning more about it. Its only sent to the server if you choose to do so. You can store your work there and access it from other devices, but you aren't forced to as far as I can tell.

I'm looking at it for the social networking benefits and ways to get more exposure for my work.

An absolute veto against. "The cloud" here.

Poser 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 7, P8 and PPro2010, P9 and PP2012, P10 and PP2014 Game Dev
"Do not drive faster then your angel can fly"!

I personally will never use a cloud system if at all possible, although Ambient is right in that Adobe CC is only access to the software, not saving the work. It's not much different to Steam... a way to provide DRM without stupid dongles and things. I'd still read any fine print over ownership/access. with cloud systems like Amazon/Kindle you do NOT own the book/music or whatever. Any documents you store on the cloud can be 'sold' or accessed without your knowledge, and lost entirely if the business that is storing your data folds.I can't understand why any business would use such a service when HDD's are so cheap.

Be sure what you are using it for. Read the fine print.

My company stuck with the last boxed version. We don't miss the 'improved' features.

I have a CC subscription and I am satisfied with it. For me it was simple economics. I use PS, Premiere and After Effects and now I get all the other apps as well for pretty much the same price. There is no difference is using the apps itself - they are all desktop based.

You can install the apps in two machines, there are regular updates and so far it all runs smoothly. You need an internet connection to activate the applications and it does a regular check for the subscription validity. It will allow up to 99 days without internet connection (with a yearlsubscription) before it times out.

I store all my files locally and do not use the cloud storage

Probably a dumb question but what happens when you decide/cannot afford the subscription, are you able to still use whatever you have created? I am looking for a comparison, If I buy a physical, or even a download software to my desktop but decide not to upgrade I can still use it years later with files I have produced. What restrictions are there when you stop paying?

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.

Shane, PLEASE don't do it, there are superior products available that are either free or can be purchased as a permanent licence. I have no sympathy for those who purchase it for Photoshop, because the new GIMP is a better program anyway once you learn it, and has a nice dark interface if you want it now.

But you know what the most amusing thing of all is?

Those people who tolerate the greed just to get AfterEffects.
Little do they realise that "AfterEffects" is pretty much doomed anyway thanks to this beauty the Pro's are moving over to:
Click Here for HITFILM

Want more, want to know what's even funnier?
Those who use LightRoom, because I'm guessing 99% of those sucked-up into Adobe's greed-machine have never even heard of Darktable:
Click Here for DARKTABLE

So let's see what you can do if you let Adobe suck on your wallet every month:

Photoshop for photo editing - Yet GIMP is more powerful once you learn it
After Effects for compositing - Yet HITFILM is a superior system altogether
LightRoom for RAW development and image amanagement - Yet DARTABLE wipes the floor with it in more ways than one

Sure, you can let Adobe constantly suck on your wallet just to use their inferior products (whatever turns you on I suppose).
But then, when you finally dedcide you should never have let them suck on your wallet in the first place, you will be left with nothing.

Here's how to get a better bundle for next to nothing, one more powerful than the Adobe setup, and one you don't have to constantly pay for.

Replace Photoshop with the new GIMP, it's free, super powerful, and despite what they might tell you, GIMP is most popular 2D editor, not Photoshop.
Replace LightRoom with Darktable, again, it's free, and has a better design than LightRoom.
Replace AfterEffects with HitFilm, this program is sooo good that even a desperate for cash loner like me is prepared to buy a copy!

The total cost of a GIMP-DARKTABLE-HITFILM bundle is the cost of HitFilm alone, because out of the three, it's only HitFilm that you would need to pay for. Buy hey, it's well worth the money, it's incredible, it's only a fraction of what Adobe used to charge for AfterEffects, and on top of all that, it's a permanent licence!

You couldn't have brought this up at a better time either, because right now you can effectively use the old version of HitFilm for free if you buy now, because you'll also get the next Pro version on release (which I hear is about to come end of this month). Seriously Shane, if you look at the HitFilm stuff you will realise once and for all that you don't need Adobe for anything.

Keep them well away from your wallet, let those with money to burn feed them - there are better alternatives anyway!
Before you do anything, you really need to take a damn good look at that DARKTABLE and HITFILM link.

Click Here for HITFILM
Click Here for DARKTABLE

Don't be a muppet ;-)

The default preference for saving Photoshop files is with "Maximize File Compatility" on. This means that it can be used with earlier versions of Photoshop. You also need to have it on for other applications which need to read it - such as Poser. So I can read all my Photoshop CC files with all the apps which support the PSD format.

If you stop paying, the software will stop working. You keep all your local files, but I assume that if you use cloud storage, you need to save them from there.

PS: As this is the Poser forum it might also be of interest to know that owning a copy of HITFILM will allow you to work wonders on your Poser scenes.

Ever wanted particles in a Poser scene?
Ever wanted to create masive cityscapes in almost realtime with both particles and volumetric effects all at once?

Import your 3D models into HITFILM and you can do exactly that!
You can already do that, and the next version is going to be even better!

The fact that the software stop working is a show stopper for me. Ok I understand that you could use much of the work with another program but if you buy any add-ons, brushes or filters for Photoshop they are then worthless.

To be honest I am not an Adobe fan anyway having been forced to use one of their products during my brief part of my career in bid support I can't remember the name of it perhaps because my brain refuses to face such a horrror, but I am interested to see the benefits and pit falls of cloud computing. I can see if you are working in a field of work where Adobe is the norm then this seems to be a cost effective option. For me, A Paint Shop Pro user for many years it does not seem to provide any benefit. During my latest stint I stopped upgrading PSP at PSP Pro X2 and only recently upgraded to Pro X7 as it gave me 64bit functionality, but I was able to use Pro X2 for the whole of that period.

I will watch this thread with interest though as I do like to see if there is a point where it would be better for me to jump on board.

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.

... oh, oh, and if you'd like to "expose" yourself like Shane want's to, they have a video wall for you to show off your creations to the world!

And those that refuse a cloud service are wise, I would never use "cloud" services ESPECIALLY if it's run by Adobe, they are, after all, makers of that clunky-tech spyware called Flash Player and have already proven themselves incompetent on a massive scale.

'k, I'll shut up now :-D

I used the Photoshop CC photography program and a stand alone subscription for illustrator CC for a year. Being a hobbyist I thought that splitting up the payments over time might be a better way to go rather than comming up with the prices of upgrades in one lump sum. So I took the plunge shortly after the Photoshop photography program came out. But I did not send anything "to the cloud" for storage. Instead I kept everything on my local machine. The added features in both apps were cool and I enjoyed the faster speed and better stability- especially with CC 2014. Unfortunately, I needed to free up some room in my budget, so I did not renew and went back to my previously purchased copies of PS and AI CS6.

@Hornet
Same here, I've used PSP X2 for a long time, good program, but it's started to be left idle as I've grown more accustomed to the GIMP.
PSP is good though, and I would otherwise still be using it.

I have a subscription, it is the program used by my place of employment and the one I am most comfortable with. Honestly I do not get all this cloud paranoia, I have never and will never send anything to the cloud. (My job forbids that anyways.) So nothing I have done on my PC has magically ended up in the cloud. Just because you have a sub with the program does not mean you all of a sudden are forced to use that service.

Personally I have no complaints with Adobe CC and all the supposedly superior products have never done it quite as well as my Adobe products. And the compatibility between the programs still beats everything else.

I have a subscription for Photoshop, mainly because of the 3d print support in the actual version, but of course for image editing too.

It's not complicated, and you don't need to use the cloud. But the software costs a bunch over time, and you may not keep it when you choose to let the subscriptiion run out. Not the cheapest solution, but maybe worth the money. At the moment I don't regret it.

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Sail out to sea and do new things.
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That Hitfilm app actually looks kind of interesting. I am still on Old CS3 creative suite with after effects. I understand the reality that the cloud is here to stay But for me I prefer to wait for the day when a superfast broadband 24/7 connection to the web is as ubiquitous&low cost for us all as tap water is here in the U.S.

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What you send through the Adobe CC Cloud is exactly what Adobe decides they want you to send through the cloud because they have control over it, not you. You have no more control over what it sends to them than Microsoft users had over having an upgraded forced upon them.

You have no idea (or control) over what it sends or what it receives, and them giving you an option to switch something on/off doesn't mean it actually makes a difference or takes any notice of that setting whatsoever. Companies especially ought to have more sense than to use these things for business. It's not paranoia, it's fact, the web is littered with news articles about what happens when people have no control over their software and those who use "cloud" services.

Given that, I'd say it's not a matter "if" you'll get burned if you use this stuff, it's more a matter of "when".

Like the majority of those who have replied here, I wouldn't use Adobe CC even if it was offered for free, nevermind pay them for it. I'm not a religious person but we can only pray that poor Shane sees sense and realises that Adobe are only for diehard Adobe Fanboys and Fangirls these days - people are dropping them like dirt. We have a lot to be thankfull for though, because since Adobe's greed got the better of them and they started doing this greedy money-sucking thing, they've been driving users away and helping the better alternatives out there get a nice strong foothold.

It's the same with what happened with Microsoft and their arrogance. Windows 8 and the "forced" lack of the Start button was no doubt responsible for pushing more people onto a GNU/Linux distro than anything they've released to date (that's why Windows fanatics now have their button back). The "forced" upgrade will push even more people away, so let's hope they keep it up, Apple too, because all three of these companies are driving people away and onto the better products.

I'm very familiar with GIMP, and honestly I hate using it (almost as much as I hate using Blender). I've always preferred Photoshop. Currently I have CS4 Design Premium but it's getting pretty dated.

I will check out Hitfilm, never heard of that one, sounds interesting. The thing is tho, Adobe is an industry standard, and when I'm trying to do professional work even as a freelancer, I have to be able to use professional software, especially when I need to collaborate with others. It's a good plus to be able to put lesser-known titles on a resum'e, but they won't replace the value of being able to list their pro equivalents. Adobe isn't being replaced any time soon. It's in just about every art school in the modern world and most studios. I do try out other freeware apps when I find them and they suit my needs, but there's scads of free software out there that were growing for a while and then suddenly their developers vanished. I don't like the idea of having to pay yearly to continue having access to it, but since those fees can be deducted as a business expense, it's really not so bad - and its much more affordable for an indie artist like myself who can't afford $3,000 - $6,000 for a complete suite of tools right up front.

Sorry Wolf, crossposted.

Yes, you should check-out HITFILM for sure, best program I've seen in ages, you can do magic with it and the new release is even better. There are Adobe fanatics holding onto their AfterEffects and CC subscription not reaslising that it's already gone the way of the Dodo thanks to HITFILM. HITFILM is a true 3D in 2D compositor where the effects actually exist in 3D space (and some other techinical reason I can't remember). You can do mindbending stuff with it, and like I said, you can even use it as a tool to give your Poser or iClone work a real Cinematic edge.

The next version will replace Premier as well as AfterEffects
They've added proper NLE features as well for the new version - all in the same product - bloody fantastic!

Shane, did you see the new version of GIMP with a unified dockable interface and a dark grey colour-scheme?

...I prefer to wait for the day when a superfast broadband 24/7 connection to the web is as ubiquitous&low cost for us all as tap water is here in the U.S.

That would be nice, however I think the ISPs are moving in the opposite direction on that. There is talk of the bigger ones charging usage rates on top of your basic service, due in large part to so many people using services like netflix, amazon, hulu, etc. and dropping their premium movie channels to lower their current monthly cable bills. Really hope that doesn't happen on a wide scale, but who knows. As it is, you don't really have a choice in which ISP you use, in most areas. In my area Time-Warner is the ISP. They bought out all the smaller guys years ago. If you want high speed internet that's who you're getting it from around here. You could get satellite, but who can afford that? They all want contracts and still charge twice as much as cable. My folks are on satellite TV, and even now their signal still breaks up when it gets cloudy. No I haven't checked out gimp in a while. I might but it was too frustrating to deal with before so I haven't looked up what they've done recently. It still isn't a viable option for me tho, as no one in the industry really uses it. I never see it listed as a requirement in job ads, but I constantly see Photoshop and other Adobe titles listed. I'm looking into getting certified in Photoshop, Illustrator and a couple others as that will help boost my desirability on job searches.

I've been using the photography package of Photoshop and Lightroom on monthly sub for a while now and am very happy with it. Simple economics - I can afford the low cost each month, whereas even the annual sub was out of reach given my current finances. The apps are downloaded to my desktop (both Mac and PC, as I use both so that's a big benefit) and phone home every 30 days to check the subscription is valid. There is a little CC icon in the Mac menu and a desktop icon on PC that open up the CC app that tells you what apps you have installed, when they last updated and gives access to assets and online community stuff; this does not need to be running to use the software. Everything I do with the apps is on my local machines, I don't use any of the cloud storage. No problem with other apps reading PSD's so there is nothing different in the file format for the CC versions.

Solid professional apps plus a flexible and sensible way to buy into them; the CC versions suit my situation so I'd recommend them.

The Lightroom/Photoshop workflow for RAW files is awesome ....

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Interesting article here about the "different" pricing models adobe are now using.. http://future-publishing.msgfocus.com/c/11wCl0JNSc5MkKt6plJ1YpTJ3M ...theres a similar article around - forget where - but it talks of designers being charged higher prices purely because of the browser they used:(

Pinky - you left the lens cap of your mind on again.

Adobe products are rapidly losing their "industry Standard" status, and funny enough, it's HITFILM that will be the first product to do exactly that to them.

No one in their right mind is going to pay for an outdated system like AfterEffects and be forced into a subscription to pay for it now that HITFILM is on the scene that is up to date, modern-tech and superior, capable of better results and can be purchased as a permanent licence for a very fair price. Like I said, people are dropping Adobe like dirt, so choosing to buy into it these days means you're effectively choosing to buy into something that people are breaking away from.

If you're after a job in graphics, blow them away with your portfolio and you'll get the job, it doesn't matter whether they advertise for "Photoshop". Send in your portfolio and they see the work you are capable of, not what you used to create it. Further than that, Photoshop's days as "Indusrtry Standard" are rapidly coming to an end, it's inevitable due to the amount of people fleeing from them.

If you want an example of what's going to happen to Adobe, you need only to look at the camera industry and the brands that inhabit it. It wasn't too long ago that the "Pros" were all using Canon and Nikon, but just as was expected when a brand like Sony enters the ring, they're now getting dropped as "Industry Standard" and the "Pro's" are moving over to Sony like there will be no tommorow. Soon, Sony will be the "Industry standard" for photographers. The reason people are flocking over to Sony is because they're making generally better, more innovative cameras than Canon and Nikon have been putting out lately.

Adobe can't compete with the better stuff so they're milking it for all they can, while they can. You should avoid getting dragged into something that will leave you with nothing, because remember, no matter how much you feed them for your CC subscription, you will be left with no licence at all when you stop paying them. Meanwhile, others have kept their cash and have been getting to know what will become the new "Industry Standards".

I quite like the CC thing actually - it costs me £9 per month and as I do a lot more photography now than 3D stuff, I need something to process RAW files. Darktable appears to be Linux only so is utterly useless to me and the plugins I use most are only PS not GIMP. I'm by no means a "fanboy" of adobe but it works well, it's in industry standard app at the moment and it works for me. The cloud part is largely irrelevant

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"I quite like the CC thing actually - it costs me £9 per month and as I do a lot more photography now than 3D stuff, I need something to process RAW files. Darktable appears to be Linux only so is utterly useless to me and the plugins I use most are only PS not GIMP. I'm by no means a "fanboy" of adobe but it works well, it's in industry standard app at the moment and it works for me. The cloud part is largely irrelevant"

I get that and the industry standard aspect of it , the bits I don't like is the cloud and the fact that within 30 days of me stopping my £9 a month I lose the ability to process RAW files using that product. Not so if I have purchased a program outright.

The basis of my cloud reluctance stems from trust and what is done with the information that the corporations have. I know communications better than the cloud so let me give you an example. With our smart new phones we have the ability to ensure that our number is not displayed if we so wish. What most users don't know is that feature does just that, stops the display of the originating number. The number is still present and is contained in the call set up message at every stage of the call. Which means corporations using 'Intelligent Networks' can base the way the handle that call based on the origination number. They can adjust the routing, or re-routing, the call priority, call charge and many other factors. All based on the number that most users think is withheld....it is not, it is just not displayed. That is just one example, there are many more, enough for me to give as little control as possible to big business.

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.

I can't speak to having any direct experience with CC. But I do think it's wise to be cautious when approaching subscription services like this. The fact is that more and more it's all going to add up and you can only swing so many subs before it nickle and dimes you to death. Then if you stop paying versus purchasing right out, then that whole sub money actually went towards nothing, it's not like it was investing in paying the price off. I do have softwares that you get X amount of time of free updates once you purchase or you get updates through version X, but I have no issue with it and it allows you to evaluation if the new features of the new version are worth continuing to invest in it - but with those, you can use what you have paid for. Personally, I just find it all kind of "schemey" but if it works for you, then great!

.

But isn't that really no different than paying rent on a house or apartment? You never actually own the place. Stop paying the rent and they boot you. Property taxes are the same. Even if your mortgage is paid after 30 years or however long, you still have to pay property taxes the rest of your life - aka rent - or you get booted. And in some areas of the US, property taxes are higher than 12 months of mortgage payments.

The sub money goes towards the use of the software for however long you chose to 'rent' it. They don't prevent you from accessing the files and projects you created during that usage, only the files you have in storage on their servers, which seems to be up to the user whether they store their files there or not, based on what others have said here, and things I've read elsewhere. There are other programs that can read .psd files. (I'm not sure about .ai files), Videos you create can be played in a number of players, etc.

I used to think that using the apps meant that everything you created in them were automatically created in the cloud and not on your PC, but that's obviously not the case. For $600 a year (or $50/mo.) I can have access to most all of their software and automatic updates, vs. $20/mo. for each individual app. (some of their apps aren't yet included in CC and still have to be purchased separately but I don't really have much use for those apps anyway), along with free website/portfolio hosting and access to a network of other artists and potential clients/collaborators. I never upgraded from CS4 before cause it would have cost me another couple grand or more to do so and just could never afford it. I was going to sign up for another years' worth of web hosting at the old host I was using but that's another $150 yr and I have to build the site myself - or find a designer I can afford, which isn't possible at the moment for me.

Anyone using e-mail or automatic back-up services like Carbonite, etc., are using the cloud. So I don't get what all the paranoia is about. And there is no such thing as an unlisted phone number. It just means it doesn't show up in a directory. There are a lot of marketing agencies that pay big money for "unlisted" phone number lists - I used to work for one of them.

only the bold succeed.

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Well said Pumeco and thanks for the link to Hitfilm, looks interesting. I've been using Blender's video editor instead of Premiere and am pleased to report that it hasn't crashed once! Blender's motion tracker is brilliant and there are lots of replacements for Photoshop.

I'm not a fan of subscription software for most of the reasons previously mentioned. Fortunately for me I've always had access to the latest Adobe packages through my job. We have no plans to go CC anytime soon. Adobe did make money off our company with their offering though as we decided to upgrade from CS5 To CS6 shortly after the cloud was announced. We're going to see how long we can hold out. I'm happy with that as we don't need to share files outside the office, only use InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat and, rarely, Illustrator.

I personally don't lust for the latest versions of any software (I'm still trying to talk myself into upgrading to Mountain Lion, lol). A lot of really talented, successful artists use older software because they understand that creativity can't be purchased from Adobe.

I think if I had needs for compatibility and access to many different packages I might feel differently. You should choose what's right for you knowing the plusses and minuses going in.

I just really hope Adobe isn't successful though. It is a money grab and once they get all the creatives in the fold watch those prices increase. What ya gonna do about it? And don't forget about the great CC crash of a couple of months ago. Had half the industry up in arms.

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Shane, even with all the concerns about "Cloud Usage" put to one side, I'm starting to wonder if there's something you really aren't getting regards how their greedy system works.

Remember that thread not too long ago, the one where Game Engines were discussed? Unreal Engine was brought up in the discussion, that too is a "Subscription Based" purchase but it's one that is perfectly fair. Do you know why an Unreal suibscriptipon is fair, and an Adobe one isn't? It's because although an Unreal Engine subscription cost's $19 per month, you can cancel your subscription any time you like and you still have a permanent licence for the version you were running while your subscription was active. This means, for example, that even a brand new user could take out an Unreal Engine subscription and cancel it minutes later. They still have a permanent licence to the version that was available when they took that subscription out - and I can vouch for it first hand - because that's what I have.

Even better, what it means is that you can effectively choose to upgrade your Unreal Engine to the latest version any time you wish, and you know it will only cost you $19 to do so because you simply buy a months subscription and then cancel it again. You can do this if and whenever you wish, no penalties, it's a perfectly fair system.

Compare that to the Adobe greed-machine which, no matter how much you pay into it, you will NEVER own a permanent licence of that product, not even if you'd subscribed for long enough to cover what would have been the retail price of the product, and that is what is truly unacceptable about Adobe's greedy system. Such a system ought to be illegal because it means that those who supported them and put in the years learning their products, have been "forced" into a payment system most of them they don't want anytthing to do with (which is why they're dropping them like dirt). Even worse, they have not left the option open for a permanent licence if you want to do it that way. No matter what Adobe says, there is no getting around the fact that once you have covered the cost of a retail version, there is no reason (other than outright greed), why you should not be entitled to keep that as a permanent licence.

I mean, what happened, did the world suddenly change overnight and decide that the right to own a licence outright was no longer possible?
Of course not, it's only the greed-machine that is Adobe who have decided that fate for their "customers" .

Unreal Engine is proof these things can be handled in a fair manner, they are the polar opposite of Adobe. Remember, forcing you onto a subscription was bad enough, but denying you a permanent licence even when you have covered the cost of a retail licence, should be illegal, and if you stand for that, you have quite a high threshold for taking sh*t from companies. There's really no polite way to say this, but my advice regards "Adobe" is tell them to take a cliff-dive (that's as polite as I can get, but not the term I wanted to use).

Good luck with whatever route you take, there's nothing more I personally have to say about it because to me, there is nothing more to it than blatant, outright greed :-D

Have fun letting Adobe suck on your wallet while the rest of us get a permenent licence to HITFILM :-D

@kljpmsd
You're very welcome, and just so you know, the team behind HITFILM are gold, they're a really cool down to earth bunch. Doesn't matter whether you're a pro or an amateur on their forum, they talk to you and interact with equal respect :-)

I hear what you're saying about the greed factor, Pumeco. I don't care for it either. And if there were more alternatives to it than there currently are I would be exploring those.

However, the bottom line is that I have to get out of the hobbyist market and move towards the professional market, where I can actually make a living on what I do, That requires investing in software that the professional side of this industry requires me to learn and use regularly in order to have a snowball's chance in hell at getting hired or taking on contracts for large studios where the real money exists. It's competitive enough as it is without making things harder on myself due to my own personal agreements or disagreements with the business practices of this or that company.

So while I am all for having alternatives like Hitfilm, GIMP and Blender out there for the hobbyists and low-budget studios, please show me real job listings that list these titles in their qualifications. I've never seen them listed, and I search every CG-related jobs board I can find on a regular basis. 99% of them list Adobe as a requirement. When I was in school, Adobe was a requirement, and still is at that school and every other school I've looked at. It's difficult enough breaking into the industry at my current skill level, I don't need to make waves by being a rebel against "the man". I need a job, and in order to get one of those jobs that are actually going to pay me a living wage, I have to use the software that they require, whether I want to or not, not the software that I prefer. It's not enough to be good, you have to know how to use the software that the studio you're applying to or the client you're trying to do a job for, requires, and most of them - all the ones I've found - require proficiency in Adobe and Autodesk.

ETA: If I were trying to build my own studio, then I would have a bit more flexibility on that decision, and I could use whatever I wanted as long as the end result was polished, but even with that, studios still do work for other studios, and still require knowing the software that those other studios are using. I don't have the means to build my own studio at this point anyway tho, so that's not even worth thinkin about right now.

I use GIMP on one machine and PS5.5 on the other. At first, using GIMP was a trial. I hated it. But because I couldn't install PS5.5 on that machine, it was either boot up the other every single time I wanted to edit an image, or learn GIMP. So I've been learning GIMP. I've gotten much more used to it, and there are very few things that I cannot do with it that I can do with PS5.5.

However, those "very few things" are essential sometimes. Moreover, despite the fact that there are plugins to GIMP to allow PS plugins to work, they aren't surefire. So I have some utterly essential plugins that only work with PS.

So I'm at the point that I can do MOST things with GIMP just fine. But I still end up having to take my image to PS5.5 to finish it.

GIMP is fantastic and gets better with every update, but it is not yet a complete substitute. And until plugin makers start supporting it, it will never be a complete substitute.

I expect most open source/free/low cost substitutes will have similar issues. Whether or not they do for any given user will depend on how deeply they've investigated each app, and which features they actually use.

As for using the cloud and subscription based licenses... I'm not a fan, but I also don't think it's some enormous conspiracy to suck away my precious pictures of Vicky in a temple. And it DOES permit me the option of accessing apps that would normally be too expensive. I actually wish C4D and Maya had subscription options, for instance.

HItfilm does look good, though. Really good.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

Shane, the fact that you can claim the cost as a business expense changes a lot. Adobe are the industry standard, so if that's what you need, then do it. It is, as you say, like renting a house. When you stop paying, they boot you. Monthly payments for a professional (I count indies that do something for a living) is easier for budgeting.

I started my professional life as a graphic designer in the early 1980's (with paint, ink and illustration board). The computer of choice was the Mac because the OS came with a paint program bundled with it. That program was made by Adobe. To this day, graphic designers are taught to use Adobe products on Macs. THAT is the reason it is the industry standard; blind conservatism and falling for the product push (or, 'I don't want to risk falling behind'). Go into any printing business in Australia and you will see PC's in the admin area and Macs in the graphics area... why? Because that's all they are taught at school. They don't know how to use Photoshop or InDesign or Illustrator on a PC, despite it being identical software. I mentioned this to a print shop owner, who agreed it would be cheaper to buy all PC's and have them properly networked and integrated through the business, but they said they would never be able to find a designer who would use them. They are not the industry standard because they are good, they are the standard due to legacy and conservatism.

I use Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign on a PC. I was taught on a Mac, but as a starving ex student, couldn't afford the computer. So I got a PC, hated Windows for a while, then realised it was no different... you just hate different things between the OS's.

Currently I lecture at university in a business faculty. My area is strategic foresight, so I teach the implications of emerging technologies and emerging/shifting business models. The only way conservative views will be overturned and other software become 'standard' (or rather, when there is a wealth of software that is 'acceptable') is by Indies producing signature work that cannot be replicated in Adobe products. Art directors can spot non-Adobe stuff a mile off (don't know how), so if it's good, they'll be interested. If you can do something that they can't, and it's cheaper to go to you rather than learn how to do it themselves, they will keep going back to you. The big advantage of things like Blender, GIMP, even Hexagon and Carrara and Poser, is that they are cheap enough to let the Indies in. You don't need the big studio to pay the stupid prices of the big companies. Of course, the other thing is that if you are a true Indie and use free software you don't have the overheads of larger businesses so you can be very price competitive. You clients won't know what software you used, nor will they care.

I have the current 3DS Max on my system. It's free, because I'm a lecturer (education licence). I don't use it any more. I use the free stuff like Blender, or the cheaper stuff like Hexagon. Full commercial licence, for free.

Do what works for you, Shane. Just be prepared to change when you see an opportunity. Don't be a blind sheep.

Client compatibility is another issue. I can't get GIMP to export in PSDs, and I can't get Photoshop to open XCFs. (Can it be done?) And if a client uses Photoshop, I am not going to get them to switch to GIMP just to open my files.

Job search is another. If you're a paralegal, for instance, you had better be extremely well-versed in MS Word or Word Perfect (and most law offices are moving towards Word for -- better client compatibility -- that magical requirement). Open Office is a fantastic app for dictation. Its autocomplete puts Word to shame. The rest of it is an utter travesty -- but you can get your docs done in it nevertheless. But if you don't know Word or WP, you WILL NOT GET A JOB that requires them. Hell, you won't even get an interview. (The last thing your boss wants is a junior who is constantly bugging senior employees with questions like, "How do I do [such and such] in [insert software] again?") When it come to apps like Excel, people who THINK they know the software (but can only kinda use it on a basic level) can wreak havoc on spreadsheets that are already being used (they move a single field to make it "more visible" not realizing it contains differential equations that are linked to 20,000 other spreadsheets LOL). I'm sure the same is true in all industries for whatever software is used by a company.

It's one thing to be able to produce a finished portfolio. But when you're working with a team, every step of your work has to be compatible with theirs, not just the end product. Chances are, you're NOT going to be the one producing the final version anyway.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

@piersyf: I try not to be a sheep. I too was trained on a mac in school, but my mac died not too long after leaving school and I haven't been able to afford another since. Mac and Adobe pretty much have a permanent grip on the art schools. I use all my software on a custom-built PC and have no problems with Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, etc.

I do try to learn other lesser-known software when I have the time and interest, but it does me no good when I'm trying to find real work in the industry, as I'm trying to do now. Mention GIMP or Blender at one of these job interviews and they're likely to just laugh you out the door. Or smile and nod silently as they move on to the next portfolio and I definitely don't need that.

I started learning digital painting several years ago on Jasc Paintshop Pro (I think Corel owns it now), and I had one class in film school that used GIMP - simply because they weren't budgeted for Photoshop and it was only used for one small project. I continued working (and fighting) with GIMP until I got into Animation and had to start using Photoshop on a regular basis. It's always been much faster to learn and much easier to work with than GIMP, at least in my opinion, which is why I prefer it, on top of being a standard. But as Moriador points out, it doesn't matter what software you prefer to use, or what your moral reasons for or against it are, if you don't use the software your potential boss/client requires, then you're S.O.L. There's enough competition and someone else will be along in 1.5 seconds or less that can meet that client or bosses needs. Run with the big dogs or stay on the porch is really what it all boils down to.

@moriador: Autodesk does have subscription to all their software too, along with cloud features and training/support - their entertainment creation suite (Maya, 3DS, SoftImage, MotionBuilder & Mudbox), is $340/mo., $855 quarterly or $2,730/yr, but they also still have the option of buying a license outright, at $6,825. You still have to pay for ugrades with that tho, which is another $4K. At least with the sub, all upgrades are included as long as you continue the sub.

I think Shane's problem isn't his understanding of the situation, it's more a fear of rejection. It's a fear that nine times out of ten is going to be unfounded because no employer, regardless of whether they specified "Photoshop", is going to dismiss him on the grounds that he'd used a different program instead. You send your portfolio no matter what they askled for, because a potential employer sat at his/her desk, going through the pile of portfolios for a position in graphics, is always going to hire the one who's portfolio is the most attractive to them. I think specifying "Photoshop" is something of an automatic habit for most of them, when actually, they couldn't care less about what was used to produce it as long as it falls within their budget for providing you with that tool and maintaining it.

Perhaps the only time that would not be so is if they develop stuff specifically for, say, Photoshop.

Photoshop is "Industry Standard" (for now), but it is no more "professional" than GIMP, and as any full-on GIMP using pro will tell you, GIMP runs rings around Photoshop in it's capabilities once you've mastered it. Same with Blender, Blender is a more capable tool than those you see as being more "Professional". Blender knows no limit, it's really only the users capability that is the limit of what can be done with it.

As for HITFILM, the program is "Professional" even at it's current version, version 2 - and version 3 will be an even bigger nail in the coffin for AfterEffects, later this month. HITFILM, DARKTABLE, BLENDER, GIMP, they're all incredibly powerful, stable, "Professional" tools that are being used (more and more) in "Professional" environments.

They're more "professional" and powerful than the crap people are paying good money for :-D

If the situation with employers is down to software snobbery, then you'd be better off going it alone anyway - that's what I'll be doing. That's the beauty of all this stuff, I mean bloody hell, what couldn't you do with a CAMERA, HITFILM, BLENDER, and GIMP! You have the equivalent of a complete Hollywood studio on your desktop. There was a guy, if I recall he was from 20th Century Fox and was responsible for producing and compositing many of the 3D elements in a whole bunch of recent movies. He was speaking at a Blender meeting and took great pride in pointing out that although either Max or Maya (can't remember which) got all the credit for the effects, he'd actually used Blender, and more than that, the people on his own team were puzzled how on earth he did it so quick without them even knowing about it.

I'll post the video if I can find it :-D

That said, I'm not an expert, and I do understand why Shane fears to go in that direction.
I think it's a stupid take in the overall scheme of things, but like I said, I do understand his concern.

There's nothing against using various software titles in your portfolio or demo reel. In fact in a lot of cases it can be seen as a major plus as it shows diversity in your skillset. The rejection comes when they ask you "can you do this in After Effects too?" "Can you do this in Maya as well?" When you tell them no, sorry, I don't know those programs, that's when they move on to the next applicant. They don't have the time or resources to train you on the software they use and they're not going to wait around for you to learn it on your own. You should have done that before you applied. Most studios don't make it a habit of changing out their main applications every other year and a lot of them won't even invest in upgrades on a regular basis. So when they list Photoshop or After Effects, Maya or Max in their job requirements, they mean exactly that, they don't mean "or similar" unless they state as such, because different software packages handle the same functions quite differently. Just because you know how to use Blender and can fly through it like a pro, by no means suggests you have a clue what to do in Maya. They are two entirely different packages. In a studio environment, you're rarely working alone, and even if you are working alone your work will often be passed on to the next guy or the next team. A modeler will model, then pass the model on to the rigging team, and from there to the animation team. Everyone in that chain needs to be on the same page and be using the same software.

It may help for people to realise that Shane is dealing with 2 issues; one is the idea of being an indie with his own set up. In that case, portfolio rules, regardless of software. If the client likes what you can do, they really don't care HOW you produced it. I feel that is Pumeco's line. The second issue is Shane applying for a job. In that he is absolutely correct; the studio doesn't care what you can produce in 'X' software if they don't use that software... they only care if you can produce with what they have already invested in. For that, you need to keep up the skill sets in that particular software. The industry will become a lot more fractured yet, but for now, the 'big dogs' dominate.

It seems ironic that people think HitFilm will topple Abode. Adobe is not who they need to topple. They need to topple the user base.

To say that HitFilm is more professional is sort of pushing it. Hitfilm uses OpenGl to render, which means that a render engine that uses Cuda, ATI Stream/Mantle, or PHI, (or a combination of all 3) will blow OpenGl's doors in. Even more so on a server with lots of gpgpu's on it. If a gpgpu does not know how to do an OpenGl call, it reverts to the cpu. IE slow as a snail.... Not all OpenGl calls can be done on the gpu either. Home users can build an 11 gpu system, and that is per box with off the self parts from most computer stores.... (1 onboard, Four 2 gpu cards) Surf Ebay, and you can get server boards with 8 PCIe slots and onboard graphics. That is up to 17 gpus per blade....

There are other players in that market that have superior software to both Adobe and Hitfilm..

Eyeon: Fusion, not cheap, used by lots of studios. Fusion uses the gpgpu for far more than just rendering

The Foundry: Nuke Studio, again, not cheap. Node based and very easy for a Houdini user to learn and integrate. Nuke uses the gpgpu for more than just rendering as well.

There are plenty more as well.

So where does that leave the Adobe After Effects? Depends how you look at it doesn't it.

That basically leaves Adobe with the people that are familiar with using it in their pipeline. In the end it really does not matter what Person A thinks about what Person B should use.

All of us should use what we are comfortable using. And if you are on a team, you will have to use what they use.

It won't do much good to be a Blender/HitFilm expert if the team uses Houdini and Nuke, you would be completely lost and unemployed rather quickly.

If you can get away with using the free stuff out there, more power to you. Knowing how to use all of the above is even better for your portfolio

Bottom Line:

Use what you want too, use what you have too.

The Cloud argument is a moot point if all you use it for is checking a subscription and getting updates, etc...

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

I chose to update to Adobe's CC when I decided to use the quixel suite in my work. It works best in recent versions of 'shop but not so much on CS4, which is what I had before making the switch. I am not a fan of subscription services, I prefer owning the software outright but you do what you have to do to keep yourself relevant to potential employers and stay up on what's going on in the industry. Until quixel moves their suite to a standalone app, I'll probably maintain my subscription. The updater isn't as intrusive as some others, so I don't mind using it. I say go for it. If you can afford it, it's not the axis of evil people seem to think it is.

Shane (your reply earlier),

That's true but you can also rent to own, given the financial means to do it and whatnot. There are also things we don't rent. Well, there are rental cars but you don't rent "your" car. You don't rent your TV and rent to own you eventually pay it off. I might think differently if it was going towards paying off the full price... now that would be fair to me. You pay it off as you rent + interest for the convenience of making small payments. It just really doesn't work for me, not saying it's evil or whatever. I don't want it. I just feel with this cloudy scenario we are being shoehorned into getting used to and eventually accepting renting every single little thing. Again if someone else is totally cool with the eventual scenario of renting 2 dozen pieces of software and all that, great! I certainly will pay right out or go open source over the rental thing, no matter what alternative it comes to. I like the companies that offer multiple "Choices". Rent it, buy it, whatever it.

.

You don't "rent" your car, but plenty of people lease them. It's a good way to ensure that you are pretty much always driving something 2 years old or less. If you're the kind of person who drives their vehicle into the ground, leasing might even be cheaper. :)

On the other hand, we're all used to "subscribing" to cable TV and paying ridiculous prices for a whole butt load of channels we never, ever watch. We don't complain about not owning the shows and movies that we've paid for, do we? Given what I've paid for cable in my life, Adobe's sub rates seem rather tame.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

What most of you seem to forget when you write this stuff is that the year is now 2014. The days of having to stomach Adobe are long gone, there are better, cheaper alternatives. Worrying about what an employer wants is another thing that effectively went out with the Dodo if you use your noodle. Like I said, the year is 2014 and in this day and age, we have the power to start our own companies on zero budget. The days of being driven like a slave only remain for those sucked-in to the old way of doing things.

Shane is obviously looking for work, aren't we all, but what is it about what he wants to do that makes him want to be empolyed rather than be his own boss?

If he's good, he doesn't need an employer, he can go it alone (that's how companies are formed, it's not fantasy, that's what happens).
If he's crap, he'd fail in businesss, but then agan, he won't get employed either.

Why take the route to employment these days?
Be your own boss, the "Indie" has never had so much power and ease to do so, as they do right now!

Get a website, be your own boss!

A more dependable salary.

Affordable health insurance and the ability to actually start saving for retirement. I am 40 after all, and it just gets harder from here on out.

A weekend off here and there.

The ability to start paying off my massive student loans and try to rebuild my credit.

Being your own boss isn't nearly as glamorous as you think it is. I've done it for the last 4 years. Sometimes the money is good, but most of the time it's nickles and dimes, if anything at all, especially in the hobbyist market. I can't live on that.

The median annual salary for my degree field in the US is $60 - $70K. I'd be happy if I could make just half of that at this point working at an actual company.

I want to build my own studio, but I just don't have the resources for it right now. I need a stable income. My other option is to go find some brain-dead retail job with minimum wage and no future (and I've been applying for those jobs too, with zero luck so far cause no one around here is hiring). That's the biggest reason I left that kind of work to go to school, but at this point I was better off back then, cause at least I could afford a full tank of gas in my truck.

Comparing the purchase/rental of an house with software subscription, I suggest, is not a fair analogy, I accept what you say is true in that, if you don't pay the rent you are thrown out and on a purchased house you will still pay tax, there is no alternative. With software subscription there is an alternative, for now at least, you buy the product outright and use it without paying any further rental or taxes.

There is often an thin line between being paranoid and having a healthy interest in how your personal information is used, by who, and for what purpose. Each person creates their own boundaries, some will be nearer to my view of being paranoid, some further away but I am not going to condemn either camp. Cloud computing means I have to trust a company's servers to be there when I need them and to have a fast, reliable broadband connection to be there when I need it. I am firmly in the "if it can go wrong, it will go wrong" camp hence my reluctance to trust another entity to supply that 24/7. Cloud computing may well be the way of the future but there are a few benefits from growing old and in my case I am at an age will it will not HAVE to be part of my future.

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.

"Mention GIMP or Blender at one of these job interviews and they're likely to just laugh you out the door."

Again, you need to remember this is 2014, the days of Autodesk fanboys doing their best to maike their bad decision look wise, are long gone - they can't pull it off anymore because people would simply laugh back at them. No one laughs at Blender these days (unless they're a retard perhaps). There has been a clear change on that front, Blender is now gathering the respect it deserves at an alarming rate. The only people who laugh at Blender these days are those with a nervous laugh, and those "nervous laughs" usually eminate from supporters of software that cannot compete with Blender. These days, Blender is the almighty workhorse that people admire and look up to, and I'm guessing is causing quite a few nightmares for the directors of the lesser, overpriced products.

Laugh at Blender these days?
Goog god man, you sound like you've not seen a Blender vid on YouTube for about five years or something ;-)

Heh ... hehe ... hehehehehe :-D

Sorry Shane, crossposted.

I hear you, but at least be thankful you don't live in the UK. The only reason I'm without an income right now is because I refuse, point blank, to set up my own company in this slimey 'shaft-the-poor' shit-hole of a country. As soon as I get out of here it'll be 'all systems go' for me, but until then, I have to get by with no income, no support, no car - just a rapidly decaying paltry amount of savings.

Even faced with that, just as with Apple, I wouldn't buy an Adobe product if a gun were pointed to my head. There are things that the human race simply should not tolerate under any circumstances, and the greed and manipulation both of these companies practice should be tolerated by no man, and certainly won't be by this one.

Ahhhhhhhhh ... that's soooooooo soothing ... space ... and the things that can be done with a simple 2D image ...
Click here for a little enlightenment :-)

I've been using Blender for UV mapping for a while now. If I was forced to use it for modeling I'd eat my own face off. It's just not an intuitive UI. I've tried to like it for a while now and I continue to keep my copy updated, but I can't use it for any serious work because I spend more time trying to find or remember how to do this or that and having to look up vids on it yet again, than I do getting anything done. I've worked through a number of tutorials on it in the past, but it just doesn't work for me. If they would update their UI to something a real human can understand and remember without having to hunt for it every time then I might give it another go, but as it is, Blender is one of those programs that is clearly designed from a coder's perspective and not an artist's perspective.

I was watching some youtube vids on its video editing features just yesterday, as I'm working on assembling a demo reel and I need some good, affordable software that I can use to do that in that isn't going to fight me the whole way through. And I'll probably wind up doing it in Premiere, which is what I was going to buy originally but wanted to see what Blender and some other editing apps could do first. And if my macbook hadn't died a few years ago, I have Final Cut Pro I could do all of that in, but it's only a mac app, so it's currently serving as an expensive book-end on my closet shelf.

Here's a blurb about Blender from digital-tutors' software links page:

"Blender is also a free and open 3d animation application. While debated on who it is best for, few studio settings use it (with growth also debated) though professional grade work can be and is accomplished with it."

If you're not familiar with digital-tutors, basically it's an online subscription service with thousands of training video courses on the most widely used software in the CG industry. They currently have a total of 3 videos on Blender. Lynda is a similar online training site with a bit larger library, and they only have 7 blender videos. Gimp and Hitfilm aren't even mentioned on either site that I can find anywhere.

Fair enough, the analogies might not stack up but to allude to well, we rent all these things anyways, so adding software isn't a big deal - It isn't a big deal in itself until you are renting everything. We are talking a single case, CC, but I have concern about the signal it sends and the road it leads to. Again, I think it's fine as an option IF there are other purchase options also available. I don't really like being forced in a box either.

I think it's completely fine to use The GIMP, Paint Shop Pro and any of a number of photo/paint programs. They are all far more capable these days. Of course you need to make sure whatever any program offers meets your needs. Unless you are at a company that requires a specific software, it just feels to me like an elitism to go with Adobe, just because it's Adobe. For me, I have invested in pay-for plugins so I'm going to want PS plugin capability, which means stick with an old version of PS or go with something like PSP. I don't need 3D painting capability, I have it in 3D Coat. For layout art and texturing work, I just need something that does it's primary function well. I don't need to stitch panoramas or whatnot.

.

@hornet3d: I understand what you're saying. I used to think the same thing, about personal info, how it's used, etc. But I quit caring, cause there's really nothing anyone can do about it if you function in the modern world of tech on any level. If you own a smart phone, if you use an e-mail account, if you have a bank account even. If you do any spending at any store with anything other than cash. It's just not worth stressing over, because if someone wants your personal data they can easily get it, one way or another. The government's goal is to track everybody and record everything they can about them, and unless you can afford to disappear and build your own place somewhere out in the sticks and completely off the grid, you're not going to escape that no matter what you do. We live in the age of Big Brother. So the best bet, in my opinion, is to just blend in, cause the ones who try to hide wind up looking that much more suspicious to those that are paying attention. And if someone wants to steal my identity for credit - LOL, good luck with that one. Maybe they can do a better job with it than I have. I didn't know a credit score could get as low as mine is. Seriously. And it's all due to my student loans, which I have no way of paying off, and they never go away. Can't be discharged in bankruptcy, they follow you like a shadow and only continue to grow interest, late fees and penalties. If I told you how much they are you'd likely drop a brick or two. Before I went to school I had decent credit. Not great, but not horrible either.

@AmbientShade.

I totally get where you are coming from I don't let the possible data use worry me for, as you say there is little you can really do. I suspect the only real difference between us, on this subject at least, is one of age. I am lucky enough to have a pension I could take early and thus do not need work. I doubt that my credit score is fantastic by any means but I have paid for my house so I do have something to fall back on. I never had student loans as I was lucky enough to have my employers pay for any training a needed. That puts me in the position that I have no need of a smart phone or tablet. The only software I use is the software I want to use and I do have an email account and I do use some 3D forums but do not use Farcebook or Twatter.

From my position I agree with you there is little you can do to stop big brother but I guess I am not going to help by making it easy. I can't begin imagine the stress of having such heavy student loans must cause but I wish you every success and hope your situation improves in the shorter rather than the longer term.

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.

To be honest, digital-tutors aren't exactly an authority on anything are they?

I never watch their stuff, just seeing their name next to a video is enough to put me off watching their videos, and funny enough, one of the reasons is because they appear to have that suck-up disease a lot of magazines and blogs have - Adobe this, Adobe that. There's a few of them, then there's "Witch?" a so-called hive of useful information, yet just about everything I read from them has been so far out, it's scary - absolute bollocks - the old lady next door has a better grasp of technology.

Anyway, like I said, best of luck with whatever you choose, the pressure is always on, a side effect of the rat race. I've never been in debt because I don't borrow, but nevertheless, I cannot wait to get out of this place, buy a cheap old property in the middle of nowhere, and just relax, do it up at my own pace, no mortgage necessary. You can buy properties for a couple of thousand in Europe so that's what I'll be doing, the more isolated the better as far as I'm concerned. I'll stick a bunch of solar panels on the roof, water from a well, no bills, no worries.

I think the key is to live simply (especially when you're poor), but some people don't want that and that's understandable I suppose. I'm lucky though, because even if I weren't poor, I'd still rather live in a hut in the middle of a field or better still, a forest, than I would a fancy apartment in the city.

I have a full CC subscription because it makes sense for me. I regularly use more than three of the apps (it's actually, like, 7 that I use frequently), and it would be detrimental to me to have to learn a new user interface to do what I do in each of those apps, even if there are programs that are free or less costly. As long as you're using more than 3 apps regularly, it's actually cheaper for the CC version than upgrading every two versions, iirc from when I did my cost-benefit analysis (Yes, I had the choice between the CS6 suite and a CC sub. CC sub turned out to be cheaper in both the short and long term for the programs I needed). And you get the upgrades and bugfixes as soon as they're released (you can update them whenever you wish through the CC app) rather than having to wait for whatever version you're upgrading with.

Granted, there are a few things that are slightly annoying. Sometimes the CC app only wants to upgrade one app and then all the others fail. Solved by shutting the thing down and restarting it, but...annoying. Occasionally (once every couple-to-three) months, Acrobat will just CLOSE and the license checker thing will pop up. Acrobat is the only one that closes, thus far. Photoshop and Premiere both allowed me to work in the background while it checked on my subscription. It doesn't check every time you use it, either. It's just an occasional thing, although it is very slightly annoying.

More annoying is that the Photoshop bug still exists that if you open PS with your mouse instead of your table stylus, PS will not read any sensitivity from your tablet. Fix is to make sure you open the app with the stylus, but it's still annnnnnooooyyyyyinnnnnngggg.

I use MangaStudio more for drawing than Photoshop now, but all of my image editing, painting, and postworking I do in Photoshop.

花 | 美 | 花美 | 花火
...It's a pun.

That's fine. My take on it is they've been going for quite a while, and have established a good reputation across the industry. They're also an extremely affordable alternative to the highly over-priced schools that will charge you thousands and not give you a fraction of the information that sites like d-t will give you. You want to talk about greed and wallet suckers, just look at so-called art schools claiming to "teach" this stuff.

You can learn a lot from youtube and even vimeo for free, but who are you learning it from? What are their credentials? There's a lot of valuable training on youtube but there's a lot of bad info as well, from novices who really don't know what they're doing. You get what you pay for. I like d-t, and lynda, and other sites like eat3d, gnomon, etc., because their training videos come from industry professionals who know what they're doing and have the portfolios and film/game credits to back it up. Many of the instructors at all those over-priced art schools don't even have those kinds of credentials, cause they've never worked in the industry and a lot of them graduated from the same schools they're teaching at now. Had I known all that when I went to school, I never would have gone. It's definitely not done me any good so far.

I like playing with all the app's there all fun.

but I like some better then others and I'm faster with certain ones.

I have no problems with Adobe ,Autodesk subscription.

no ones going to tell me what app's to use or how to get them and I wouldn't tell another what they should do.

the general rule is try it all find what fits you best. refuse to live in fear.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

WIth all due respect, Pumeco, you say a lot about how easy it is to make it as "your own boss", but talk is cheap. When you've succeeded, let us know how you did it. Until then, I remain skeptical.

I know very few people who have succeeded in doing this -- and every.single.one.of.them either started out by moving up the ranks in a corporate environment that earned them enough money to finance their self-employment (and build the extremely important networks of people that you won't get simply by using social media) OR they inherited a substantial lump sum that let them do it.

To me, the belief that anyone can make it on their own is about as useful as knowing that anyone can win the lottery. It's true. Anyone who buys a ticket, CAN win the lottery. But if you're relying on the lottery for your future income, you're destined for no where but the poor house. And you're about as likely to "make it own your own" from a start of absolutely nothing (no industry experience, no starting capital, no industry connections) as you are to win the Powerball. Yes, some people manage to start from nothing and create a business that thrives, and some people do actually win the Powerball. But the likelihood that anyone we know will do the same is minuscule. You can keep your dreams, but if you don't have a very good and reasonable Plan A, then in 20 years you'll be saying exactly the same thing on internet forums that you're saying right now. ;)

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

"To be honest, digital-tutors aren't exactly an authority on anything are they?"

Wow, you start out with "I never watch their stuff" to totally slamming what you have never seen....

Please tell us you are joking. Many of the top 3d companies sponsor (IE pay people) to make many of those videos.

Adobe stuff is only a fraction of what is on there. They are not going to promote anything not relevant to what they are teaching.

Some of the top people in their fields do video's that are on there, many of them are also reviewed by those companies prior to publishing them,

If you think sponsored videos on software that are approved by the parent company is not an authority, I don't know what to tell you.

Next you will be telling us that the people that wrote the software don't know how to use it to the full potential of it.

Simply because you have never seen it and you know (insert whatever) is a better choice..

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

The surest rule in this industry is that networking is everything. No one can produce a full length feature film or a triple-A game title on their own. Often times, the people you worked with on one project, or went to school with, are likely to be the ones who help you get a job 2 or 3 or even 10 years down the road. Many studios, especially in this current economy, only keep a small group of core artists and bid out the rest of the work to freelancers and other smaller studios. Even the biggest names in the industry spend a good chunk of their time freelancing. So for those of us looking for work, it's really a bad idea to shun social media - it's a powerful tool in today's market, so by not using it to your advantage, you're really only hurting yourself. It's basically free advertising for your talent.

dang I forgot to get a lottery ticket .

but

odd's of getting hired for a CGI studio worth working at. where talking lottery odds.

odd's of getting ya Art on the cover of Heavy Metal again where talking lottery odds.

If your not as talented as a Royo, Borris in CGI, & ya want a lot of $$$ probably best to go to wall street.

Millionaire Artist is a oxymoron :(

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

That's a defeatist mentality RorrKonn.

While it is true that it's one of the most competitive industries out there, it's not that difficult to get a studio job. It just takes persistence and determination, and confidence in your work. You have to constantly push yourself, just like any other career if you want to succeed. Skill and talent takes a lot of time to develop. The more time you invest in it the more those skills will grow. You have to try to make every model that much better than the last one and be willing to learn as much as possible and accept honest criticism of your work. It also means setting aside a lot of your personal life and dedicating yourself to your craft for several years, especially in the beginning. I spend as many hours every day as I can pushing myself. I try to avoid distractions as much as possible. I don't waste my time watching tv or socializing too much, cause unless it's related to my work, I feel like I'm wasting my time that could be better spent practicing or working on a commission. If I'm awake I'm almost always working on a new model or learning a new task in one of the apps I use.

You don't have to be on the cover of a magazine to make a good living as a CG artist, you just have to be good at what you do, and part of that comes from looking at and studying the work of the bigger names out there who are successful and really listening to what they have to say. To - loosely - borrow a line from one of the guys in a thread on CGSociety I was reading the other day, "The biggest problem in this industry right now is mediocrity." In order to stand out from the crowd you have to push yourself to be better than all the others you see. If you do that, your work will eventually gain recognition.

@Moriador
You're so very wrong on so many levels, and the reason is because you're speaking in popular "safe lingo", the sort that people are bound to agree with just because it sounds feasible. That's precisely why people fail, they listen to everyone else instead of using their own commom sense and their own initiative.

Do you think the peeps behind HITFILM gave a crap about whether others thought they would succeed?
Fact is, they have, and they're growing.

The only reason Adobe are "Industry Standard" is because people behave like sheep, they flock to what they think most people are using, they like to be like their friends or collegues. Fact is, if the "Adobe suck-ups" that made tutorials made as many GIMP and BLENDER tutorials as they do for greed-machines like Adobe, then those better programs would soon over take them over as "Industry Standard".

It's all to do with marketing, and the publics perception of what is what.

I pointed out earlier that Photoshop is not the most popular 2D editor in the world, that award goes to GIMP. You have never seen Adobe claim that Photoshop is the most popular in the word, because it isn't, GIMP is. If Photoshop was the most popular in the world they'd be yelling it from the top of thier big greedy mouths, but as they're not in a position to do that (and never will be) they play on the "Industry Standard" thing instead, because that is the only thing that's holding them together, it's all they have to play on. Take that "industry Standard" part out of Adobe and you're left with an outdated, buggy, overbearing, overpriced greed-machine and nothing more.

A big thumbs-up to you for learning GIMP, you'll feel better about it when it becomes industry standard, I know I will.

Regards proving myself with a business, I already have, three times, each of which succeded but I dropped willingly out of choice because in this country, you're effectively working to get sucked-dry again (and I didn't enjoy runing a business that much anyway). I'd rather not run a business at all than run one in this country, especially after the changes made in recent years - screw em. Like I said, as soon as I get out of here it'll be "all systems go" for me, but then again, that's assuming I want to do that. I'll most likey run a business for a while, just enough to scrape by for the rest of my life, then drop it and chill, live simply. I'm not interested in fancy cars, swimming pools and gold watches.

@David
Don't think I haven't observed your behaviour lately, and having a nice cleaveage doen't mean you won't get rectified ;-)

When I watch a tutorial, I generally have no problem with Photoshop being used to demonstrate something now and then (I do my best not to vomit). But if I then watch another tutorial by the same producer, I expect some variety. It's not unreasonable to see the most popular 2D editor in the world (GIMP) get used for the tutorial. Nor is it unreasonable to expect to see Corel's editors get used, either. But when a producer constantly suck-up to Adobe, they rightly get ignored. I'm just not interested in learning that crap, and neither are the vast majority of people out there who are using the better programs (GIMP for example).

I don't care who are responsible for their tutorials, I would still have the same opinion if it were being demonstrated in soft focus by a bunch of naked nymphs. Let me know when they start behaving in a fashion conductive to a healthy industry, then I just might take another look at their tutorials.

Until then, they can rabbit-away all they like, I won't be listening to any of it.

@Shane
You hit the nail on the head when you said you don't have to be on a magazine cover to do well, you just have to be good at what you do. That's why the whole "Industy Standard" thing is a farce that needs to be ignored.

Much as I shy away from sites like Farcebook and Twatter I do accept that, if you are running a business or looking to promote yourself or your work, social media is a necessity not an option. My view of social media is also, almost certainly biased in that it gets a bad press. It is the dark side that gets most of the publicity and the good that social media provides is rarely promoted. For me though I have no need for it but as I don't use it would not be fair for me to condemn it or the people who use it.

The same is true of software, each person has made their choice based upon their situation and needs and that is their choice. I seems reasonable to suggest that there may be different options just in case there is software that they are not aware of but I don't see it is reasonable to rubbish their choice.

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.

Pumeco, you're free to believe what you want. But you're the one swallowing the big cultural myth.

You know why the UK is in such a state? Because a whole lot of people believe the Tory line that every one can succeed with enough hard work, that opportunity awaits just around the corner, that the odds are not seriously and ominously stacked against you. The truth is that, while discipline, effort, talent, and networking will get you a long way, luck is equally as important. However, every day you spend telling everyone on these forums how wrong we are about whatever it is you feel like preaching that day -- every day you waste like that, the chance that you'll get an unforeseen opportunity just becomes lower and lower.

I've known a lot -- A LOT -- of people who were always talking about the future. "As soon as I leave this job..."; "The moment I get my car loan paid..."; "Once the kids are old enough to go to school..."; "As soon as I get out of this country..." And you know what? They're still saying "As soon as [whatever]".

If you have a big plan and you're not actively working on it right now, you'll never work on it. You'll just spend a few decades TALKING about it. That's the truth that people don't like to tell the young folk because it's so demoralizing. Of course, you don't have to be in that position. You could stop preaching and start working on whatever it is. I've lived in 5 countries in my life, and I guarantee that there's no magical place in any other part of the world that will make the difference. You're in a modern, industrialized nation. It doesn't get any better. And if you leave the country, your excuses will come right along with you. So I advise that you stop waiting "until" and start doing now. And put away the Open Source Bible. We didn't come here for a sermon. :) <----- Note the smiley. :)

Edit: As for GIMP, you still haven't explained to me how to export in PSD format. If a client insists on that format, they won't accept something else. Perhaps you're already famous enough in the art world to turn down clients, but most of the rest of us aren't. So we're going to chug along using whatever software is compatible with whatever the other people we work with are using because compromise makes you a lot more friends than always insisting on having things your way. :)

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

Years ago when I left a secure, well paid job that had become mundane everyone was quick to tell me I was a fool. Two years later when my salary was substantially better and traveling the world many said it was OK for me but they had a mortgage and kids to look after. To a degree they were right, I was lucky to have no kids and a wife that supported my decision, but the there are two sides to that and most of my colleagues in the new company also had kids and mortgages to look after.

Travelling a great deal I discovered two things, firstly it is not as glamorous as it seems and, unless you make an effort to change, many of you problems go with you. In other countries I found difficulties very much like home, after a while I had to accept it was not the country that was at fault it was me.

Many years later I took the jump the other way. I stopped the travelling and decided to work locally for about a third of the salary. At each point it was the right call to make, but I was lucky enough that I was in the right place at the right time and had a wife gifted enough to show me what opportunities were opening up for me. Yes I was lucky that such doors opened for me and I had someone to guide me through but it is also clear to me that many others have had opportunities open up for them and they made an excuse not grasp the opportunity. Of course, when it was the right time they many found the doors had closed and no more had opened.

It is very easy to find any reason not to do something, much harder to find a valid reason to do something.

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.

But that's where I differ to most people, Moriador, you see:

I don't worry about debt because I never borrow, and never will.
I don't worry about what could happen to my data in the "Cloud" because I don't use clouds.
I don't worry about Adobe sucking on my wallet because I don't subscribe to greed-machines.
I don't worry about Autodesk subscriptions because I don't rent software.
I don't worry about spying and backdoors because I use a safe OS and don't have a SpyPhone.
I don't worry about housing because I can buy one outright the moment I see the one I want.

That's a lot of stuff I don't worry about and never will, but most people do (or seriously need to).

You probably read my stuff and think I'm an arrogant prick (and that's ok), but actually, everything I wrote here is to protect people, not hurt them. I know I've had my fair share of disagreements with Shane, but believe me when I tell you, I have every sympathy for him, because like most people who aren't rolling in cash, he's a victim of being shafted by the system, he's the underdog, and I always have sympathy for the underdog. He's not in debt out of choice, he's in debt because the "system" made him believe that paying for further education is going to do him some good. He's still jobless and in debt because of it, a scam people are falling for even now. People need to wise-up and realise that if they don't protect themselves, use a little common sense, then the system will shaft them.

In contrast, I draw your attention to my little list above, that's my situation, and I'm happy about that - I don't need advice in that respect - I know what I'm doing because I have nothing to worry about. I might not be financially rich, but in a "spiritual" sense I'm way richer than everyone else I know. I just don't have the worries they have because I do things my own way. I'm not unique in that respect, either, millions of people do and think like I do, but compared to the Ratrace we're just a drop in the ocean.

You know what I'd do if I were Shane?
Something he'd likely never do in a million years, but I'll tell you anyway.

I'd take a job stacking shelves, just to get the student loan thing paid off, nothing wrong with that. Then I'd pack everything into the back of my Toyota and head for Texas. I'd buy a large plot of land for next to nothing, no loan necessary, and I'd ensure it was in a code-free area so that I could construct my own hut without planning permission. So lets see now, for practically no outlay (and completely mortgage free) he'd be livinig in his OWN house on his OWN land, and with a constant supply of burning-hot FREE energy from his friend in the Texan sky. He'd never have to worry about another bill for as long as he lives. Free electric, free cooking, free heating, free cooling, open land, own design house, I mean, what more could a guy want?

Compare that to what he has now: stress, bills, loans, debt, no land, no house he actually owns. Like most others who follow the same old routine, he's now having to deal with the consequences of being sucked into it. The other life I just described doesn't demand these things, it's a whole different way of doing it, a much more pallatable approach to life. Apart from the debt, I'm in pretty much the same situation he is, the only difference is I know that my plan is a realsistic one, and one that won't fail me. The reson it won't fail me is because I'm in control of it and won't be reliant upon anyone or anything to achieve it. That's the beauty of beign realistic and not being interested in doing what everyone else does. Unless I suddenly drop dead in mysterious circumstances, belive me, I'll be doing exactly what I said i'll be doing. I have everything in place to the point I could do it tomorrow if I wanted, so it must be true :-)

As for the "PSD" thing, how dare you mention such a thing to me, consider yourself whipped 100 times!

Actually, I don't know the answer because I have no need to touch Adobe formats of any kind, and I'm not going to look into it for you either.
t's for your own good :-D

@Pumeco:

That's some pretty bad advice if you think you'll be able to pay off student loans and buy land in texas (which ain't cheap) off of "stacking shelves" salary. You're going to have just enough for the basics and some of that student loan... maybe. I'm more with Moriador on this because that post is more grounded in the reality of the what's going on and I've seen the same thing with people: always talking about stuff and on the soapbox, but never really doing anything. The thing is if you're going to keep meaningful employment even in hard times, you need to have the proper skill set so employers keep calling you. They care nothing about philosophical stances; if you don't have what they want, don't expect calls, but do expect a hard life. And I learned that early in life and as a result, the most I've been out of work is three weeks.. and i'm working a job no where I travel internationally and I have to always have a bag packed and my passport by the front door (which I've been slacking on my 3D projects because of) ... while my friends that had those same type of plans were out of work for months or even years. No matter what career path, you have to keep learning and using the current tools that employers and clients want. If they want SQL Server administration experience, don't think you can apply for the job just knowing MySQL. If a clients wants work in zbrush or photoshop, don't apply if you're putting models together in blender and gimp... you're wasting your time and theirs. If that's what the industry wants and you want that money, then that's you need to be learning or you'll just have dreams of doing stuff... and an empty refrigerator.

EDIT: and no, you can't make PSDs from gimp... at least not easily. Time is money.

Yeah, listen, I've got some great advice for anyone who needs to get out of debt without paying for it!!!

Basically, you need a special cloak, they're a great invention because when they come looking for you, just switch it on and they can't see you!!!
You could kill them off without a trace, a great way to get back at the system!!!

Click Here to see how to make one!!!

Later,
Roxie - Girl With Blade

And on the topic, I did buy the Photographer bundle subscription from adobe to update my set from Photoshop CS4. That was pretty much the only software I had that I needed to update, since I use that, Modo and Zbrush on a regular basis. No complaints about it, and I can always fall back to CS4 if I need to.

I'm fine, so telling me I'm kidding myself is moot, those situations that plague others don't plague me because I can spot scams and bad ideas a mile off.

My suggestion was to pay off his loan first, then move-on to a better life. I'm not speaking from a sop box, you must have missed the part where I said I could do this stuff tommorow if I wanted, I assure you it's all very real, I can also assure you that millions around the word live like that every day.

I can do these things because I have nothing to stop me doing so. I also did say that Shane would never do what I suggested anyway, I'm just pointing out what I'd do if I were him. And BTW, land is dirt cheap in Texas, I'm not even American and even I could snap-up a massive plot for next to nothing!

I personally won't buy in Texas due to American immigration laws, but I'll happily drop you a pic when I have my solar-powered hut in my own little forest (only mine will have to be in Europe).

Must be just me but life with no cares whatsoever and no ties seems rather sad but each to their own.

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.

"However, the bottom line is that I have to get out of the hobbyist market and move towards the professional market, where I can actually make a living on what I do, That requires investing in software that the professional side of this industry requires me to learn and use regularly in order to have a snowball's chance in hell at getting hired or taking on contracts for large studios where the real money exists. It's competitive enough as it is without making things harder on myself due to my own personal agreements or disagreements with the business practices of this or that company."<<< Shane May I offer the opinion of one who has had a 19 year Career in print Industry staring as a pre prepress File prep operator and eventually becoming a designer and ending as an account manger handling out top high end clients. I am FLUET in Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator& Indesign CS. If you are looking for salaried ,relatively Stable income as a staff member at a graphics company and you wish to, in general ,to have a viable industry Standard graphics skill set in a very competitive marke.t Then get the CC subscription if you dont already own a seat of at least CS3 like I do . Everyones personal objectives are different you should learn/use the software that you think will most likely achieve your professional objectives. your personal feelings about a companies "greedy" business model or some personal mission to see them "toppled" will not necessarily contribute to the achievement of your professional objectives. Get the subscription if you can afford the monthly fee.

My website

YouTube Channel

@Pumeco:

In order to really give the advice on paying off loans, you're really have to understand how the government student loan works. For instance, if you take out loans for a law degree, you'd basically have to be working in that industry to pay off the loans because of the cost of law school. If you take out maybe $100k loan for law school, you'd never be able to pay that back working in a grocery store. And you can't default on the loan because the government WILL get their money by garnishing your check. So for some, the student loans can be crushing for them, especially if they don't get into their intended career.

That's not what it's about, Hornet, it's about being in control of your life and being able to enjoy it instead of being constantly hounded by the system. If you rely upon the system, you are always going to be hounded by it and that's all there is to it, there's no getting away from that. The onlty way you can give them the big finger is to be independent of them, your own land, your own house, your own water supply and your own source of free energy. What's so sad about having your own place on your own land, away from the crowd, totally independent of the grid, what am I going to miss?

Have to say, you got me there, Hornet. Unless of course you're worried I might not have internet access anymore. Don't worry, I know how to cover that one as well, I won't disappear from the forum no matter where I move or how remote it is, I'll be able to annoy everyone just as much as I do now. That said, at first, I'll be very busy renovating, so please bear in mind that you peasnts must come second to that :-P

Then of course, I might have to grow some 'tatoes so I can make a chip-butty.

@Male_M3dia
You know what, I had no idea they work like that, I literally just sat staring at the screen in shock at what you just wrote!

FFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFFF'ing hell!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I can't believe it, I mean wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwow!!!!!!!!!!
Talk about a government manipulating it's minions!!!!!!!!!!!!

I don't get it, how on earth do those a-holes get away with this sort of thing?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!?!

What freaking right do they have to dictate where the money comes from?
A loan is a loan, the only thing they should have a say in is whether to loan you the freaking money in the first place!!!!!!!!!

I'm sorry Shane, really I had no idea, seriously, I want to swear sooooooooo freaking bad right now, so be thankful I can use the word "freaking" in place of a similar sounding word I'd rather use!

FFFFFFFFF'ing Hell!!!!!!!!!

I honesty don't know what's worse, those a-holes for enforcing it or the American public for tolerating it!!!!!!!!!
Hahahah, I'm laughing out loud out of sheer disbelief, I've never heard anything like it!!!!!!!!!

Here's something equally American for y'all ...

---> OH
---> MY
---> GAAAAAAAAAD

Well, at least you can laugh at my attempt at an American accent :-)

@pumeco

Own land, own water supply and totally independent, well I guess you would miss nothing. I would miss my wife first of all and then my dog. Sure they could come with me but I would be forcing them to live their life I want and even then I would miss my sisters, brothers,nieces and friends. They could all come and live with me but now it doesn't look so isolated any more.

I am more than happy on my own company and can go for long walks on my own, or since retirement, with my dog, but I would still miss people. Your dream/plan works for you but it is not everyone's dream and certainly not mine.

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.

True, but I don't need to worry about whether my partner would like the lifestyle, because I don't have a partner. I see that as a bonus because if I do finally get lucky, she'll already know what style of life she can expect. Not only that, women are every bit as fond of that sort of lifestlye as men are (I think they like the romance of it all). There are as many women as men into this stuff from what I can tell, certainly from what I've gathered on forums occupied by fans of the lifestlye.

Doggies like it too :-)

Interesting discussion. I'm not siding with anybody, but I just want to suggest that unqualified absolutes lead to misplaced responses.

For example (and I'm not picking on pumeco - just an example)

" If you rely upon the system, you are always going to be hounded by it and that's all there is to it, there's no getting away from that. "

You know that's not true. I relied on the system just fine. I paid off my student loan at the age of 24 when my girlfriend at the time asked "If you hate writing checks so much, why don't you just pay that damn thing off?" Yes, the system allowed me, in just two years, to accumulate enough money to pay all four years of my college.

I have two daughters - one finished college and the other has one more year, and both educations I paid for with cash. The system seems great to me.

Renderosity forum reply notifications are wonky. If I read a follow-up in a thread, but I don't myself reply, then notifications no longer happen AT ALL on that thread. So if I seem to be ignoring a question, that's why. (Updated September 23, 2019)

Also student loans are funded by taxpayer money. Yes the government can come after you for your unpaid student loans because the American people want their money back; the government is not being a tyrant about it. The loans are there because there are benefits to investing in the economic future of its citizens. But a bad investment is a bad investment and the loan system is set up so that the people get their investment back one way or another, or it would have went broke from no one paying back loans.

But you're only talking about a specific part of the system, BB, one that worked out for you and your family. Shane is a perfect example of being shafted by the system, he's in debt because he paid for something the government should have provided for free by default anyway. A governments job is supposed to be to run a fair and pleasant ship and look after it's population, not screw them over. So to be independent of these monsters is an empowering thing, and for me at least, I think it's not just the best thing you can achive, but the most important.

How much of a crap would a person give about interest rates if they don't have a mortgage?
How much of a crap would a person give about the cost of energy if they get it for free?

Wealth is different things to different people, and like the majority, Shane is trying to sustain a lifestyle he probably never even thought about ditching in favour of other options that are open to him. The system can work for some, but you only have to look at the state of things to realise it's not working for the rest of them.

lol, yeah.. I could work 4 or 5 full time "shelf stocking" jobs - if there were enough hours in a day - while living on ramen and still not make enough to pay off my student loans any time in the next 20+ years. And that's the case for a good number of college grads in the US. That's how the system is designed here, and for the majority of people, if you don't take those loans, or have parents who were smart enough and wealthy enough to save for your college, you'll never do much more than minimum wage, paycheck to paycheck. Sure, some folks get lucky and make a small fortune as a high school drop out, but the majority of people have to have a degree in order to make a real living. We are debt slaves, simple as that. And last year the amount of default student loan debt in the US broke $1-trillion, and it's just been continuing to grow since with no end in sight. Because more college grads today are out of work than in work, because there are NO jobs for grads to fill, so they're working at mcdonalds or wal-mart or not working at all. For a lot of them, they're now over-qualified for the min. wage jobs and no one will hire them.

Fortunately the majority of my loans are NOT federal loans, they're private, but they still basically have the same rules as federal loans. They can't be discharged.

And no, the government should not be giving us loans for free. First of all there's no such thing as free, regardless of where the money comes from, someone has to pay for it. I fully accept my debt and I don't expect anyone to have to pay for it but me. I made the mistake of taking the loans to begin with. If I had it to do over again I wouldn't, but live and learn.

Moving to TX and buying a chunk of land and living off the grid is all fine and dandy in fantasy land, but what are you going to do to pay your annual property taxes? Basket weaving isn't going to cut it, and there's no where in this country you can live on "your own land" (which is a fallacy by definition) and not have to pay property taxes. Like I said earlier, you never really own your own place here. Cause as soon as you stop paying those taxes, the feds will take your place.

Thanks for the info Wolf. I do have CS4 Design Premium. It just doesn't have all the apps I need. The thing is tho, I don't really know graphic design or print media. I mean I can use Photoshop and Illustrator pretty well, but I can't tell you what the specifics are when it comes to print and all that. So if I wanted one of those jobs I'd have to learn graphic design. My degree is in computer animation.

@Shane
Like I said, I'm sorry, I had no idea you were being forced into having to pay your loan back through a 'specific' source of income.

But I'll tell you this for nowt, the fact that you Americans speak so lightly about such dictatory systems, is extremely scary indeed, it's like you'll stand for anything - no wonder Apple, Adobe, Google, and Microsoft (all American) can get away with doing the things they do. The way your student loans work, suggests that a human isn't entitled to change their mind. These are life changing decisions we're talking about here, yet if you get a loan for this crap and then decide it isn't for you, you're effectively still being forced into a life and 'directon' you no longer want to take despite the fact you might be in a position to pay-off the loan through another source.

It's them having outragous control over your life. If it wasn't that, and all the the public really wanted is to have their money back, then there should be no problem at all with you paying it back from whatever source of income you chose, should there? For crying out loud, Shane, know when you've been shafted by the system, sort it out, then give 'em the finger.

Oh, and stick barbs on it while you're at it, I certainly would ;-)

I don't know how you'll get out of your situation, certainly I've nothing to suggest because seriously, I think you must have taken leave of your senses to take out that loan in the first place, especially when such dictatory terms are attached to it. It just seems unfathomable to me why anyone would do that, but all the same, I wish you well in ridding yourself of it.

I don't think you understood quite what male_media meant when he said "you have to work in that industry". It doesn't mean, if you go to school to be a lawyer, then you HAVE to be a lawyer whether you like it or not. It means, where else are you going to work that will pay you the salary necessary to be able to afford to pay back those loans? The lenders don't care what you do to pay it back, as long as you pay it back they're happy. But a law degree is expensive (and there's no guarantee you'll pass the Bar exam - a lot of folks don't) and working in a warehouse or a retail chain isn't going to pay you enough to live on and pay back those loans. Hell, those kind of jobs don't even pay enough to live on even without the burden of student loans, unless you're in management, maybe. So the moral of the story is to make sure you know this is the career path you want and will stick with so that you have the means to repay whatever loans you acquired to train for it. Or better yet, don't take out the loans. Save for college instead, if you have the means to do so.

Well I'm bloody glad to hear it, and in that case you'd better start stacking shelves then, and get it paid off.
Once you've done that, don't make any more moves that effectively pull you into the "Rat Trap".

Honest, I don't get why anyone needs to pay for education these days if they have the internet. I mean, I'll be the first to admit I have a wandering mind (wow, do I have a wandering mind), but the benefit is I get my head into so much online literature because of it that I start to "connect" things in ways a school could only dream of being able to tech me. I can learn at my own pace, visit sites, watch videos, buy books, download books, diagrams, schematics, files, anything.

So, why get yourself in debt like that when you could do better for free and in your own time, why do that?

Surely, doing it your own way would have been a better option. You would likely have learnt more than you have already, and you would not be in debt because of it. I've always felt a good, solid way to learn something is to have a physical copy reference book to hand while I browse the web, so that I can cross-reference things. I don't know of a better, more relaxed way to learn something than that. Before the internet, I always used a library to hire books and educational videos, but since the internet, I've not come across anything I've not being able to learn with ease (apart from Baggins bending my mind over Poser Nodes).

BTW: Not related, but do you know if the round avatar format is here to stay, or is it just a temporary glitch?

@Pumeco:

Employers will not accept "self taught on internet" as valid experience or education on the resume. They want references to properly accredited schools so they know all their applicants are on the same level. You can supplement your knowledge with online materials on your current job and others will look at it if you end up using it there and have a few years on the job training. However, it will not open doors on its own. I started out working on mainframe computers, however I took classes at the local college to upgrade my skillset to programming in SQL Server and Visual Basic while everyone rushed the market to fix Y2K issues. So I had that on the job experience with those languages an my company transitioned, so when the IT bust occurred and the Y2K fixes were done, a lot of programmers were out on the street but I stayed employed and consulting agencies were constantly calling me with opportunities. Because I kept my skillset updated with proper training (at my own expense), I don't stay out of work for long and I get the more hard to fill jobs like the one I have now, which is a combination of programming, support, and database administration... which is why I have to keep my bags packed to head out of the country. You simply don't get those jobs without the proper training, work ethic, and skill set.

I went through college with scholarships and summer internships at corporations, so I didn't take out any loans. So I entered the IT market free and clear, though it took a lot of work to increase my salary. Loans work for people if 1) they're prepared to do the work necessary to graduate 2) they choose the proper career field so they make money to pay back the load and 3) they can enter that market when they graduate (nothing like going into the field and no jobs for your degree is available). I had to finance my college on my own since my parents funneled money into supporting my brother's education.. which was a law degree and several Master's financed with student loans... and he never took the Bar and ended up working outside the states for decades teaching English. (The government was harassing me for his location because he didn't pay them and he used me as a personal reference on the loan application. I told them to use their resources to track him down overseas because he didn't tell anyone where he was... and sent postcards with no return addresses). He's back in the states now, and the first conversation he had was with Uncle Sam. They want their money and then some. ;)

Depends on the degree. I don't want a doctor who is "self-taught" on youtube. Or an architect, or even a lawyer.

In animation, yes you can learn it on your own and really don't need a degree for it, but even with that, there are things you learn in school that you will never learn on your own unless your networking skills are strong and you're able to get into a good company early on with good contacts that you can learn those things from, such as industry standards, do's and don'ts, etc. Teamwork is everything, and they don't take too kindly to rebels who think they know more than the rest of the team or think they can get by doing it "their own way". That approach will get you unemployed pretty quick, if ever employed at all. Cause your boss to lose a contract or be late on a deadline for trying to go it your own way and it will be a long time before you find work at another studio again.

I don't think that your "training on the Internet" will work that well. You may have an interesting portfolio to impress someone, but I guess formal training, with a piece of paper to prove it, will still be better to open doors.

And I think there is a lot of cultural difference here. I had no need to get a student loan, since getting educated is close to being free in Germany. Some people need a student loan to cover their basic living expenses while studying, but not much more. I have an american friend living here and from our discussions I know how expensive education in the US is. Well, probably I pay more taxes for that, but I'm fine with that.

Situations are different in different countries, but if you need a well paid job, Shane's way to do it sounds reasonable to me. I don't think that mentioning Blender or Gimp is really a drawback, but it's not a bonus either. They won't change their pipeline for you.

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for.
Sail out to sea and do new things.
-"Amazing Grace" Hopper

Avatar image of me done by Chidori.

* quote bagginsbill*

Interesting discussion. I'm not siding with anybody, but I just want to suggest that unqualified absolutes lead to misplaced responses.

For example (and I'm not picking on pumeco - just an example)

*" If you rely upon the system, you are always going to be hounded by it and that's all there is to it, there's no getting away from that. "

You know that's not true. I relied on the system just fine. I paid off my student loan at the age of 24 when my girlfriend at the time asked "If you hate writing checks so much, why don't you just pay that damn thing off?" Yes, the system allowed me, in just two years, to accumulate enough money to pay all four years of my college.

I have two daughters - one finished college and the other has one more year, and both educations I paid for with cash. The system seems great to me.

the details of how you succeed in the CGI would be helpful to others. your a boss at ILM or Blizzard ? & how you got there ,school courses ,etc ,etc.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

@Male_M3dia / Shane / Bantha
Well, I'll not argue with that, in fact I can't argue with that because what you're talking about here are things that have never applied to me so that's pretty much why I'm not aware of what people face applying for jobs these days. I don't work for other people, I've always prefered to line my own pockets rather than that of some other bloke giving me orders. I know it's a perfectly normal thing to be employed, but it's always felt a bit demeaning to me, to take orders from someone else. I know, that sounds ignorant, but truth is I've never worked for anyone in my life, well, not since the first (and only) job I ever had when I had just left school. I've always done my own thing since then, always been my own boss.

So basically, Shane (and anyone looking to be employed) is faced with a different set of requirements due to the fact that he's chosen to be employed rather than go it alone. To be employed he needs to meet expectations written on a piece of paper, but to go it alone, all he needs is to be good at what he does. You either take one route or the other from the sounds of it. Maybe Shane does need to go industry standard after all, I'm just glad it's him and not me. I don't need to worry about whether my software is industry standard, it's up to me what I use because no one can say no, I decide, I'm my own boss. None of my software is industry standard, I just use tools I think are the best for the job (and none of them are made by Adobe or Autodesk).

I've attached a photo I'd like you all to view at a 1:1 ratio if you would.
How many of you knew what it was at first glance, I wonder?

You're looking at the most popular 2D editor in the world, this is the new GIMP running in the usual multiwindow mode, but with a custom skin, and laid out just how I like it, clean and functional.

I wonder how many people will bother to download GIMP after viewing that image?
I wonder how many people even knew it could look so professional?
I wonder how many Adobe fanboys just wet themselves?
I wonder how many people still think that letting Adobe suck on their wallet is a good idea?

I wonder :-)
file_4c56ff4ce4aaf9573aa5dff913df997a.jp

It takes a lot of money and resources to be self-employed in this industry. Along with a whole lot of contacts, and a good reputation for working well with others and providing quality work to your clients.

Being self-employed means you're always working. You don't have the luxury of taking a vacation, or even a day or two off when you want to. At least not in the beginning. Not until you're well established and have a team of artists working for you to meet your deadlines and a reputation that is gaining you future contracts. Because even when you're not directly working on a project, you're spending your time marketing yourself, acquiring more contracts.

And you still have bosses even when you're self-employed. Every client is your boss, and when you don't meet their expectations, they find someone else who will, just like any employer. Your goal is to sell your talents and expertise to them - they're not selling anything to you and there's a thousand other artists and studios out there competing against you for that same client. It's your job to convince that client that you're the best man for the job, at the best rate with the fastest turn-around and the highest quality. They don't want to hear you can't do this or you don't use that software. They want results and they don't care what your excuses are. And when you fail at one job they hire you for, your chances of them hiring you again for your services drop significantly, as do your chances of acquiring another client, because word can spread pretty fast especially on the internet. One sub-par project you do for someone is ten times more likely to damage your reputation in the eyes of other potential clients than 10 perfect jobs will do to increase your reputation. That's just how it is, in any industry. People remember when they get crappy service and are quick to tell everyone they know about it. Those same people aren't so quick to talk about the great service you provided unless their friends and colleagues specifically ask them about you.

And even when you're running your own studio, you still have to use software that you may not agree with, to meet those clients expectations. If you're producing a complete film or video game or whatever, a final finished product for a client, then no - the client isn't going to care whether you used gimp or photoshop, or blender or maya. But a lot of the time - far more often than not - you're not producing a finished product for that client - you're only producing one or two aspects of it - whichever area of it that your studio specializes in - such as an animation sequence, or a group of models. That client will then take those files and hand them off to the next guy who will continue with it, and the next guy and the next, until the project is complete. Clients often build a team of multiple artists or studios that when combined will produce the best results the fastest, and at the lowest rate possible for their budget. So if you're using software that the rest of that client's team doesn't use - because it's not an industry standard - then your chances of that client hiring you fall to practically zero.

As for gimp being "the world's most popular 2D editing software" - maybe the gimp's maker's and it's loyal users believe that, but if that were truly the case, we'd all be reading and hearing about it more on various sites. The only time I ever hear about gimp is when I go to gimp's website. When I take files to be printed they want them in psd or some other adobe format, because that's what the majority of printers use.

No no no!

See that's your problem, right there:

The bit where you think you need contacts.
The bit where you think arrogance wouldn't be tolerated.
The bit where you think it costs money to go it alone.

Crap, crap, and more crap.

What you do is you grab that free program pictured above, you stop wondering what you should do, and you just knuckle down and you learn it, for free. If you want to do animation, what you do is you grab Blender, and again, you learn that for free instead of learning a less capable program you'd constantly have to pay for. Once you have that, and you have a portfolio, what you do is you find a company which, judging by the quality of their current graphics, you know for sure you can do better than.

You approach the company you just observed, you do so whether they're looking for someone or not, you show them your work and tell them: "Hey, has your company got a fetish for junk or would you rather me do your work for the same price?"

No contacts necessary, just lots of arrogance and guess what, providing your work is better than that of their current artist, they have two choices after seeing your totally unexpected portfolio. They can either continue to employ the talentless twat they currently employ, or they can take you up your offer and get your much better work for the same price. People in successful positions aren't stupid, if they were, they wouldn't be running a company. Those people aren't dumb enough to pay for substandard crap when they can get better for the same or a lesser price.

Networking? my arse.
Contacts? my arse.

You need neither. This all boils down to that ridiculous "must do what everyone else does" attitude again, it's why you're in debt in the first place and you've still not learned by it. If you look at going it alone like there's a fixed way to go about it "the done way", they yes, I can imagine it would be a bad idea. On the other hand, if you were to drop these muppet-like tendancies and force your talent onto people, things might be quite a bit different. To do that, you need a portfolio, and to build a portfolio you need to knuckle-down and learn something thoroughly. One of the most important factors of learning, say, GIMP and Blender over, say, Photoshop and Maya, is that when it comes to going your own way, you will never have to concern yourself with "breaking even" just to fund your software licence (and that's a biggie). It's a biggie becuse this in itself presents another benefit in that you are always in a position to undercut those that need to recoup their licence fees.

Who has the real power to get the contract?

Those who have to charge higher to cover their insane costs?
Those who don't?

I don't do animation, but if I did, my main competitors would be those that could undercut me, not those using Maya. I'm not talking crap here, either, I'm talking to you as a poor guy, but someone who can afford to sit on his arse annoying people on the forum all day (in case you hadn't noticed :-P). I can do that because I'm not worried about running out of money. That's because I can, at any time I wanted, practice what I just told you and I'd be set for another five-ten years of loafing around (because I live simply). I'm not talking specifically about using GIMP or Blender to do that, it's all relative (and it's all pretty new to me as well), but it's the same take on how I do things, I'm still here, I have no debt and I have no worries.

I have zero income right now, but that's out of choice, and it was only a few years back I feared I'd be homeless by now, but a simple self-reminder of how to get around it all, sorted that.

Stop doing what everyone else does and stop thinking that just because everyone does something, that it must be the best way to do it. If you keep doing that, you're effectively just one muppet in a billion, it's not surprising then, that it's hard to stand out. The worst thing you can do, in my opinion, is "do what everyone else does" and go about it "the same way everyone else does". You only need contacts, or to worry about offending people if you work with other people. The only people who matter are "customers", and that's something most companies are an epic failure at grasping these days.

Find customers, respect them, don't even think of trying to screw them over or lie to them, and they'll be loyal. When you have a customer it's because they chose you and not someone else, the respect needs to be returned. But as far as business goes, you look after number one, because that's what your real competitors are doing too. Now, you can let what I just said to you flow right out of the opposite ear and try to point out that I'm kidding myslelf or that I have it all very wrong. I say good luck with that because the fact that I'm telling you this from experience means that I do in fact, have it all very right.

My apologies for the length of this post :-D

Face Palm

Pumeco, you clearly haven't the slightest clue how this industry really works or the history of it.

"industry standards" has nothing to do with snobbery and everything to do with getting the job done fast, the right way, the first time.

If Blender was such an awesome tool, then all the biggest studios would be using it, and all the biggest schools would be teaching it. Why would they spend thousands on Autodesk when they can spend zero on Blender? A company's number one priority - regardless of the industry it serves - is to maximize profit and minimize overhead. They're not using Maya or Lightwave or Cinema4D because they love spending wads of money. They're using it because they love MAKING money, and those packages provide the results they need and want. 30 years ago there were very few CG artists and even fewer studios for them to work in. Very few software packages existed at the time that could accomplish what those studios needed. As time went on the major studios worked with the software companies to develop software that met those needs, because they had the resources to fund that development, and from that, industry standards were born.

When Blender first launched it was a complete failure. Virtually nobody wanted it or were willing to pay for it. It was completely un-intuitive to the majority of its users (and still is) and it failed as a software company. (By intuitive I mean easy to learn and use, all the features are accessible without having to dig through a hundred different menus and memorizing where this or that function is, or where it's been moved to with the latest update - something Blender's developers still have not grasped after well over 15 years of development - to the point now that they can't change the UI without pissing off their loyal users, so they're kind of stuck at the moment). The only reason it still exists today is because its developers decided to make it open-source instead of shelving it. And that's great, because the indie market needs software it can learn on and produce it's own art with. I have nothing against people using blender. I'm glad it exists. It's been a great success as an open-source, no-cost alternative to the starving artists who just want to learn and create art. I don't believe anyone should be prevented from creating simply because they don't have the funds to learn. On top of that it has helped to grow the indie market substantially, taking the reigns out of the hands of the giant Hollywood and video game moguls and giving them at least some bit of competition, and in turn some good art for people to enjoy. I appreciate the existence of a lot of the freeware open-source software that has come along over the years. But they are no replacement for the software that I and many others prefer to use, and it has nothing to do with snobbery and everything to do with ease of use and quality results. And sorry but Blender does not do everything Maya does, not by a long shot, and definitely not easier. I can say that from first-hand experience with both programs. It can produce similar results, with a whole lot more frustration and time spent, but it is not a replacement for Maya or any of the other high-end software. If it were then more professionals would be using it. But the bottom line is, use what you want, be a pioneer and show the world what Blender and Gimp and all the other open-source software is capable of. Meanwhile I'll be using the software that I prefer to use and the software that will get me hired - either as a freelancer or in a studio. I'm not picky, I just have no interest in being a rebel, cause that doesn't pay my bills.

And as far as student loans go, my debt is my own fault. It's not because I went to school so much as it is due to the BS and drama I had to deal with while I was going to school, from someone who I thought I could trust and stupidly getting involved with when I had no business being involved with, and allowing my relationship with that person to take precedence over my education. THAT is the main reason why I'm in the situation I'm in now. It's an extremely long and twisted story tho and it's in the past, thankfully.

I had to facepalm too.

I have to be honest about pumeco's advice... that's like a when an obese person was telling me how to lift weights when I dropped 20 lbs and was getting definition (and my chest ;) ) and all I seen him do since I started working out was talking and leaning against machines. You really need to listen to the advice of people that are where you want to be. I'm sorry, but I have no desire to be broke and only time I'll listen to someone that was homeless is someone that is making over a million now. If you were homeless and you've upgraded to broke, you simply don't have any valuable career advice to offer because you're not doing the things I need to see in order to further myself in my career.

For example I have two friends. One I hung out while I was finishing up my last classes in college and we worked in a record store. He always had financial problems but was lecturing me how to do things, even after I bailed him out of jail for what I found out was bounced checks. Of course I ignored his advice, graduated, quit the record store and started working in corporations. Years later he's still living check to check doing retail and we don't keep in touch or hang out. My other friend, was broke when I met him and was working a dead end job doing video editing for a cable company. He quit and was cleaning gay bathhouses for money. He saw what I was doing with my career and took my advice and went back to school. Now he's a project manager at a major financial institution up for a job making six figures. Can he give advice on how he moved ahead from nothing? Of course he can. Can my other friend give advice when he's not qualified?

Of course not.

I bet a major financial institution payes well but it's wall street related.

Male_M3dia your job is wall street related to ,I guess ?

and ya make DAZ Poser content on the side for extra money ?

it's good you all are successful but it's not being CGI successful.

AmbientShade your full time job is Renderosity ,right ?

I know bagginsbill is successful .just don't know if it's in CGI or Programming or etc etc.

----

I've been a Artist my hole life .that started long before home PC's and CGI .it's all I know.

got in to CGI in 1998 ,before zBrush ,forums and youtube and all the schools and everything else.

I was one of the first to complain about manuals being written buy third parties that had no idea what CGI even was.

I like knowing I played a small part in manuals being written buy actual CGI Artist.

----

If I was just starting out to day as a CGI Artist. I don't have a clue where to start.

any one here know the correct paths to take ? is there a harvard of CGI ?

----

one thing that is timeless thou only the best rule.

so no matter where you start and no matter what paths you take at the end

you need to make damn sure no matter what other peace of Art buy any other Artist is set next to your Art.

that your Art is the best . One Rules the rest live on there knees.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

Pumeco, for someone who does not need a stable income your views may work. But most people do. If you don't live in a country with a good social security system, money matters. In addition to that, if you owe someone money, it matters even more.

If you want to make a living for yourself and possibly a family things look different and you will need contacts, clients, experience. Or a fixed job, with a boss who tells you exactly what he wants. As a freelancer you depend even more on your clients.

I would love to do a full time job by modeling or designing things. I don't even try that, because I know it would be close to impossible to earn the money I need to keep a good standard of living. My actual job is mostly boring, but well paid, and I don't want to risk that. I mean, I live in Germany, I would not starve and still would have health insurance and a place to live, we do have a good social security system here. But I still prefer to have some money to spend.

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for.
Sail out to sea and do new things.
-"Amazing Grace" Hopper

Avatar image of me done by Chidori.

I just really like this song

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IYnuSsM7tRw

but I think this song relates well to this thread

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w-Ng5muAAcg

oh and don't end up like this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Ersbc2bRLs

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

@RorrKonn:

It doesn't matter what career field I'm in. If you have the skills and work ethic to be successful, that carries over to anything you wind up doing. If you don't, you end up failing at everything you do.

You're doing it again, only this time you're missing the part where I pointed out that what I'm telling you is from experience - it works (for me anyway). I know it works because that's what I've done my entire life. Like I said, I'm not rich, I don't pretend to be (and couldn't give a crap about being anyway). Yet I'm still here, I don't depend on benefits, and I'm not in debt either.

I tired benefits now and then, but you know in England, you know what they do when you're unemployed? They treat you in the most demeaning way they possibly can. They treat you like a child and constantly threaten the loss of your benefits by forcing you to visit them every two weeks. When you visit them you're expected to have filled a booklet full of pages recording a list of jobs you applied for since you last visited them (jobs that don't exist thanks to the epic failures "running" the country). They're not interested in what jobs you apply for just as long as it's the sort of job anyone would be capable of and they'd be able to claim they helped another into work. Any qualifications or degrees you might have is irrelevant, because after they've pointlessly asked you what your specialitiy is, they then proceed to point out that you'll either fill the form with enough jobs or they'll stop your benefits.

You get the picture, right, non-stop threats?
Thats exactly what they do.

They once asked (read blackmailed/threatened) me into to creating what is called a "CV". I was quick to point out to them that I'm not a Citroen mechanic, but this had no bearing on them or the humourless, brainwashed, pea-sized blob of matter between their ears. So anyway, face uncracked by the humour being too dumb to even realise there was any, they sat there rabbiting-on and told me how I should go about making one of those CV thingummies (and as usual, threatened to stop my benefits if I didn't bring it in on my next visit). So I did, and much to my surprise, they looked at it and was mighty impressed by it. And you know what, you know how many jobs I landed over they years, on ond off, through taking their advice and sending out that most "impressive" CV?

None, that's right, none :-D

In the end it got to the point where these reptiles were actually starting to effect my health (apparently, it's a common complaint among the unemployed of England that haven't yet resorted to killing themselves). In the end I had no choice but to tell them to go and f*ck themselves, so that's exactly what I did (and took great pleasure in doing so). I'll tolerate some things if I'm getting something out of it, but having my health effected by those reptiles isn't one of them. Again, it's a perfect example of being hounded by the system, and the only reason for it was being dependent on it. Break away from that and you get to tell them what I told them. See in England, they bleed you sensless for taxes when working, but don't want to put it back and support you when you need it, despite the fact we're forced to pay for all this stuff to be in place for us in case we need it.

Ya can facepalm and shake those heads all you like, lads, but the fact of the matter is that although I don't have a lifestlye some would be happy with, I do have a lifestyle that I'm happy with, one that is massively more carefree than anyone else I know, and that will only get better once I ditch England and buy my own place on foreign shores. Having a family wouldn't change anything, having a family wouldn't suddenly stop my way of doing things from working, I'd just have do more of it.

It's not me that's odd, it's you lot, you're basically just a buch of crazy peasants :-D

@RorrKonn
That first track is excellent, such a shame it doesn't translate to reality, such a shame people are still prepared to feed what what they know is bad and not support what they know is good. Such a shame they all think they need to do "what everyone else does".

You know what I'm spinning on my turntable right now, something from the "charts" perhaps?

Nope, I'm spinning one of my favourite vinyls, and trust me when I tell you there's nothing like a spot of soft French vocal and composition to make you think streight. Unlike those that "do what everyone else does" I have a real Hi-Fi to listen to mine on - not a horrible computer gadget. You can of course listen to it on YouTube, but it's just not the same as seeing her spin, and really hearing her sing - like what I'm doing right now!

Click Here lads, you know you want to - it's something from the better times!

I live in the UK and for a very brief period I had to sign on just to have my National Insurance paid. I had no other benefits as my wife was working and I had savings. I did two visits each two weeks apart and was then told "you are clearly looking for a job so we only need to see you once a month, you will clearly find something." I never went back I found something. Over my last five years of working I was 'let go' four times and each time I was unemployed for less that a month. In a career spanning 42 years I was unemployed a total fifteen weeks and twelve of those were after being made redundant and convincing perspective employers I was serious about working for about a third of my previous salary.

I have never had a problem with working for someone else, or taking orders and with only a couple notable exceptions always respected the managers I worked for.

I never wished to be self employed but I do admire those that are and work hard to be successful, but even then you need luck. You can work as hard as you like but if a client decides not to pay even the best self employed people can struggle.

I am happy I live in the UK, I have travelled enough to know there are some better places but most are worse.

People are lucky on occasions but in general the world does not come to you door just because you feel it owes you a living and most 'free' living is actually just living off someone else.

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.

@RorrKonn
"I've been a Artist my hole life .that started long before home PC's and CGI .it's all I know."

I just wanted to thank you for not using that spellchecker ;-)
The old RorrKonn is back!

@Hornet
I don't know when that happened, but it's years since I got benefit from them. There's absolutely no way on earth you would have done that at the place where I used to go, and from what I read somewhere, it's going to get even worse because they plan to make them travel there to be hounded by them every day. In other words, more emotional blackmail designed to shove the needy off' benefits they paid for and are entitled to.

No person is going to cope with that for very long. I mean, barely a visit went by without one of them almost copping a smack in the mouth from a member of the public - even back when I used the place. I dread to think what it's like now, and worse still, what it's going to be like. But anyway, even talking or being reminded about those a-holes pisses me off, I have no interest in them, they can do as they wish, it won't effect me.

Anyway, back to the main topic, nothing else I can say other than what I said from the start.
Don't be a muppet - but good luck either way ;-)

@Pumeco

There are two sides to everything, there are those that are genuinely down on their luck and others where complete families have had no one work for two or three generations but that's getting into politics which is a no-no here.

As to the intention of the thread, well I can see a lot better why someone would use Adobe and why the CC service would be a valid option. I cannot see it being an option for me but I can see situations where I would suggest to others that they might look at this as an option.

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.

I think anyone just starting out and wants to be a Pro CGI Artist today.

Don't think it would be a bad idea to go on the Autodesk ,

zBrush and all the Pro forums and ask around.to see what's what.

for got my sound track :(

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJDDxHIaaVk

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

To be fair, I don't even dislike the programs those companies make. It's obvious they're good otherwise people wouldn't use them. Photoshop is super-cool, Maya is super-cool, I know that. But I don't own a copy of Photoshop because I don't like Adobe, the way they suck on their userbase and the way they do things. The licencing and manipulation is way beyond my tolerance threshold - waaaaaaaaay beyond.

People shouldn't stand for that, and thankfully the vasty majority, don't.

Where do you get that they suck on their user base? Adobe software is cheaper than its ever been before. WAY cheaper - to the point were there's no real reason most artists shouldn't be able to afford it now - at least those who create art for a living or a 2nd income. Should Adobe just be giving it away to everybody? It takes money to develop good software and keep it updated. Money to pay their coders, money to market and advertise. None of that comes cheap, especially not programmers.

Before their cloud system, a full license for Photoshop averaged about $1200 or more. Just for Photoshop. That's it - you get that copy. No upgrades, minus some bug fixes here and there, unless you pay to upgrade to the next version - which usually cost about half what a full license would cost. Look on amazon - there's still copies of Photoshop CS5.5 selling for $1700. Most people can't afford that, so they don't upgrade very often.

Now with the cloud system you get Photoshop for $20 a month. That's $240 a year. That's cheaper than Poser. And you get all their updates and new features along with that, whenever they come available - which, looking at their release schedules, they update it pretty regularly, and don't charge a penny more. Who can't afford $20 a month? Most people spend that much or more on Starbucks in a few days time. And if you want their entire suite of software - with regular updates - it's only $50 a month. Along with free cloud storage and a site to host your portfolio if you want to use it.

So what if you don't have the shiny little discs anymore. Good for Adobe. That's saving on pollution cause those discs are made of plastic and chemicals, along with all the packaging they come in. Lose or damage the discs and you're buying another copy, along with another license. And it's only good for one machine. With the cloud you can install it on 2 machines - from what someone a while back stated. I thought it allowed you to install on more than that, but 2 is fine for me. I only use 1 anyway. And I don't have to worry about my machine dying and losing my license - like Microsoft is trying to do. They have a cloud service too with MS Office, but if you want your hard copy full license, it's good for one time use. Let something happen to the machine you just installed that license on and you're buying a new license. Or you can sub to their cloud service and put it on any machine. I don't like that, so I stick with Office 2007. It does everything I need anyway.

Autodesk is doing the same thing with Maya now. They have Maya LT for $30 a month or $240 a year. It's not the full-featured Maya, but it's plenty for indie game modelers/animators and you get automatic updates. And from what I've been reading, it's actually a better deal than buying the full one-time license of Maya LT for $800, because the subscription service comes with additional features that the full license doesn't provide. I'm partial to Maya because it's what I learned to do this stuff on in school, and because I have a crap-ton of books on it filling my book shelf. I'm comfortable in it - I know where everything is, and it usually doesn't piss me off too much like most of the other modelers out there do - free and paid. The only things I don't have books on are the features that have come out since those books were written. Before Maya I was using Wings3D - god what a nightmare. I don't even touch that anymore. I know some people love it. But some people have never tasted steak either.

So for me personally, I think it's a pretty good deal. I don't mind connecting to the internet, I do it every day anyway. And if I was buying a full license for these programs I'd be having to make monthly payments to a credit card service, for a whole lot bigger price than subscribing to the software itself.

It hasn't stopped game companies from charging a monthly fee for their games, Most people don't have a problem with that - as Blizzard and EA and a slew of others have demonstrated over the last 15+ years, charging everyone $10 to $15 a month to play a game. And they aren't giving you any cloud storage and you still have to buy a physical copy of the game every time there's a new expansion, which will run you about $50 to $60 on average, on top of the monthly sub, cause it don't work without the sub. So why shouldn't software companies be allowed to do the same thing? That's just silliness to be mad about it.

@ AmbientShade

I agree with most of that, but I am not so sure on the lower pollution angle. Not supplying a disc and having cloud just moves the pollution to the manufacture of hard drives to store the data. Downloading also saves the production and shipping of a DVD in theory but again, the program is stored on a server somewhere and users often make a back up copy locally.

Nit picking I guess but I have always bulked a claims we should buy modern new cars as they give more miles to the gallon and thus help save the planet. That only works if you leave the metal and energy used in making the new car, along with all the paint used plastics and all the rest out of the equation. Often claims for saving pollution is nothing of the sort it just moves the point of pollution elsewhere.

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.

Pumeco - It is fortunate for you that you are able to provide for yourself working solo. I question the wisdom of broadcasting your method though. I think you are in what is ultimately a zero sum situation. Advocating that others follow your example could put in up against rule 3 in the story of the frozen Russian bird. (Impish wink)

Getting Photoshop for $240 isn't cheaper than a permanent Poser licence, it's not cheaper because you're not "getting" any permanent licence at all.

The reason they're "sucking on their userbase" is because they're not giving them the option to buy it outright. They won't even let you keep it as a permanent licence once you've covered the cost of what would be a permanent licence. If you're going to debate these things, you need to take into account what was already pointed out, that being what I just reiterated and the fact that there is no reason that Adobe CC users shouldn't be enttled to a permanent licence once they've covered the cost of one. It's not the fact that they're offering this cloud crap that is the issue, it's that they're not giving options.

As was already pointed out, Unreal Engine are a perfect example of fairness under a subscription. They're the polar opposite of the Adobe greed-machine. You can't just ignore those facts, Shane, you can't pretend these things don't exist. There's only two types of people who'll side with Adobe in this crap, and that's those that are already being sucked on, and those that are planning to be sucked on. I think deep down, it just makes them feel better about themselves because they know they're being taken for a ride. But ask any of those people to give even one good reason why they shouldn't have the option to buy outright, or why they shouldn't be entiteld to a permanent licence once they've covered the cost of one - ask them and they'll fail.

They fail because there is no reason (other than blatant user-sucking greed).

Go on, give one good reason why there should be no "option" to buy outright if that's what suited you?
Go on, give one good reason why after they've sucked the cost of a permenent licence out of you, you shouldn't be entitled to one?

Unless you can answer those qustions stating the reasons why (which you can't), they are a greed-machine, and you shouldn't support greed-machines. The practice of completely obliterating the option to buy outright bloody-well ought to be illegal, nevermind tolerated. Yes, it's good that some people will find the software more accessible for them, I get that, and if it works for you too, great. But buying outright is just as ideal for some, as renting is for you - the option should be there.

Unless you can answer those two questions (and good luck with that), the situation should be perfectly clear, just give 'em the finger like most of us do. Anyway, that's my last word on the subject because it's clear-cut, couldn't be clearer if it were diamond cut. I honestly don't even need to wait for the reply because I already know you cannot give any reason other than the reason I already spelled out.

Just in case you actually go ahead with this crap, here's a fitting T-shirt for you ;-)

i_heart_corporate_greed_tshirt-r88ac6cce

@Jaager
Yeah, don't you go stealing my secrets to the good life now :-P

The no-permanent license argument is valid, to an extent. But it's a rather weak argument, imo, because it only provides you with a license for that version. If you want to upgrade you'll be forking out another sizable chunk of change to do so.

I already have a permanent license to Adobe CS4. It has Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Acrobat Pro, Flash, InDesign and a couple other titles that I never use. I mostly just use Photoshop and Illustrator. Somewhere around $2,200 was the cost for all of it. I never upgraded to CS5 cause that would have been another $1200 or so, and CS6 would have been the same. And I'd likely still be paying for all of that and STILL not have the most recent version. And somewhere I have an old license for Photoshop 7. Not that it does me any good now, I haven't used it in years.

Don't kid yourself that Unreal isn't following the same model as Adobe and Autodesk, and a lot of other software out there. They've jumped on the subscription bandwagon too. Unreal used to be free for everybody. There was no $20 sub fee before - all of that is new, just within the last year or so. Sure you can pay your $20 one time and not pay anything else - until you want to update to their latest features or their next version. Why did they decide to start charging $20 a month for that now? And you still can't publish anything with it until you buy the full license. I was using Unreal before they started charging for it. Unity3D is still free for everyone until you publish a game - that's the way Unreal used to be too. And now more people are moving over to Unity.

So if you'd rather spend $1200 to $2200 one time, just so you can have the discs and none of the updates, vs $240 to $500 a year for everything they offer, that's up to you. How many years does that license get you before you have to spend another $1200 to $2200 to stay relevant and up to date? I'm definitely not trying to be an Adobe salesman tho, use whatever you'd like. I just don't agree that they're being greedy, and nearly 1 million other subscribers don't see it that way either.

But this is where software is moving, and a few nay-sayers aren't going to change it. It's cheaper to make it subscription based than to constantly be publishing hundreds of thousands to millions of discs and packaging with every new release. And movies and music are going the same route, because DVD and CD sales have been dropping year after year, while subscription services like Netflix and Hulu and Amazon just continue to grow. People can't afford the big price tags all this software can run into, but it doesn't make the cost of producing all that software any cheaper, so those companies have to come up with new ways of getting their software out there for people to afford it in order for them the continue turning a profit and continue producing better software that people want to use. And yes it does help the environment in terms of reducing pollution, at least a little bit, because most people don't have stacks and stacks of hundreds of hard drives sitting around their houses that will eventually wind up in a landfill somewhere. I mean technically, the computers we use add to the pollution just by increasing the energy consumption and all that, but you can't have the tech we use today without that.

So that's the real problem, you're following it because that's the way you think it's all going.
Fact is, it isn't, and it never will, you can even bet your life on that.

Do you know why you can bet your life on it? It's because free software alternatives will always ensure what you think is going to happen, never will. The only people who will ever have to deal with "subscriptions" are those that take out those subscriptions - which is another reason you shouldn't. I'll never face the cost of a software subscription for as long as I live. I will never subscribe to anything that doesn't give me a permanent licence, and I'll never find myself in a position that forces me to, either. That's the beauty of free software like GIMP and Blender, no person and no single entity can make decisions for it.

They're free and therefore subscripton free, and always will be.
They're also evolving quicker than most commercial programs.

As for all music going the way of the Apple iTunes greed-machine. Nope. It's already reached the point where people have had enough, people are now looking back and realising how silly they are for purchasing "virtual" music and how bad it sounds. Manufacturers are starting to release turntables again, vinyl releases are skyrocketing, and the large music retailers are prepaing, as we speak, to take back their profits from Apple etc by bringing massive stocks of vinyl back to the shop floor.

And naturally, the manufacturing of those turntables, those vinyls, those record sleeves that hold the vinyls, the printing shops that print the sleeves for the vinyls, the need for shop assistants to look after the shops that sell the vinyls, all of that, it creates jobs, jobs that disintegrated due to greed-machines being allowed to run riot and do whatever they like. You know what's really funny, is that vinyl was around before Apple even existed, yet it will still be around when they're long gone along with everyones "virtual tunes". The fact that you think these greed-machines even have the power to finish-off physical media is absolutely hilarous, because Vinyl for one thing, is going nowhere - it's already survived them and growing stronger by the day (just like I said it would).

Best thing you can buy an Apple iThing user for Christmas, is a Turntable, just a little tip for those wondering what to buy.
They'll thank you for it profusely after having the experience of physically browsing through real vinyl in a real store.

Are you thinking clearly yet?
If not, I give up.

Click Here - it's a vinyl from the better days that are thankfully making a return - helps you to think clearly.

I'm following it because I know what quality software is, and what it takes to produce it. When you can show me a shareware program that does everything the commercial titles do with the same level of ease and functionality, then I'll be right there to download my copy and save my cash. But until then I'll stick with what I know works best and provides me the most results with the least amount of headache. I don't mind paying for quality. You can call it corporate greed all you want. We're all entitled to our own opinions.

With respect, you did ask for one.

One of the main reasons the economy is in the state it's in, is because of greed-machines. Far too much money is being channelled into companies that are already far more powerful than they should ever be allowed to get. You feel the result of this crap but you choose to feed it further. I already said I get that you like the software, I even admited I like the software too, I won't patronise them though.

I knew from the moment I read your opening post you were going to subscribe. It would have been cool to see you change your mind, but it's fine all the same, it's you that'll be paying for it after all (in more ways than one). Just a friendly word to you though, about being led by what you think is popular. This is a recent image, taken at the beginning of the vinyl resurgence Apple users tend not to be aware of. It features young people flocking to buy vinyl. The vinyl they're buying comprises of both new and old releses, yet some people are so caught up in their little download world that they don't even know this better world exists.

On the left is the sort of thing you are planning to support, on the right is what freedom, a healthy economy, and a better life is all about. As long as you realise what you're feeding and being sucked into, that's ok, just as long as you don't think everyone does it, or will ever do it ;-)

file_5fd0b37cd7dbbb00f97ba6ce92bf5add.jp

^If you were really concerned about the corporate greed you would buy neither... whether you buy albums or MP3s, you're still dealing with the record industry that takes advantage of their artists. Bad example there ;) Business are in business to make money, and they have to fund their businesses otherwise they are out of business.

I'm paying $10 a month for the adobe plan, so that's $120 a year. If you would have bought previous versions it would have been $1200 without upgrades. So I can use the most current version of photoshop for 12 years rather than $1200 up front and then you would have to pay more in 2-3 years to keep current. Doesn't sound greedy as it's cheaper and it brings more people in that could not afford it so it's better for everyone and keeps the piracy down. Also they're able to keep their funding going because of the monthly income instead of people just buying once and then waiting a few years to drop another $600-1000 for an upgrade.

Here is something to consider.

Pumeco is self employed and knows about unemployment. No one in the United states can collect unemployment if they are self employed, and most people could not tell you how it works if they never collected..

If you are self employed in the United States, you pay twice the taxes someone does that has an employer. Making it far more expensive to work for yourself.

Unemployment is a federal program in the United States, but each state has different rules about it. In some states you must get 40 signatures a week from places you applied and turn them in or you don't get a check (and you might also get removed from the program). There is a maximum cap on unemployment in the US that hardly pays the bills unless you are single and live in a shack with a wood stove in the summer... SO, how are you supposed to get 40 signatures in the states that require it? God help you if you don't live in a city and have to drive to get them...

On another note...

Graphic design, 3D, etc all have standards. Photoshop is one of them. Just as Maya, Houdini and many others are.

Large printing companies want specific file formats, or they get rejected. Yes you may be able to do them in other software in 2D.

Working on a team requires file formats match between members of the team and that the production schedule is maintained. Not so much a problem in 2D, but it is a huge one in 3D.

You can't do something in other programs if they don't support something used in the project, which is why there are standards in the first place.

Standards have little to do with greed and everything to do with getting the job done with as little headache as possible.

Yes you can do a lot of things with Gimp/Blender/etc. But what others have said about why Adobe/Autodesk/Side Effects/Maxon/etc have more merit than greed.

There are things that Photoshop can do, that Gimp cannot.

Just as there are things Side Effects/Autodesk/etc can do, that Blender never will because it is not open source and is trademarked/patented/etc.

If you need to do any of those things, Blender is completely useless in that case.

How would you import a Houdini or Max file into Blender???? You can't..... Max is trademarked and Blender can't do a lot of what Houdini can.

If all that free software works for you, that's great. But on this side of the pond it wont get you real far in any business.

Look at Houdini's demo reel for 2014, then try any of that in Blender.

Some of it you can do. Some of it will take you a while to write the plugins, just so it will do it. Some of it will take you so long to set up, you might forget what you were doing in the first place.

http://vimeo.com/102943879

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

@David
I'm not self-employed, I have zero income and am living off savings until I leave England, I refuse to start a new venture in this country, these days.

As for the other stuff, I give up, the image and text in my previous post says it all as far as I'm concerned.
People make up their own minds no matter what, but hopefully it opened a few eyes.

Ironically, you can work in electronic media just about anywhere.

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

Like I said, I give up!

There's only so much blatant obviousness that can be denied :-D
I'm just super-pleased things are taking a turn for the better, for the rest of us.

I don't care what's popular - i'm not a hipster. I care what works. And as I said before, when you can show me free software/shareware that does what the professional grade titles do, then I'll start using it. It's not like I'm oblivious to the freeware/shareware out there. I've used a lot of it, from GIMP to Blender. And none of it does half of what the pro software can do. They simply don't have the funding to keep up with it. Because even tho you're getting Blender for free, it still takes a LOT of money to write it. All those coders aren't coding it out of the goodness of their heart. They all have bills to pay and families to feed just like most everybody else.

I also buy software from indie developers when it's decent software that I actually need and does something my other software doesn't do. Topogun is a good example of that. I paid $99 for it a few years ago and don't regret it one bit, even with all it's bugs. It's one guy that develops it. I don't know if that's still the case - he may have sold to or partnered with a bigger company by now, but that was the case when I bought it.

And Adobe and Autodesk aren't responsible for the economic situation of the world, not by a long shot. They also don't have a monopoly on the kind of software they produce. They have plenty of competition, and a lot of that competition is much more affordable to the average user. So if it was really an issue of money, more people would be using the less expensive titles. No one can stay in business for too long selling crap products, no matter what it is they're selling, cause eventually people will realize it's crap and stop paying for it.

I'm not an Apple fan either. I don't currently use or buy any Apple electronics. I had a macbook because I was required to buy a macbook for school. I wasn't happy about that - mainly because I hate laptops - but I didn't have a choice if I wanted to go to that school. It died in 2010 and I've never bothered to get it fixed or replace it. Right now it's in my closet in pieces, where it's been since it died 4 years ago. At home I still used a desktop PC even when I was working on school projects. The only Apple product I use is iTunes and I don't buy anything from the iTunes store. Can't remember the last time I even logged into it. The only reason I use iTunes is because I find it easier to use than any of the other mp3 players out there. I especially hate windows media player. My current PC is custom built by me. I ordered each piece from Newegg and have been upgrading it as needed and as funds allow since I first built it back in 2009, when my old Gateway - which was barely 3 years old at the time - died on me for being crap and overheating.

And as for vinyl - http://qz.com/103785/hipsters-are-buying-vinyl-records-but-they-arent-listening-to-them/

I had plenty of it 25 years ago back in high school. All of them are crap now. I live in the south where it gets extremely hot, then extremely cold, then hot again - often within the same week, especially this time of year, and humidity is hell. Vinyl warps and once it warps it's useless. On top of that I hate using plastic anything and try to reduce it as much as possible, and I take full advantage of my local recycling plant for the plastics and glass and other recyclables that I do use. I'm not against the use of petroleum for energy like a lot of people are, but I do believe in moderation. I welcome the digital age because it reduces the amount of pollution and waste dumped into the environment every day. So all those vinyl records you hipsters are buying up because its a new fad and "retro" - most of it will eventually wind up floating in the oceans or buried in some landfill, adding more pollution to an already sick environment. Vinyl - along with all the other plastic out there - is a petroleum product, remember? - which takes centuries or longer to break down. So enjoy it all you like if it makes you feel better about yourself, but I've never heard of a digital file killing any sea life, and it probably never will.

Anyway, no reason to continue debating the issue. You're not going to change my mind and I'm not going to change yours, nor do I care to try. I've got plenty of work to keep me busy and without sleep all week long.

@Shane
Regards how damaging greed-machines are, you need to look-up how much Apple, Adobe, Google, and Microsoft are worth. That money gets channelled to them in such mass amounts through either manipulation, monopoly, digital handcuffs or other nasty business practices that only companies as big as they are can get away with. I prefer it when the money is distributed among the economy in a good, even fashion, because that's what a good economy is. I've never been a fan of all that money being en-route to a select few greed-machines.

Regards the hipster thing. I recommend a source of news that treats it's readers with some intelligence then. You could use that other famous greed-machine, Google, and search for vinyl comeback, resurgence, or whatever term you wish and you'll see a different story. That is assuming Google aren't selectively hiding the thousands of articles about it from the Americans. But yup, you're right, I'm not going to change your mind and you're not going to change mine, either. I'm pleased a conclusion was reached, but man, you dragged it out a bit considering you was gonna get that subscription all along ;-)

file_5fd0b37cd7dbbb00f97ba6ce92bf5add.jp

Bang Your Head

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

@Pumeco: My original question was only to ask if anyone had experienced problems with the service or how their experience with it in general was. It was never intended to become a debate.

You do realize YouTube is also owned by that famous "greed-machine" Google, correct? So you're still supporting them every time you watch a YouTube video. Even with ad blockers, they're still making a few cents on every video that's watched. Why are you still watching YouTube videos again?

I don't agree with some of MS and Google's business practices, but they aren't the only ones, and some of those things are forced on them by the powers that be - they don't always have a choice if they want to continue operating, due to the nature of their business and various laws that exist that are beyond their control. But that's getting into politics and we're not going to go there in this forum.

Just because a company is rich and successful doesn't make them greed machines, nor does it mean they acquired their wealth through any kind of deceit. There will always be corporate greed - that doesn't make all corporations greedy. Anyone that develops something should have the right to do with it whatever they choose - if that means getting rich off their creation then so be it. It belongs to them. None of the companies mentioned here are anywhere close to being a monopoly. Maybe try looking up the real definition of a monopoly sometime. If they were anything like a monopoly then they would be the only option for the services they provide. They aren't. They just happen to be some of the most successful at it. And if it weren't for the innovations that companies like Autodesk and others like them have produced over the last few decades we wouldn't have a lot of the technology we have today. They do a lot more than just entertainment software. They're also in a lot of architectural and engineering software as well. Their software technology has been responsible for a lot of good things, both for the environment and for the people that use it, and from what I've read, they are quite generous with the money they earn. They don't have to be. They have every right to keep every penny they make for themselves if that's what they want to do. I prefer companies who are generous with their earnings and give back to their environment, but I don't demonize companies who don't just because they're rich.

That's an interesting look, RorrKonn, sort of semi-organic, pretty cool!

I was too tired to continuie last night, but anyway. Regards that stuff about digital downloads not killing sealife, no, it just helps destroy the economy which in turn takes human life instead (I'll post proof only if you want me too). I wonder how many vinyls could have been made from the "petroleum-based" tyres that wear out every few years on your Toyota? Or the billions upon billions of drinks bottles that are sold everyday?

I think Shane should patent that argument, it could be profitable in the future when Apple will need it to scare their "useds" away from vinyl.

As for vinyl ending up in landfill, nope. The only time that happens is if it get's broken. One of the inherent beauties of the vinyl format and the freedom of using it, is that you can buy it, you can sell it, you can give it to your friends, swap it with your friends, trade it in for other vinyl, whatever you like. And there's not a thing Apple or any other manipulative greed-machine can do about it. It's one of those things they've never had control over and never will have control over. The only thing they can do is scare their "useds" away from it.

As for vinyl being a fad, nope, a "fad" is something that comes but doesn't hang around for long. Vinyl has been around longer than most of us have, It's still here and growing yet again, so I think it's fair to say vinyl has earned it's reputation as the longest living format next to the book - no faddery there then. A "fad" is things like a touchscreen device and DRM formats that become obsolete as soon as a manufacturer says so. A Fad is Microdick trying to force desktop users to accept touchscreen mentality on a desktop, and failing to do so (and having to give them their Start button back as a result).

I'd like to leave it at that, but like I say, proof of everything I just said is available if Shane requests it.

Arrrgh, dammit Shane, stop crossposting :-D

The Google services I use are Search, Maps, and YouTube, and not since at least two years back have they ever been able to use me in return.
That's right, I use Google but Google doesn't use me, and I have no problem with people earning money from my clicks anyway - I'm pleased about it.

Just getting back to the original subject, MaleM3dia is right about the price of the subscription. I pay about 13€ a month with taxes, it will take quite a while until I reach the original price. And I have all updates free up to then. Works for me.

People who write software like to be payed, and if they are very good they are probably payed very well, just ask our Master of Shaders. Companies either need a lot of enthusiasts or a constant cash flow. Brecht van Lommel, the deveoloper of Blender's Cylces renderer works for a commerical company right now, probably because he could need the money. Things work this way.

Pumeco, I could not go your way, simply because I do not have enough savings to live from it. Enjoy you freedom, but keep in mind that most people don't have that freedom.

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for.
Sail out to sea and do new things.
-"Amazing Grace" Hopper

Avatar image of me done by Chidori.

I hear you bantha, no worries :-)

"That's right, I use Google but Google doesn't use me, and I have no problem with people earning money from my clicks anyway - I'm pleased about it."

They aren't using you necessarily, but they are benefiting from you, because you are contributing to Google's fortunes every time you watch one of their videos. There are a lot of individuals that make a lot of money through posting their videos on youtube (which I think is a great thing, don't get me wrong - it's helped a lot of people earn a living, or at least help supplement their livings, who otherwise might not have been able to over the last several years) but for every 1 cent each of those people make on YouTube, Google is making at least 2 cents, and likely a lot more than that. They're providing a free service that helps a whole lot of people - to include yourself - yet you call them greedy, but at the same time turn around and help them get even richer by utilizing their services. Do you see the flaw in your logic there? No, you probably don't... Just like all those Occupy kids complaining about corporate greed and the 1%'ers while tweeting on their iPhones and posting videos about it to youtube and facebook on their macbooks, all the while complaining that they're being oppressed...

And thumbs up to everything Bantha just said. Most of us don't have the luxury of sitting around all day complaining about how horrible rich people and corporations are. We have to work for a living, to support ourselves and all the others who think they should be entitled to something they didn't earn, just because they exist.

And no, I've never once put a tire in a landfill. We have recycling centers that are specifically designed for that purpose. Same with used motor oil. But I've seen plenty of boxes of old records tossed in the bins at the dump many times over the years. Next time I'll take a picture of it for you.

@Shane
Like I said, I give up. You keep forgetting the part where I'm not rich, and you keep forgetting the part where I still have the luxury to do what I do despite the situation. Yes, of course I agree with Bantha, he's spot-on, most people don't have the freedom to do what I'm doing. The whole pont in what I've been trying to get across are the reasons people might not have that freedom. You're richer than I am, Shane, you can at least afford to run a vehicle, so you must be!

I haven't been able to afford a vehicle for years now, it was necessary to drop it if I wanted to be able to sustain myself. I'm not having a go at you for your tyres, either, I was just putting into perspective how ridiculious it was to use landfill and petroleum as a way to attack something that is good news and is making a comeback. That link you gave was clearly written by someone with a chip on their shoulder, likely an iPod fanboy - I only had to read the first line to know what crap they were talking.

Assuming they're not blocking Americans from seeing it, here's the real news, what's really going on, proof that people have had enough and are wising-up:
Click Here - and check-out the title.

Now wasn't that link a lot better?

If so, and there is anyone here who bought their loved ones an Apple device last year, you can make it up to them this year and buy them some freedom.

Click here this one's not bad, quite a lot of reviews too!
Buy 'em that and show 'em why you did it, they'll thank you for it when they drop the Apple shackles.

That link said pretty much the same thing the link I posted said. A lot of them are buying for nostalgia purposes. No mention of corporate greed or none of that.

Ok, so have they started making turntables that ride in your car too, to play all these new records on?

I hated vinyl back when I was in high school and couldn't switch to CD fast enough. No crackles and pops. The sound is a lot clearer. You're tellin me I should want to go BACK to that crap? lol, no, sorry.

What shackles are you talking about anyway? It doesn't have to be played on iTunes just cause you bought it from there. I don't actually buy music from itunes but I have in the past. It takes about 5 minutes to burn a cd. I've never had a problem copying any music into mp3 or burning it to CD or throwing it on an mp3 player, or my phone or my flash drive, or all 3 if i want. I don't actually have a portable mp3 player anymore - don't need one. I have a 4gb flash drive that plugs right into my stereo in the truck. Can add and remove anything I want from it. Don't even remember the last time I burned an actual CD, except for backing up files but I use blu ray for that now.

The difference between the two links can be summed-up in the opening line of the one you gave! Vinyl doesn't suck, and only 15% are buying them for collectible reasons, that means 85% are using them for what they're designed for, and it's growing faster than the current system can handle.

I'm not getting into the debate of why Vinyl (an analogue format) is better than digital. Both digital and anlogue have thier flaws, not just one of them, so in the end it comes down to what sounds better, and that's analogue (this is why the worlds finest audio equipment is all 100% analogue). There's a whole heap of stuff about digital shackles as well, so I'm not going into that, either.

Regards listening in the car, if you have a physical analogue product like vinyl, you can copy that to any recordable format you wish. You can degrade it into iTunes format, burn it to a CD, even record it to tape (which is what I do as it makes it sound even better, tape being an "analogue" recording format). There's nothing to stop you listening to what you bought in your car. But people who buy vinyl to digitise it are missing the whole point about enjoying "pure analogue audio". For a little piece of paradise, all a person has to do is buy a turntable, an amplifier (which must have a physical BASS and TREBLE knob for maximum enjoyment), and a nice set of speakers, preferably something that can go down to at least 50Hz, but the lower the better. My own are 25 year-old 40Hz-18Khz beauties. But those three items is how you enjoy music as it's meant to be enjoyed. What a lot of peole don't realise is that Digital audio almost always has a lot of "sweetening" applied to the recording using DSP. The equivalent of that in analogue is to buy an "analogue exciter" - then your jaw drops - and the goosebumps cannot be stopped. Buying a turntable and listening to it though a computer is 100% pointless.

This vinyl is absolutely spine-tingling the way I get to listen to it, in analogue, exciter engaged - goosebumps - really - you have no idea.
But anyway, you're impossible - best of luck.

file_f0935e4cd5920aa6c7c996a5ee53a70f.jp

Well to me Vinyl sound CP when compared with CD and abysmal CP when compared with SACD on my surround sound system. All vinyl gives me is surround hiss and clicks and a lot of grief. Stick with vinyl by all means but it all but died once and, with decent turntables getting more and more difficult to get hold off and more a more expense as the supply continues to dry up it isn't about to make a stunning resurrection anywhere but in the niche market.

You will have a different view, of course, but this patient is on life support only.

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.

I like Norm & Cliff type discussions on the forum but it can be sometimes quite frustrating when the original OP was of interest- please if this thread is no longer serving its purpose can it be closed.

@Hornet
Then you desperately need a better system, or better ears, and better still, an exciter.
Read facts, forget opinions :-)

@Ironsoul
I think that one is as good as done.

@pumeco

No I know my system well, listened to a lot before I purchased and know what I paid for it. I also know that is outstrips vinyl in the exciting stakes hands down. Just because you have strong opinions does not make everyone else wrong.

@Ironsoul.

I agree this thread has been informative and answered the questions and know is done. I am opting out anyway.

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.

@Hornet
And technical facts do not change because you think otherwise, like I said, you need a better system or better ears. Have a word with world renowned and respected AMS/NEVE systems, maybe they'll convince you which is the superior technology between analogue and digital.

@All
In an attempt to get the thread back on topic it would be best all round if everyone did exactly that. You can't expect to show support for something bad and rave about it, and badmouth something good, and trash it. The facts will always prove that "bad is bad" and "good is good" - and no amount of tying to make yourseves feel better about what you support will change any of that.

I've tried to hint numerous times that I'm fed up with the conversation, wished him luck regardless, but if what is good continues to get badmouthed in favour of what is bad, it's obvious people are going to say something about that (those of us with morals I mean). Don't speak further on the subject, just stick to the Adobe CC thing and that's the way the conversation will remain. Just don't try convincing people it's ok in order to make yourself feel better about what you plan to support.

If that's what you want to do, you do it.
So for the final time (I hope), good luck with whatever you do, Shane, truly, even going the Adobe route.

Pumeco, you can't even afford a car, and you're lecturing Americans on how to live? You even suggested living out in Texas on a piece of land. LOLOLOL.

I'm going to guess that you've never been to Texas and haven't got a clue what the land is like. Yes, there's a ton of cheap land in Texas. $200 an acre. And you can be 500 miles away from any other human being. But you know why it's cheap and no one lives on it? Because you can't live on it. DIg a well -- no water, because the water table was emptied to provide for a city 500 miles away. Wanna grow potatoes for your chip butty? Not gonna happen. You can't grow anything but wild grass and tumble weed in sand and clay that suffers a 5 month long dry season with daytime high temperatures averaging 40 C. And good luck getting to your land without a vehicle. You really don't want to walk 200 miles across west Texas wilderness. You won't make it. [Or it could be in east Texas, in a flood plain. You get to spend your summer waiting for the day that you sit on your roof hoping for rescue, while the flood water drowns everything you own.]

The same is true for northern Canada. Tons of land. Cheap too. Good luck surviving the winter. If you're rural Russian and have been living off the land in Siberia your whole life, and have the very specific skill set needed to survive in the wild, you'll make it. If you're a city boy, who hasn't got a clue how to make an axe from an oak tree (with no iron), you'll be dead two weeks after the first snow.

There's no cheap, usable land in the world today because it has been bought and settled. If it's cheap, it's guaranteed that it's not usable. Not without a lot of investment in infrastructure or some highly unusual survival skills that you won't pick up just by watching some YouTube videos.

As for everything else you've said, I was going to ask you just to tell us outright what you do for a living, then. You say that you can make money and have in the past, but as I said, talk is cheap. I could tell you that I'm a multimillionaire. But without some evidence, all you have is my assertion. And quite frankly, you'd have to be pretty gullible just to accept what I said as true.

On the one hand, you say you have enough money to buy housing outright, so you don't worry about it. But on the other hand, you can't even afford a car. I'm not sure where you're getting your ideas about the cost of real estate. LOL. I know there are a lot of scam ads that promise house and land in some other country, but as soon as you get there, you realize that what you've bought is the right to use the land, not the land, as only citizens are permitted to own. Or you find a broken down hut on a condemned lot that the government won't let you live in until the environmental pollution levels are lower. And to clean it up will only cost you another $1.2 million. Or you get the hut and the land, but now you have the state hounding you, as the new owner, for the decades of unpaid property taxes.

In other words, I see a lot of inconsistencies in what you've written that makes me highly skeptical. Without details about exactly what you do and have done and what technology you used to do those jobs, you're just giving opinions and relying on repeated unproved assertions to make your case. How about a link to your portfolio? Show us the work you did and for which clients.

And tell us where we're supposed to be able to buy this cheap real estate. I'm quite curious, because I doubt it actually exists anywhere.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

40 C ? nah ,in U.S.A. it's 104 f. we don't use C ;)

Since this is a Art forum ,some Art
http://www.renderosity.com/mod/gallery/index.php?image_id=2575973

pumeco quote "That's an interesting look, RorrKonn, sort of semi-organic, pretty cool!"

Thanks ,I've always been a fantasy Artist.
Realism ,just not in my vocabulary. Think they have cameras for that ;)

I'll be unleashing some monster to terrorize Poser in 2015.A good year for monsters :)

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

40 C ? nah ,in U.S.A. it's 104 f. we don't use C ;)

I know. I lived in Texas for 18 years, and there's a reason I don't own a bunch of cheap land there (or "beaucoups (boocooze) of cheap land", to borrow an east Texas/Louisiana border phrase). :) But Pumeco's a Brit.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

lol, well next time I want to "bring back the joy of vinyl" I'll turn the bass all the way down on my speakers and pour a bowl of rice crispies whilst i jam out to some manson. That should match about the same.

Thanks but no thanks. lol.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7dgrMSTalZ0 - one of my favorites, from one of the greatest bands of all time (imo), in the spirit of RorrKonn.

@Moriador
Sorry but that's just not true, and during my time planning this stuff, I've made myself a whole bunch of friends who live that very lifestlye and the balance is roughly 50/50, some have done it their whole life, and some have been doing it anything from 2 -16 years. None of them would swap it for the world, the stuff that bothers the ratrace simply has no bearing on their lives, they're independent. You only need a trickle of an income and you're set for a stress free life if you know what you're doing (and I do). It's the ones with life-long mortgages, high blood-pressure, and no freedom that are doing it all wrong I reckon.

I have a whole bunch of property agents contact me at a rate that barely three days don't go by where they have something doable to offer me. But drinking water is important when you're going to be independent of the system. Some of it is drinkable and infinitely better than tap water by default, some of it needs filtering. It's a balance between getting somewhere I want and having what I need. I already had an idea of what I needed, and the carefee friends I've made have already confired that for me. Like I said, I don't need advice, I'm not in any situation I'm not happy with, and I know exactly what I'll be doing next year (exactly what my carefree friends are doing). I'm not going to Siberia or Texas, I'll be doing this in a part of Europe with better-than-needed solar-stats (just like six of my friends are doing) :-D

BTW, before I forget again (and this is very important) I would like to make it clear that I have nothing against CD or SACD. Both are physical formats and therefore, it is good to support those formats (but it's better still to support vinyl). My reason for using vinyl is because it's both a physical and an analogue format, and knowing a fair bit about audio, I know which is best - it's my preference.

@Shane
And as for you, stop teasing, and long as you're happy, that's the main thing, insn't it - it's what we all strive for :-)
Here's some real hum, crackle, and pop for you - (it's worn out) - it will still knock your block-off if you pump up that volume!

Click here, whack-up the volume and give your neighbours some grief :-D

As for the vinyl comeback, yeah, well here's more good news (espeically for men). See, due to demand bringing vinyl pressing to breaking point while they build more magnificent pressing machines to cope with it (and more jobs). Man, in his infinite wisdom, has developed the solution. The attached image shows what is called a TGVP (a two-girl vinyl press), and apart from the obvious visual benefits for factory workers, it creates two new jobs for every Vinyl Press required.

There's only one person so far who's spoken up about this solution, and here she is ...

Yeah, listen, Vinyl is waaaaaaaaay cooler cause my beats are more solid on it than some crappy digital file with no bottom end!!!
Plus, I can buy all my new beats on Vinyl now!!!

But ... WTF ... those girls stole my puffies!!!

Later,
Roxie - Girl With Blade

Now, you all stop teasing me and get back on topic!
You should know by now that you cannot "beat" the logic behind the mighty pumeco :-D

BTW, Shane, looking sharp in your new avatar!
I guess that means these stupid round borders are here to stay though :-(

BTW, Shane, looking sharp in your new avatar!
I guess that means these stupid round borders are here to stay though :-(

Pumy, you finally said something I can agree with wholeheartedly! LOL. Hope it doesn't mean the world is ending. :D :D :D

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

Hell, don't do that, to agree with pumeco is to side with the devil himself.
My middle name isn't 666 for nothing you know, I worked bloody hard for it :-D

BTW, just so you know, Shane only updated his avatar to try and out-cool the one I had before Roxie took over it.

But you make it so easy. The teasing part. lol.

I get you on the aim for the carefree lifestyle tho. Breaking the ratrace and all that. Nothin wrong with aiming for that at all. Life should be enjoyed to its fullest extent, so long as its not on the backs of others. I believe fully in the philosophy, and way of life, of Ubuntu - (no, not the linux os) - but unfortunately I don't see it ever really taking hold in the modern world, least not on the scale it would need to in order to really make a difference. But who knows. In the meantime I gotta do what I gotta do in order to keep pace with all the other rats and maybe some day I'll get to my own little chunk of heaven if I play my cards right. But stockin shelves at a grocer aint gonna get me there, or anywhere close to there. There's a guy named Michael Tellinger who a lot of people think is crazy, but I admire him and what he's trying to do, and hope to live similar to the way he lives. Some day. A lot of people think I'm crazy too, but I don't mind. lol.

Thanks on the avatar.

Yep, on the circles. I like circles. So much better than squares.

Well, someone's gotta make the solar panels, and they don't be doing it in the outback, so the rats still have important contributions to make. :D Until climate change makes the old ways of doing things impossible, that is.

Nothing wrong with the anti-corporate stance, either. I'm no fan of The Man, myself. I was a Marxist long before millennials decided that wearing Che T-shirts was cool, and I have read Das Kapital (though not in German). But I'm also very fond of John Stuart Mill and WIlliam James. Utilitarianism and pragmatism have a lot going for them, and I'm too old to live by romantic ideals I had in my youth. So I say you can dream, but you can't eat dreams, so you do what you must in the meantime to keep a chicken in the pot and the government off your back. However, I also got to watch one of my best friends suffer from profound anxiety problems that led to him believing all sorts of conspiracy theories and obsessing over paranoid fantasies. It's a truly miserable, wretched way to live. You have to try to moderate the craziness sometimes, or end up spending your life angry or bitter or afraid all the time. [Not you, Shane. Your craziness is just what people would call "totally rational" if they were, in fact, rational themselves.]

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

Thumbs up @ moriador.

But be careful and steer away from the politico stuffs. cause that's a no-no 'roun these parts.

Yea, anxiety sucks. been there way too many times myself. not so much these days tho.

Nope, you can't eat your dreams. We have so many other things that can do that for us tho.

Ok back to original topic.

Or art.

Or how to cure a hangover. Omfg my head... told them i didn't wanna drink cause i got work to do and they made me do it anyway, lol.... uuggghh....

Thumbs up @ moriador.

But be careful and steer away from the politico stuffs. cause that's a no-no 'roun these parts.

Yea, anxiety sucks. been there way too many times myself. not so much these days tho.

Nope, you can't eat your dreams. We have so many other things that can do that for us tho.

Ok back to original topic.

Or art.

Or how to cure a hangover. Omfg my head... told them i didn't wanna drink cause i got work to do and they made me do it anyway, lol.... uuggghh....

Not going to discuss politics here, Shane. Economics and philosophy, however.... ;) Seriously, though. No one brings up Marx unless they want to end a political discussion. It's a sort of... Godwin's law unto itself. At least, that was my hope. No cures for hangovers. I've only ever had a few. I'm one of those people who can drink entire quart of whiskey and feel no pain the next day, which is dangerous territory to be in. It's way too easy to pick up a habit. So I don't bother drinking any more.

Good news is that if you suffer nasty hangovers, you're less likely to become an alcoholic. Yea! So that should make you feel instantly better. Heh. Sorry.

Just don't take any Tylenol or anything with acetaminophen in it. Both alcohol and Tylenol are metabolized by the liver, and it's actually possible (and not even that unlikely) to suffer liver failure by taking it after a night of drinking. Stick with Advil/Motrin/ibuprofen or good old Aspirin. :) And eat some eggs, if you crave them.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

A thumbs up to Moriador as well, just landed in Houston on my way to the port in Galveston for work, and I pretty much saw a little of what was mentioned... Lots of wide open brown plots if you want them away from everything. Won't be photoshopping for a few days but I did get zbrush loaded to make correctives for this project.

I had some pita and humus - and a monster coffee and some aspirin. I never take tylenol for anything. just aspirin and the occasional ibuprofen when aspirin isn't cuttin it but even that's rare. I think i'm mostly good now. still a bit swim-headed but good enough to be able to look at my screen for more than 5 minutes now. I didn't even drink that much. used to be able to handle a lot more than that. getting old sucks. lol. i go months without a drop of anything these days.

I've never been to TX. Well, drove thru the pan handle once on my way back here from CA.

Have a safe trip M_M.

Well I haven't got a headache right now but I think I soon will have, stupid forum, I can't even upload a new avatar!

It lets me select it for upload but it doesn't actually upload it or display it on the settings screen after I select it. And if I delete the old one first and then select a new one, it just puts the old one back as if I never deleted it. Nothing to do with the caching, either.

And I know it's not Roxie messing around this time because she likes the new avatar as well!

Nevermind, it just showed up!
How do I get rid of that ugly white edge?

I have CC subscription (I get an education discount which still allows for full use nowadays) and I mainly use photoshop, muse and adobe bridge. Muse is a very easy software for building websites. you can drag and drop. Other website building utilities tend to only let you place pictures in a similar way to text ie at the beginning middle or end, but with muse you can just drag and drop files wherever you want.

I'm finding the content aware fill tool very useful when fixing poke through on my poser people renders. And liquify filter is really good for making adjustments to the renders as well. And of course all the other usual tools in photoshop - cartoon actions etc. The mixer brush tool allows stroking the hair of the render (with a dotty hair brush) to make it longer and flowing etc.

Love esther

MY ONLINE COMIC IS NOW LIVE

I aim to update it about once a month. Oh, and it's free!

Yes, that's one thing I've always liked about Adobe's licensing - they charge less for students but it's still a full license. Most student licensed software is strictly for personal/learning use.

One thing I've read during my search into how well the CC is working for people, is that Adobe can claim ownership on anything that's uploaded to their cloud. I don't like that, but I'm not sure where to go to verify if this actually is true or not, without subscribing and reading all the fine print that comes along with it or just calling them directly. I haven't found their terms of service on the main adobe site yet (not fond of how they have their site laid out, have to dig for a lot of things). I know some other art sites do this also, which is not cool. But some don't actually claim ownership, only fair usage rights - such as for advertising purposes and such, which I don't have a problem with, but some do. Maybe that's actually the case here. Would like to find out for sure however.

ETA - found the terms of service, lol. Guess I'm blind. And it's as I suspected, their use is only for advertising and such. You keep your rights.

file_eb160de1de89d9058fcb0b968dbbbd68.jp 666

vinyl or digital ,ah what ever she wants ;)

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

In section 3.2 they lay out what they can do with your work, which is scary if you ask me..

They can do just about anything they want with it, and do not have to give you anything for it in return at all.

The sub license worries me. That basically means that they can make money from it and not give you any of it. Even sell the rights to someone else, and keep all the the proceeds for themselves.

Section 3.3 sort of goes against section 3.2, and is more a CYA step in countering fraud and passing the buck if it does happen..If they are not going to look, then look, then go "Wow, we can use that". You loose all rights to it accept that you created it. Retaining ownership and not being able to control what is done with it, is no longer exactly ownership. Don't plan on them giving you credit for it, or it would specifically say that in the agreement.

Store your stuff somewhere else.

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

Hmm, yeah that completely contradicts 3.1

Kind of sounds like deviantart's policies. Or what their policy used to be at least. not sure if that's still the case. Doesn't daz have a similar policy? Not sure on that, i thought they did.

So, one way to combat that would be to 1 - watermark everything, and 2, not upload any print-quality work. Keeping it around 72dpi with a max size of say 600 to 800, or whatever is reasonable to show it well on the web but would be pretty useless as a print. And similar measures for audio/video, so that it's about as good as you might get from a youtube vid. I pretty much do this with most everything that I upload anyway, anywhere, to include here.

The agreement says they can modify it, so watermarking it may not help either.

I use ASUS web storage, and what is there is encrypted so it wouldn't do anyone any good.

If you want somewhere to display a portfolio, creating a website of your own is the safest way to retain your rights to it.

That doesn't mean that someone wont steal it, because someone inevitably will.

A few of the ones I have in the gallery here have shown up all over the place.

This one has ended up all over the place and I gave on filing take downs on it.

I I found it on the same poster site a few times, lol...

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

true, on the modifying. But can't add resolution that isn't there to begin with, without it becoming pixelated, or without spending a whole lot of time on it by hand. Same with watermarks, if they're placed in the right areas on the image then trying to remove them makes it pretty obvious. I kind of doubt a company like Adobe would be making it a habit of doing too much of that - their customers would start dropping like flies if they went too far overboard with it. A lesser-known company might be a bit more prone to taking advantage like that.

Of course not uploading anything at all is the safest bet, (kind of like abstinence is the only true protection from std's - lol), but then how does a digital artist advertise their work? One of the pitfalls to being an artist on the web really. Anyone that comes across it can steal it, and for every one you find, there's likely 10 or even a hundred others you haven't found yet. And how much commercial Poser/3D work is out there being traded freely on torrent sites? good luck finding it all.

Regards to hosting your own site, sure but then you have to advertise it yourself too and that can be pretty time consuming and expensive. Hosting on a site of collective works gets a lot more exposure in a much shorter timeframe, without a lot of leg work. So I guess there's pros and cons for both options. Comes down to which is more important.

I get the microsmith emails .
they sell a enlarge photo app.
can't say how good it works but with topazlabs .
I'm sure there's a lot of app's n plugs for .jpg's manipulation.

When I post any of my Art to forums ,sites ,etc ,etc.
I know the forums ,sites ,etc ,etc. will have something about they can use it
&
Ya know it's now there for the taking buy anyone that wants it.
to do what ever they want with it legal or not ,permission or not.

they could plaster my Art all over the would Russia ,China ,NorthPole ,Texas etc etc.how would I ever know ,anyways ?

I dang sure wouldn't go to Russia and fight with them about it anyways & they know it .so there's nothing to stop them.

in 1980 Kiss,Ozzy etc etc concert tickets was $10.00 . And they sold records.
Now there making there music for free on YouTube more or less .So concert ticket's are up in the $100.00's

But we can't tore ,so. I bet all the venders lose a lot of $$$ with there stuff being given away for free.
App's and games also.

A lot of big online games are free .I know there making $$$ some how just don't know how ?

Any thing I post isn't that great anyways but if I posted killer Art really worth stealing.
Think I might have something like a tomestone ,rock,billboard in ever peace of Art.

with my logo on it in side the Art or all threw it in the back ground .
So when they steal it ,Everybody would still know it's mine.

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

quote How do I get rid of that ugly white edge?

have the background black

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

Most agreements for upload contain the boilerplate stuff about right to distribute, alter, blah, blah, blah, which is essential for services like DeviantArt if they are going to display the uploads.

If they are just storing your work, however, there's no need for language like that, so I'd be mightily suspicious of anything like that in say, DropBox.

Not sure what Adobe's cloud service does in that respect. Do they offer portfolio services, for instance? To showcase your uploads? If that's the case, then they need to include that boilerplate text in their agreement.

That said, some boilerplate text isn't quite so boilerplate. E.G. Facebook's agreements, which have been widely denounced as overly aggressive when it comes to rights of usage. So you do have to be very, very careful.

Making your own site to showcase your work, I think, is the best way. Control the sizes, as suggested. Include a watermark, and also add the embedded copyright and contact info. Then use social media sites like DeviantArt and whatnot to provide a sample of your work and link to your website.

If you hand code your website, you can make it extremely friendly to search engines, and all your images can be tagged with keywords (including your name) that will benefit you (so if someone googles you, they will get your portfolio images come up in a search, if you want). If you put a bit of effort into it, you can rise to the top in certain common keyword searches, but it does take some work.

In the best scenario, I think, if someone posts a small res copy of your work and someone else like it, they can use TinEye or Google image search to find other copies of that picture. If you've done it right, your name should pop-up among the first listings, and should be peppered all over the place. That way, even if stolen, someone can find the original creator pretty easily.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

Adobe offers a free portfolio site on their behance network, and as I understand it, everything you upload to your cloud storage box automatically gets displayed on your behance page. There may be a way to turn that feature off. It's basically a facebook for adobe users, i think, but you can set it up with your own unique domain.

Adobe offers a free portfolio site on their behance network, and as I understand it, everything you upload to your cloud storage box automatically gets displayed on your behance page. There may be a way to turn that feature off. It's basically a facebook for adobe users, i think, but you can set it up with your own unique domain.

Then they do need some rights to alter, distribute, etc in their agreements. But without seeing them, as you point out, it's hard to judge if they're reasonable. Also, neither of us is a lawyer... I'd tend to think that they probably are reasonable, if a large number of other professionals are using the service. But I wouldn't rely on that assumption to protect me. Social media seems, as an industry, to be attempting to redefine what belongs to whom, and not in favor of the user. There should be a way to turn off the service, or else you might never want to upload a seriously-needs-improvement WIP for storage. LOL.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

Also, I'd want to keep in mind that Adobe's servers do not have a history of being the most secure. I still have the email notifying me that my account details were stolen when they were hacked, and unlike Sony, they didn't helpfully notifying the banks so that the credit card numbers could be invalidated. So I'd be a bit wary of storing my most precious work on their servers, even though few hackers would be interested in anything other than my credit card numbers. :D

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

Yes you are correct.

If I do sub to the service I will be putting the funds on a prepaid card, so if something like that happens, all I'm out is the $20 for the prepaid. No way I'd put my actual bank account info on there, there are very few sites I trust with that info. I think I can count them on 2 fingers. lol.

And yeah, right again on the just building my own site. Thing is I did that once already - paid 2 or 3 years consecutively for an unlimited hosting plan, at about $150 a year, and never used it. Cause I know basic html, maybe a bit more, but I'm not a web designer and even tho I have dreamweaver CS4, and flash CS4, I could never get the site to actually look the way I wanted. And its difficult to find a hosting plan that is generous enough with what kind of content they allow and what they don't. I wound up having to go with an adult hosting company, which tends to cost a bit more, because none of the others I found that were reasonable would allow nudity in anything you post, even if it's art, and there's nudity in a lot of my work.

If I was working in this industry I think I would use the Adobe CC service but I would make sure I never use the cloud part of the deal. Adobe are not alone in having agreements where your work essentially becomes theirs.

At home I regularly back up my data, particularly the data that I could never recreate such as photographs of my parents who are no longer alive or music and art work I have created over the years. Even the stories I have written I would miss, even though they were only ever written for family and close friends. Not only do I back up locally I also ensure that the real important stuff has a copy stored with a family member at another location.

OK so maybe I am a little paranoid but having worked in the computer industry I have had too many occasions were I have had to explain that pictures cannot be recovered from a hard drive that failed, or if it can at massive financial cost. It made me feel helpless and would upset me particularly if it was a wedding, or special holiday on some occasions it was a students university work built up over months. If I felt that bad because I could not recover it so just how bad was it for those that had lost it? The thought that I would trust any of my data to any service where I only have the owners word that the data is stored safely, I will always have access to it and no-one else will have access is a alien concept to me. Rightly or wrongly that is why I can never see me being a fan of the cloud, the lack of control scares me.

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.

@All
So the more you read, the more you realise you're being used, and worse still, you're actually paying them to use you!
Remember the words from that "I'm a Marionette?" track?

This crap exists purely for their benefit, not yours!

@RorrKonn
Yup, looks like I'll have to do that, shouldn't have to though because I knew that would happen and already clipped it twice now, I've eaten well into the leader on the rim already, it really shouldn't be doing that now. Regards the hottie, well, I'd say she's defininitely a Vinyl girl, you can tell from her hat cause It looks suspiciously like she's carrying her favourite Vinyl in it - she's a good girl for being badass - what a fine specimen she is :woot:

@David
Well, you will go around posting naked women, so what do you expect? They are going to get stolen! To be honest though, having work stolen can feel flattering because it means someone liked what you did. The only time I'd have issue with it is if someone was trying to sell it, make money off' my work, unless I discovered they were desperately trying to survive.

Drop it pumeco. If you don't like it don't use it but quit harpin on it.

What do you mean, drop it?

It's a conversation, isn't it? People are discussing the manipulative terms of using their greed-machine, so I pointed out that all this crap is for Adobe's benefit (which it is) in case others aren't aware of it. The amount of people sucked into this crap is indication enough of how many people either aren't aware of it, or simply have no morals whatsoever. Making excuses for why you use it is an epic fail if you have any morals whatsoever.

Thanks to that comment, I will drop it and let it go only in the direction you want it to. Fact is they've not just trapped every CC sucker into tolerating cloud subscriptions, they're sucking them further still by forcing CC agreements upon them which, like I said, is the sort of thing only companies as big as they are, can get away with.

So suck on it, literally, cause that's what you'd be doing!

FFS

I'm out of this thread, grow-up, peeps, FFS!

Wasn't going to post this until after he'd subscribed, just to teach him a small but friendly lesson about getting caught-up in false beliefs.

Here's what's really happening to the Adobe greed-machine, it's thanks to people like myself and others who know when something needs to be avoided.
CLICK HERE - Check out the title and you might learn something useful today :-D

Thanks but that link doesn't tell me anything I didn't already know from my own research and talking to other people. A drop in revenue is to be expected when a company switches to an entirely new mode of delivering its product. That drop is only temporary, their subscribers have continued to increase. And Adobe isn't hurting from it that much, not in the larger scope of things - considering they rank #166 of largest companies according to Forbes. If they do start to suffer they'll figure out a way to solve it.

Here's a better article for you to read:

http://www.techradar.com/us/news/world-of-tech/management/why-a-subscription-model-could-be-the-future-for-all-businesses-1249302

Now if I had $3-$4K sitting around to drop on CS5 or 6 master collection then I would, but I don't, so that's not an option. Same for a lot of people. Subscription service is much more attainable and affordable for a lot of people, especially in today's economy.

And using shareware or some other "cheaper" software also isn't an option, cause you get what you pay for, and they don't do what Adobe software does, not even close. If they did then I would use that instead. They're fine as additional tools for various things, but they are no substitute. When those others step up their game and actually put the development money and resources into being real competitors, then maybe the story will be different, but they'll also have to charge more for what they offer, or have their own cloud-based subscription service, because like I said previously, like it or not that is where most software is moving. At least the software that intends on staying relevant. 20 to 25 years ago most people were afraid of the internet too. The cloud is just the next stage of that. And desktop PCs and laptops are being replaced by tablets and smart phones, and everyone wants to run all this software on their tablets and smart phones, making the cloud that much more a permanent fixture of the future. Those who don't adapt get left behind. Sure, call me a sell-out if you want, I don't care. I'm going to use the software that works.

If you want to complain about tech, complain about TVs that record everything you do and say, all under the guise of "tailored marketing". To me, that's a valid complaint and something to really be against.

SmartTV's ... hmmm ... would that happen to be those devices with a built-in camera and microphone?

Sort of like a SmartPhone and a LapTop and a Tablet has?
The sort of thing that would never get in my house in a million years?

Man, I knew that lot before the first manufacturer had even thought about it, I can read 'em like an open book. I personally own no such device, and the built-in webcam and microphone on my sisters laptop was physically disconnected, by yours truly, years ago. But yeah, that's nothing, there's still a heck of a lot to come for the gullible ones yet, a heck of a lot :-D

pumeco

Always One Step Ahead

Just to throw this out there,

Houdini Indie is now available on a yearly subscription basis. It has some restrictions and its own file save format. Limited to a max of HD renders (1920x1080) and only with the Mantra Engine (Which does awesome renders) It appears to be able to do everything that Houdini FX does, other than the restrictions listed. For what they are asking for it, you get an awesome program. Be forewarned, the learning curve is rather steep if you are just familiar with Poser/Studio. Houdini excels at reusing content, just like Poser and Studio do. You can build massive libraries of ready to use drag and drop content. Note I said build, although you can buy content at their store as well. The store is similar to what we are used to. User content for sale.

It appears that yet another company has allowed people to get high end software at a budget price. (seems to be a fad now, which is a welcome surprise)

Houdini engine is also available on a yearly basis as well. (Houdini Engine is a bridge to other software. Maya, C4D, and Unity. Has an api to write custom ones as well.)

This seems to be a trend. Companies realize that not every one can drop a few grand for a program. One of the best 3D programs in the world that no one can afford, is no longer the case.

You can get Houdini Indie for 22 years before you hit the price of buying one year of Houdini FX outright (at the present prices)

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

I'm not so blind to see that all of this is a way for companies to make bigger bank than they already make. The difference is I don't care. If it's software I want and need to use, and they make it affordable to me, then I'll pay for it. If it's software that I have no use for or don't enjoy using, then I won't use it even if it's free.

I probably won't be using Adobe's cloud storage tho. There's too many question marks and security holes in it right now, so I'll wait to see what they do about all of that. But I can use their software without having to use their storage.

Yes they will probably make more money, but the yearly rate will also add to the user base. If you want to be on top, you have to have the most users.

Using the software for the price they are asking is a good deal. You really can't argue that at all. I do agree that the Adobe EULA for the cloud storage is a tad odd, but as we all know you don't have to use that. Hard drives are cheap, and you can use any computer you happen to have as a local back up as well. I do that on 4 machines. Anything that is added to certain directories on any of my machines is copied to all the other ones automatically. The chances of 4 machines dying at the same time are fairly slim, and I also send it to encrypted cloud storage a few times a week.

Shane, if using Adobe subscription is what you want to do, no one else's opinion on it is more relevant or valid than your own. You know what you want and need software wise, and what you can spend on it. So, only you can decide the best way to go about it. All of us already know that buying it outright is very expensive and at the same time doesn't make a lot of sense since the subscription route has far more benefits.

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

@David
Houdini sounds interesting from what you say, I'd take a look if it weren't for being a subscription thing. That said, 1920x1080 is bit ridiculous anyway considering even consumer format Blu-ray is four times that amount when running in 4K mode. Does sound interesting though, mainly because other than Vue I don't know of any other reasonably capable package that is heavily content orientated. The new iClone looks cool as usual, but I've no interest in that seperate Indigo thing and they've not really showed much regards the new built-in renderer improvements. Won't be ordering this time unless they quit the secrecy about the main renderer and start giving some real details and demos of it. I know people have (understandably) been asking for motion blur for years now, and still, no mention of it.

No mention of audio-driven animation, either.

@Shane
As it looks like you've chosen to be sucked upon, be sure to check how they structure that licence agreement, and by that I mean make sure that the terms for 'CC Storage' and 'Product Usage' are seperate otherwise you might be agreeing one for all. Not being witty or anything, just serious, so be careful and look out for underhanded, devious ways of wording things.

Um, Blu ray is max 1920x1080... Yes it can be upscaled to 4k but it is still 1920x1080. The only 4k players out are the Red Ray from Sony and the Brightsign

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

They can't force me to store my files on their servers I don't care what the license says. It's not a contract, I can cancel it any time. I can pay month by month or a full year at once. So far I haven't paid anything.

@David - yes, I'd only created this thread to see what other people's experiences with it were before I signed up. So far, other than the complaining by those who don't like change and prefer to stay stuck in the past, I haven't seen anything that makes me think it isn't a good idea. Aside from the cloud usage issues, which I won't be using until they patch some holes and get clearer on exactly what they do with user content.

Shane: Price wise, I don't see how you can go wrong. It is like getting the full version for pennies on the dollar and upgraded yearly for free.

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

@Shane: my subscription doesn't include cloud storage, so I'm guessing all my files are saved locally. Once I get back I can try it without internet access when saving to see what happens.. but I'm guessing they'd quickly run out of space from all the odd saving I'd been doing if they required a copy in the cloud ;).

@David
Houdini sounds interesting from what you say, I'd take a look if it weren't for being a subscription thing.

By all means spend 5 grand to get the full blow version then discover you don't have a clue. That would be a wise choice..... At least you would have a really expensive coaster....

Or you could spend 200 bucks and get it for a year with all the tutorials, content, etc....

Do you get a newspaper? That is a subscription. Do you have a phone? that is a subscription. Electricity? Yep, that is basically a subscription as well.

Lease a car? Rent an apartment? We know you have internet, and that too is a subscription...

Your fear of subscriptions is just odd.

BTW Houdini Learning Edition is free, but very limited in what you can do render wise.

http://www.sidefx.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=blogcategory&id=245&Itemid=400

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

I don't even know if I have space on the cloud included. I use S3 for Backup, but files are encrypted here so they are useless for anyone but me.

I pay for Photoshop, not for the cloud.

A ship in port is safe; but that is not what ships are built for.
Sail out to sea and do new things.
-"Amazing Grace" Hopper

Avatar image of me done by Chidori.

As shvrdavid has already said the only person that can make the correct decision for AmbientShade is AmbientShade.

I worked for many years as a volunteer on a telephone crisis line and one rule that was always applied was never give advice which I found strange initially. It was explained to me that giving advice was essentially saying 'this is what I would do if I were you' and there is no way you can be them or fully understand their situation and so there was a very good chance that any such advice would be wrong for that person. We gave them facts, and discussed the options with the people that called but the decisions were always theirs. OK this thread is not about any sort of crisis but the same holds true and telling someone they are wrong to do or not do something seems a step too far, for me at least.

AmbientShade is the only one that has all the facts on his side and, with good research, most if not all of the facts on the other side. This thread was part of the research and, maybe in a negative way, it looks to have been valuable. So far in this thread, that has been running a while now, the only really dissenting voice has come from someone who does not use this system and never will. That is a valid position for any individual to take, but the lack of other voices suggests that there is little wrong with the concept. More than one person who is using the CC system have spoken positively about it and I am sure if others had issues they would quickly make their views known. Human nature suggests that if you feel wronged by a person or a system you tell as many people as possible, no one has done that here.

I can't see I will ever use it but if the situation did arise I am more likely to sign up after reading this thread than before.

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.

Thanks Hornet, good input and observation there. And btw, you can call me Shane ;). Most other regulars around here do. I'm sure they call me other things too at times but they can keep that to themselves - LOL

Like I said earlier, I was mostly just lookin for input on what experiences others have had with the service. What I should watch out for, etc. Could be good info for other who might be thinkin about using it as well.

@Male_Media: I've seen mention that you can use it without a net connection for somewhere around 45 to 90 days. After that it requires a connection to verify you still have an active sub. But that's just what I've heard, not sure if it's really true. But I doubt you have to have a constant connection, cause sometimes net access just goes down, for weather, ISP issues, etc.

@Bantha: According to Adobe's page, they include 20gb of cloud storage and a personal portfolio site if you have a full sub to any individual title, or to the complete suite of titles (which I'm guessing is the equivalent of the master collection). For the photography bundle, with just photoshop and lightroom, I don't think that package includes the storage, but I'm not 100% sure.

@David
No, I mean proper 4K Blu-ray, not upscaling, though the format is irrelevant anyway, it's still 4K compared to 1080P is what I'm getting at.
CLICK-HERE for news of real 4K Blu-ray.

Like I said, I don't have issues with subscriptions on software as long as it leads to a permanent licence - does it?

If it does, I might be intererested
If it does not, I won't be.

@Shane
Please read the tone of my posts properly before you reply to me, a lot of times you sound like you're trying to get a stab in there. You might not have subscribed yet but you will, and that's fine, but it's no reason to have a stab at me just because I know what sort of thing you're trying to rationalise. It's your money, so it should be obvious it makes no difference to me what you do. Adobe have a sudden 46% decline in profits because their other-worldy greed got the better of them and people are dropping them, simple as that. All that other crap about the size of them etc, is irrelevant, that money came from customers that have now left them, end of.

The result is that in the not too distant future, you'll be getting either an entitlement to a permanent licence once you've covered one, or a choice of subscription or outright purchase. That's what will happen, and time will be proof of it.

Prefering the right thing and using what is best has nothing to do with being "stuck in the past", and even if it were, I'd rather be stuck in a better place than sucked into a worse one. The better formats are making a comeback and the free software is evolving and is unstoppable.

It's not me who's in the past.

@Hornet
Just spotted your post, and all I can say is that it's pretty scary that people can be so gullible.
I'm glad to hear you're more prepared than ever to support a failing greed-machine, I'm sort of glad for you because you sound like you deserve it.

@pumeco: Not really taking stabs. You're not the only one here who is anti-adobe, you've just been the most vocal about it lately.

The "46% decline in revenue" is supposed to sound damning on the surface and make for good headlines on tech blogs and newspapers, when it's really not damning at all. It may be more of a slide than Adobe would have wanted, or maybe it's not even as much as what they projected it would be. Either way, a decline in revenue is to be expected, especially within the first year or two. But look at their stock - it's been climbing steadily over the last few years, and is higher now than it has been in the last decade or so, whereas before, back in the 90s and early 2000s it was pretty much stagnant. That steady climb shows that more people are buying/subscribing to their software now, not less. That same article you linked to even stated they've acquired another 500,000 subscribers in the last 6 months to a year, putting them at 2.8million as of the writing of that article, and that number continues to grow.

Think about it - for their entire existence their sales have relied primarily on one-off purchases. Individuals and businesses paying one large sum for their software at a time. Now they've moved entirely to a subscription base for 90% of their software, where the most any one customer can pay them at a time is around $800 for one year per license seat, for their entire suite of software (aside from bulk licenses, which their site doesn't give pricing on, you'd have to contact them for a quote). Compare that to the $1200 to $4,000 one-time fees they were getting per sale, and you'll see that even if every single previous customer had signed up for the CC service, they still would have had an initial loss in revenue. I know that's a really simplistic way of putting it and there's a lot of other factors involved - i'm not a stock broker or a banker, but the point is, a drop in revenue is to be expected in this situation. It has nothing to do with how well the company is performing on the whole. They're not getting $1200 to $4,000 per sale anymore, they're getting $600 - $800 at most, on top of losing some customers who aren't happy with the new system.

Fact is, aside from a few nay-sayers and disgruntleds, the majority of Adobe users are adapting to the service and seem to be liking it.

ETA: I already linked to an article the other day that talked about how a large percentage of people WANT subscription-based services for everything from entertainment to software to food. DVD and CD sales are down across the board, while subscriptions to netflix and amazon and others are continuing to grow. More people are preferring to subscribe to a service than buy a license or a hard copy outright. Whether you agree with it or not, the numbers don't lie. And businesses are reading those numbers and responding to them. Sure it's the businesses that are pushing it too no question, but if most people didn't want it, then it wouldn't be growing at the rate that it currently is. And, you can thank pirate sites for a lot of this, as a big motivator behind moving software and entertainment to subscription-based, non-physical copies is due to all the theft that goes on. It's not going to stop it, their will always be some thief that figures out how to pirate, but this does put a big damper on their party, and will continue to do so.

I realise that, but what I'm taking issue with is people taking what I said and twisting it to make greed-machines look acceptable. I've lost count how many times I've made it clear that I do not have anything against subscriptions. What I'm against is blatant greed, because if they could charge, say, £300 for a permanent licence before, then there's no reason that you should not be entiteld to that same permanent licence once you've paid them £300 worth of subscriptions - why can't any of you see that point of view - why does that part conveniently go right over everyones head all the time?

It was bad enough they removed the choice of a permanent licence altogether, but it was beyond disgusting that even after that, you still don't get a permanent licence after covering the cost of one through a subscription! There's a massive difference between a fair subscription system and what Adobe are doing, and it's not my fault if people misinterpret what I said. I wrote it in plain English, just like I have again, it still won't stop someone making out like I must be stupid if I don't like subscriptions.

Like I said, it's not subscriptions I have a problem with, it's the blatant greed and manipulation - that's the bit I don't like and won't tolelrate.

Sigh ... anyway, here's some good news (and you did say we could post art), just in case anyone believed that stuff Hornet said about there not being any new "Pro Turntables" on the market. There's actually already quite a few, and one of the biggest in the business have just launched their offering too. Please note, though, this is strictly for those of us wanting the best sound quality and appreciate being in control of our lives and our media.

Why not join the best?

A big thmbs-up to Pioneer for stepping-up the game, due to their influence with DJ's, this will help the format grow even stronger in a very big way.
CLICK HERE to see a short clip of what some will be getting for Christmas this year (lucky bas*ards).

It's not greed, Pumeco. It's a legal requirement that a corporation make as high a profit as it is capable of doing within the boundaries of the law. They are, as a corporation, legally REQUIRED to do that. So if they CAN charge $1000 for a widget and make more money that way than charging $1 for a widget, they are required, by law, to charge $1000. That's capitalism. Not Adobe.

If a competing corporation makes widgets for $10, you can bet your life they aren't doing it "For the good of the customers." They're doing it solely because that's the price that they have determined will maximize their profits. And the moment they determine that they need to raise the price -- to whatever -- they will.

Arguing that this or that corporation is greedy or bad because its products are out of your personal reach is just silly and naive. On a moral level, they are all exactly the same. Except where a company aggressively engages in negligent and clearly harmful activities (such as burying research that indicates a certain drug is dangerous), there's nothing bad or immoral about what they're doing. Unless, of course, you're an anticapitalist. But if you are, be consistent at least, and recognize that it's the nature of corporations themselves and the legal requirement to maximize profits that's to blame, not certain companies with expensive widgets.

I don't campaign against Gucci because their products are priced too high for me. I just don't buy them. I may think it's silly to waste money on Gucci stuff, but if someone can make a convincing case that they can't get employed in their preferred occupation without wearing expensive accessories, then I'm not going to tell them not to do it.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

And, Pumeco, I really don't think Shane is digging at you.

If anyone is digging, its me. Hell, I'm practically hurling shovels at your head. :D But, you know, it's just because we both hold certain ideas very strongly, and it's nothing personal at all. (And I am an anticapitalist, as I already said -- so we probably fundamentally agree on more things than is obvious -- but as I live in a capitalist world, I prefer to see things realistically. When in Rome swimming among sharks, as the famous mixed proverb goes....)

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

As shvrdavid has already said the only person that can make the correct decision for AmbientShade is AmbientShade.

I worked for many years as a volunteer on a telephone crisis line and one rule that was always applied was never give advice which I found strange initially. It was explained to me that giving advice was essentially saying 'this is what I would do if I were you' and there is no way you can be them or fully understand their situation and so there was a very good chance that any such advice would be wrong for that person. We gave them facts, and discussed the options with the people that called but the decisions were always theirs. OK this thread is not about any sort of crisis but the same holds true and telling someone they are wrong to do or not do something seems a step too far, for me at least.

AmbientShade is the only one that has all the facts on his side and, with good research, most if not all of the facts on the other side. This thread was part of the research and, maybe in a negative way, it looks to have been valuable. So far in this thread, that has been running a while now, the only really dissenting voice has come from someone who does not use this system and never will. That is a valid position for any individual to take, but the lack of other voices suggests that there is little wrong with the concept. More than one person who is using the CC system have spoken positively about it and I am sure if others had issues they would quickly make their views known. Human nature suggests that if you feel wronged by a person or a system you tell as many people as possible, no one has done that here.

I can't see I will ever use it but if the situation did arise I am more likely to sign up after reading this thread than before.

Having used such a crisis line in the past, I can see why you'd be very good at it. I would think myself very lucky to have got you on the other end. And I don't say that lightly. It must be one hell of a hard job at times -- but rewarding too. The point about advice giving is spot on. Spot on. (I need to remember this, because it's useful to consider, as you point out, in all areas of life.) On behalf of everyone who ever called you on that line -- Thank you. Edit: Your assessment of this thread is very balanced, and generous where it needs to be. Why aren't you running a newsroom? :D (Had to inject some humor into an otherwise uncharacteristically serious comment of mine, but do I think you'd be a great news anchor.)

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

How on earth do you think this crap is "out of my personal reach" ?

How can it be, I could subcribe to this crap right now if I wanted because like you all keep pointing out, it's dead easy to get (sucked-in) due to the subscription. I would never buy an Adobe product now that I've seen the way they treat customers, but even if I was prepared to, surely buying outright would be even more expensive for me?

I don't get how you come to such a weird conclusion :-D

No, like I said before, not one of you can answer >>> why you should not be allowed a permanent licence once you've covered the cost of one <<<. They're a greed-machine that ought to be boycotted even more than they already have been. The more people that boycott them, the more their profits will slide, and the quicker permanent licences will become an "option" again.

How on earth do you think this crap is "out of my personal reach" ?

How can it be, I could subcribe to this crap right now if I wanted because like you all keep pointing out, it's dead easy to get (sucked-in) due to the subscription. I would never buy an Adobe product now that I've seen the way they treat customers, but even if I was prepared to, surely buying outright would be even more expensive for me?

I don't get how you come to such a weird conclusion :-D

No, like I said before, not one of you can answer >>> why you should not be allowed a permanent licence once you've covered the cost of one <<<. They're a greed-machine that ought to be boycotted even more than they already have been. The more people that boycott them, the more their profits will slide, and the quicker permanent licences will become an "option" again.

I came to this conclusion because 1. You offer free or cheap alternatives, not expensive ones by different companies. So the price -- as you experience it -- is clearly an issue. 2. You don't campaign against other companies that behave in a similar manner which offer products cheaply by your standards, but which are nevertheless unavailable to most of the rest of the world (So, again, it's the price, from your viewpoint, not the behavior of the corporation or how it treats its potential customers) 3. You believe greed has something to do with how easy it is for YOU to use a product, not for ANYONE to use it. 4. I believe that if Adobe offered a subscription service for $1 a month, you'd have one -- or at least you wouldn't be so vehement in your objections. So again, it comes down to how much you think the service is worth paying for. Clearly, the price is too high for you personally. I didn't mean to imply that you didn't actually possess the funds, though I can see that it certainly sounds that way. I was just thinking in terms such as: I could buy a Porsche today with cash if I wanted, but I don't consider it a vehicle that is "within my personal reach" as it's not priced at the level I believe someone with my income would be wise to pay for a car.

Edit; I don't own permanent copies of the movies I watch on Netflix, or on Cable TV (though, I suppose I could for the latter). Yet I'm happy to watch Netflix. Now, if Netflix cost $500 a month, I might think I deserved to own those copies. But that would just be my opinion -- based again on what I personally expected to get for the PRICE -- and not some thing inherently evil about the subscription model.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

@moriador

Thank you for the kind comments, and you are correct that while there are some difficult times there is a great deal of satisfaction. It is also change that, along with the theme of this thread in many ways, you are working to a different goal than the 'bottom line'. Spending donated money in the right way is very important but there was never any pressure to make profits.

I hope I did help, you never truly know of course, but if the truth be known I probably gained as much if not more than the callers as you learn to treasure what I have so much. I also learnt the skill, thanks to some excellent training and support from other volunteers, to listen. Strange as it may seem listening is a skill and one I still try to improve on everyday.

I will take the detail of every conversation I had at the time with me to the grave but almost all continue to live with me and I still try and learn a lesson from each and everyone. Which I why when I read threads like this I am interested in other people's views but there is nothing here that will upset me, the fact we are here and able to discuss matters like this shows we are a great deal better off than many.

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.

@Moriador
Again, you still failed to answer the question I pointed out in red :-)
The answer is - "Because they're a greed-machine".

A lovely view to take, hornet. I suppose it does give you a much greater sense of perspective to hear the stories of other people who are suffering.

Pumeco, I own permanent licenses to Poser 5, 8, Pro 2010, 10, Pro 2014, and Game Dev. What good are they doing me? What purpose do they serve? If I can't transfer those licenses to other people, they're utterly useless the moment I upgrade. In other words, even if you think you own the license, if you can't sell it, you don't own it.

At least, back when it did offer permanent licenses, Adobe was one of the few companies that did permit you to sell yours and transfer ownership without a hassle. In that sense they're less greedy than most software companies.

And all corporations are greed-machines. Why pick on Adobe specifically?

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

You can still buy Adobe's stuff on permanent license basis, you'll just have to search their site as they are heavily promoting the CC stuff. Photoshop CS6 Extended is just under £1,000. Photoshop CC already has some features that CS6 doesn't have, and the point to subscribing is that you are renting software that is continually updated. Eventually there will be enough feature difference to justify Photoshop CS7, and there will be a hefty price tag to upgrade from CS6. So permanent licences are still an option, but when you start to look at it critically, the subscription makes sense and does open the market up to new users.

Shane - on a monthly sub the apps will dial home to verify after about 30 days use, on an annual sub it's about 99 days. Using the cloud is not necessary, nor is a permanent internet connection.

And combating piracy is probably (as someone posted above) a big factor driving this sort of option among software companies. Which is a good thing IMO.

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Not approved by Scarfolk Council. For more information please reread. Or visit my local shop.

@Moriador
You still haven't answered the question in red :-D

You can still buy Adobe's stuff on permanent license basis, you'll just have to search their site as they are heavily promoting the CC stuff. Photoshop CS6 Extended is just under £1,000. Photoshop CC already has some features that CS6 doesn't have, and the point to subscribing is that you are renting software that is continually updated. Eventually there will be enough feature difference to justify Photoshop CS7, and there will be a hefty price tag to upgrade from CS6. So permanent licences are still an option, but when you start to look at it critically, the subscription makes sense and does open the market up to new users.

Shane - on a monthly sub the apps will dial home to verify after about 30 days use, on an annual sub it's about 99 days. Using the cloud is not necessary, nor is a permanent internet connection.

And combating piracy is probably (as someone posted above) a big factor driving this sort of option among software companies. Which is a good thing IMO.

Ah, that's good to know. I got my copy of CS5 on a 24 hour educational discount for everyone sale. :D They gave me CS5.5 Extended for free. They even sent a physical copy in the mail, and when it came through customs, they put the cost at $0 (under the promotional category), so I didn't even have to pay duties on it. Yeah, as Pumeco would have it, they sure treat their customers like crap. LOL.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

@Moriador
You still haven't answered the question in red :-D

Because they don't have to. Because a permanent license doesn't have any value. Because no one but you cares. Because what's the point of a subscription model that lets you pay by the month and then gives a permanent license after you've paid the cost for one but then won't give you access to the subscription any more until you've paid for the upgrade? It doesn't make sense your way. If you got a permanent license to CS6 under the sub model, as soon as their servers started offering CS7, they'd have to deny you access until you upgraded, and that would probably be a technological nightmare. So, if you want CS6 permanently, you just have to buy it. You don't get access to free upgrades AND a permanent license. One or the other. You can't have your cake and eat it too. That's not greed. That's industry standard.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

"A lovely view to take, hornet. I suppose it does give you a much greater sense of perspective to hear the stories of other people who are suffering."

It can also make you seem inconsiderate when you have been listening to people, quite literally at wits end, then you go into work and have someone makes a drama out of the fact their car would not start.

Just like this thread shows, some people have strong views not only on their way of life but apparently on how others live theirs. In the end it all boils down to getting what pleasures you can from life. If a CC subscription can bring you happiness, either directly or indirectly, and doing so hurts no-one, just go for it.

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.

Haha. Indeed, hornet. The internet seems to be primarily a vehicle for commenting on how other people live. Fat-shaming, fashion-shaming, now we have software-shaming. I think there are a lot of people attempting to validate their choices by denigrating those of others.

Other people's life choices can be important, of course. Whether you get your kids vaccinated or take antibiotics for a viral cough. Whether you support a non-profit that is actually doing harm. And when it comes to financial choices, of course, the sum total of how people behave has a direct influence on all us. I do agree that there are some causes worth championing with great enthusiasm. But campaigning for a cause where you aim is to persuade people to change is a lot different from just judging other people's actions. I think many don't quite see the difference.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

"A lovely view to take, hornet. I suppose it does give you a much greater sense of perspective to hear the stories of other people who are suffering."

It can also make you seem inconsiderate when you have been listening to people, quite literally at wits end, then you go into work and have someone makes a drama out of the fact their car would not start.

I do believe I know what you mean. But I also think that everyone who is born suffers, and very likely, through the course of a life, we all suffer as much as each of us can stand. If someone is making a drama out of a car not starting, it really is trivial, but I imagine that something else is going on that causes them to strive for attention that they're not getting. They are probably deeply unhappy in some other way, and we have no way of knowing why. Outwardly, people can look like they have everything going for them. But you don't, as you said, know their past, their experiences, or their inner life.

PoserPro 2014, PS CS5.5 Ext, Nikon D300. Win 8, i7-4770 @ 3.4 GHz, AMD Radeon 8570, 12 GB RAM.

@Caisson
I'm talking about up to date software though!

I do believe I know what you mean. But I also think that everyone who is born suffers, and very likely, through the course of a life, we all suffer as much as each of us can stand. If someone is making a drama out of a car not starting, it really is trivial, but I imagine that something else is going on that causes them to strive for attention that they're not getting. They are probably deeply unhappy in some other way, and we have no way of knowing why. Outwardly, people can look like they have everything going for them. But you don't, as you said, know their past, their experiences, or their inner life.

That is so very true and that happens in some many areas of life. Very often subject that the person is complaining of is just a symptom of what is really wrong and treating the symptom does not help. Like getting the persons car started and then getting upset because they seemed ungrateful but the error is treating the symptom not the problem. That is one big plus for the Internet, it allows people to write something they would never say to someone. The centre I worked for also allowed people to contact the centre by email and there were many aspects that were different to telephone conversations. I found that form of contact most difficult of all as anything you said on the phone is gone in an instant but the written word can be read again and again and each time a different inference can be drawn. The charity were well aware of this and no email was allowed to be sent before at least two volunteers had read the response.

When someone puts a post that is clearly sent in a rage over an aspect of Poser or the like I find myself wondering what the real issue is because the passion in the thread does not appear to relate to the problem described.

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.

@caisson: There are only a handful of Adobe titles you can still buy licenses to now - directly through Adobe that is - titles that aren't part of the CC. If you want Photoshop, or After Effects, etc, you have to subscribe as they are no longer selling licenses for them. You can however still buy CS6 master collection through Amazon and other retailers, for about $4,000, and through some student software resellers for a significant discount, if you can prove you're a student.

Autodesk still allows you the option to buy outright a full license to most of their software, or subscribe to them monthly, quarterly or annually. As of Feb 2015 they will no longer be selling upgrade licenses. So if you haven't upgraded your Autodesk software by that point, you won't be able to without subscribing. They announced this in October of 2013, to allow plenty of time for their customers to upgrade. But that only applies to upgrades for now. They're phasing out license sales gradually. I'm guessing sometime in 2016 is likely when they will end the sale of new licenses and everything (or most everything) will be subscription based.

And yes, the end of software licensing is largely due to pirating. It's been estimated that Adobe software is the most pirated software in the world, and I don't doubt that that's likely the case. Autodesk is probably the 2nd-most pirated, especially 3DSMax. These companies have to come up with ways to combat all that theft, which is another reason why I don't mind the subscription based model. Good for them.

ETA: You never own any software, unless you wrote it yourself. You only own the right to use it. That's all a license gives you. It was never yours to begin with. Same with movies, or music, etc. Trading is still theft. It's not the same as buying a car or even a computer. Those things are tangible goods. When you buy a car it's yours to do with whatever you want, tear it down, resell it for parts, set it on fire, whatever. Software is not the same and never has been.

@Moriador
It's only a subscription model now because they decided so. What they're doing is no different than, say, a car manufacturer suddenly deciding that you're never going to be allowed to buy it outright, and that you're going to pay them a constant sum of cash and never own that car no matter how much you pay for it. That's clearly wrong and ought to be illegal. People work, they earn money by going to work, and when they get home and choose to spend that money on their toys they are entitled to get something permanent or tangible for that money if they have the amount upfront. I don't care what crap people come out with to try and rationalise it, it's clealy wrong and ought to be illegal.

This is software we're talking about, not consumables, it's not gas or electricity!

Anyway, I won't be replying further on the topic (and I'll have to stick to it this time).
Don't anyone think I'm ignoring when I don't reply :-)

@Moriador
It's only a subscription model now because they decided so. What they're doing is no different than, say, a car manufacturer suddenly deciding that you're never going to be allowed to buy it outright, and that you're going to pay them a constant sum of cash and never own that car no matter how much you pay for it. That's clearly wrong and ought to be illegal. People work, they earn money by going to work, and when they get home and choose to spend that money on their toys they are entitled to get something permanent or tangible for that money if they have the amount upfront. I don't care what crap people come out with to try and rationalise it, it's clealy wrong and ought to be illegal.

This is software we're talking about, not consumables, it's not gas or electricity!

Anyway, I won't be replying further on the topic (and I'll have to stick to it this time).
Don't anyone think I'm ignoring when I don't reply :-)

There are already a bunch of Ferraris(FXX-559XX) that fit this description. You can buy the car, but you can only use it at designated track days by the agreement.. You can't even take certain models home.... They have been doing this since 2005 and don't have any problem selling them at all. Not sure you can consider it sold thou, since it isn't really yours depending on the model. Your maintenance costs are zero on these models, which is one of the selling points.

Software companies did not start this, Ferrari was one of the first to do it and has proven that it works very well..

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

Shane - had to search on the UK site for it, but under Creative Suite 6 the individual apps were listed along with pricing (£944 for Photoshop CS6 Extended) and a Buy button - though hitting the Buy button brings a screen up that emphasises the benefits of CC and states the CS versions are 2012 releases, with no additional services or feature/version updates. So they just stop short of telling you you're mad to consider it :)

I've seen Autodesk's pricing models and have considered MayaLT on monthly sub as the full version of Maya is out of reach. Having used it on the 15 day trial I'm very unsure, found it difficult to 'get' (I'm really hoping that the Foundry will introduce subscription on Modo) ... but to be able to even consider a stripped down version of a professional 3d app given my level of income is a very welcome change!

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Not approved by Scarfolk Council. For more information please reread. Or visit my local shop.

Ok - that option isn't available anywhere that I can find on Adobe's US site. I've dug through every link I can find. Maybe a back door via a google search might bring it up for the US site. But most of the google links seem to point to 3rd party educational resellers.

Maya LT is very limited. It's a good price for learning, and for creating game content, but it's very much aimed at game developers, and very specifically designed to function with Unity3D as it has a direct link into Unity with no poly count limits. Outside of Unity the limit is 65K. As I understand it, unless it has changed recently, you can't even export to OBJ format from it, only a limited form of FBX. And there is no render engine. No plug-ins, no MEL or Python scripting. It also has very little to no dynamics. But its modeling features are almost identical to the full version of Maya. So far there doesn't seem to be many folks who are too happy with Maya LT due to its over-reaching limitations, and at $800 for a full license for it, those limitations are unreasonable.

Shane, it is (err was...) buried in the enterprise section, which appears to no longer be online.

If you want individual offline licenses, give them a call. You can still get them.

Some things are easy to explain, other things are not........ <- Store -> <-Freebies->

the site keeps going to a blank white page :(

every thing might go to subscriptions .so ....

but I like them ,there affordable :) so I don't mind

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

Hope Shane doesn't mind, but I just came across this and had to share ;-)

Remember that stuff about people embacing the return of Vinyl, and the younger generation getting in on it in a big way? Well, I just heard it's getting pretty exteme now, seriously, we're at the point where they've found a way to get even more pleasure from modern Vinyl systems. They've devised a way to connect themselves, literally, 'Body and Soul' to the music that is playing. It's believed that the direct connection to the media stimulates a heightened sensation which then allows the output from the stylus to travel in sync with the neurons from skin sensation and be processed by the brain. Apparently, it's the processing of two senses that heighten the Vinyl experience whereas before, using just a stylus, you only had the senses from your ears.

Interesting stuff, quite a neat idea actually and it would be great to see it in action for real, but anyway, a concept image has already been posted:
Click Here for concept demonstration of the new extra sensory Vinyl technique.

AmbientShade : did you get photoshop ?

============================================================

The Artist that will fight for decades to conquer their media.
Even if you never know their name ,your know their Art.
Dark Sphere Mage Vengeance

Of course he did, I can hear the sucking sounds from here :-D

Forum: Poser - OFFICIAL

Subject: OT: Anyone round here using Adobe's CC service?