For-Profit (Creative) Software

Summary

In this insightful and narrative-driven video, the creator EndVertex delves into the evolving landscape of for-profit creative software, highlighting personal experiences and industry shifts that reveal the often tumultuous journey artists and creators face in maintaining access to crucial tools. From the exorbitant costs of proprietary software like 3D Studio Max to the rise of open-source alternatives like Blender, the video explores the consequences of subscription-based models and software consolidation by major companies. The creator also reflects on the importance of learning universal skills, engaging with open-source communities, and advocating for accessible tools, while sharing personal anecdotes and historical insights into software development. It's a call to action for artists and consumers to support alternative platforms and maintain resilience in the face of a profit-driven software industry.

Highlights

• Exploration of 3D Studio Max's earlier high cost and its impact. 💰
• Autodesk's acquisition streak in the 3D software market. 🏢
• Impact of subscription-based pricing on artists. 📈
• Open-source software as a lifeline for creative professionals. 🆓
• Importance of learning universal skills and supporting community-driven tools. 🌍

Key Takeaways

• High costs of creative software can hinder artists' careers. 💸
• Subscription models often replace perpetual licenses, sometimes to consumers' detriment. 🔄
• Open-source software like Blender offers viable alternatives. 🌐
• Historical perspective on software shows cycles of innovation and acquisition. 🕰️
• Creators should explore and support open-source and universal tools. 🤝

Overview

The video takes us on a journey through the creative industry’s software evolution, from costly proprietary solutions to the rise of accessible open-source alternatives like Blender. The transition for artists often comes with hurdles, as steep prices and subscription models lock them out of vital tools, leading many to seek out new paths or switch industries.

EndVertex shares their personal saga with 3D Studio Max, explaining how prohibitive costs and changing payment structures initially forced them away from their passion. The narrative expands to examine how major companies like Autodesk have consolidated much of the 3D software market, often pushing legacy users to adapt or abandon their tools when faced with new pricing models.

Ultimately, the creator paints a hopeful picture of resilience and collaboration within the artist community. By embracing open-source software and learning universally applicable skills, artists can reclaim control over their creative processes, ensuring their work and legacy are not beholden to the whims of profit-driven corporations.

Chapters

• 00:00 - 02:00: Introduction and Personal Story The chapter discusses the author's experience with a costly program used during their college years, 3D Studio Max, which was priced at $33,000. Upon graduation, the author faced a dilemma of either taking out one last loan to buy the software or relying solely on existing portfolio work to secure employment. Fortunately, the author managed to land a job. However, after the job ended, they felt as though they were back at the starting point. The chapter also touches on a peculiar aspect within the industry, particularly in art, where showcasing professional work in a portfolio or resume isn't always allowed.
• 02:00 - 05:00: Software Pricing and Flex Pricing Model The chapter discusses the importance of an artist's portfolio in proving their capabilities, especially for those who are inexperienced or lacking a network. It highlights the challenges faced when access to necessary tools is restricted, leading to a career switch as a temporary solution — which eventually became a permanent change as circumstances grew more difficult.
• 05:00 - 16:30: Historical Context and Flash Software The chapter discusses the historical context of software changes in the art job market, focusing on the author's personal journey. Initially, the author aimed to return to the art field by investing in 3D Studio Max. However, due to a shift in the software's payment model to a costly subscription of $200 per month, the author found it financially impossible with existing rent and loan commitments. Instead, the funds saved were redirected to purchase necessary perpetual licensed software like ZBrush, Substance Painter, and Designer. Eventually, the author discovered Blender and embarked on the challenging journey of learning a new 3D software from scratch.
• 16:30 - 21:00: 3D Software Industry Overview In the '3D Software Industry Overview' chapter, the discussion highlights the emotional and professional investment users have in their chosen 3D software tools, such as Blender and Maya. It addresses the anxiety associated with transitioning between software and the potential loss of skills. The chapter emphasizes the importance of fundamental art skills, which remain valuable regardless of the software used. It also touches on how individuals carve out niches within the industry and how these decisions can lead to strong opinions and debates over tool preferences. The speaker shares their personal experience of losing access to a favored software and the impact it had on their career, including their role as a peer and educator.
• 21:00 - 29:00: ZBrush and Substance Software The chapter discusses the reliance on software tools in professions and hobbies, particularly focus on 3D software like ZBrush and Blender. It highlights the challenges faced by individuals who become proficient in specific software, only to have those tools potentially rendered obsolete or inaccessible. The chapter emphasizes the importance of staying updated with software developments to maintain professional competence.
• 29:00 - 36:00: Open Source Alternatives The chapter titled 'Open Source Alternatives' explores different pricing models in specialized fields. It introduces the concept of 'Flex pricing', where users pay each time they open software, instead of a fixed price. This is compared to a system similar to Chuck-E-Cheese, where tokens are used to access software. The chapter attempts to address the concern of paying for software only when it's in use. However, the cost of a token or the pricing structure using tokens isn't entirely clear in the transcript provided.
• 36:00 - 43:00: Conclusion and Personal Reflections This chapter presents a reflection on the complexity of accessing software through a token-based system, emphasizing the user frustration experienced when multiple tokens are required just to open a preferred program. The high cost of tokens is highlighted, alongside confusion over the math involved when purchasing them in bulk, leading to leftover tokens. It is revealed that each program has a variable token requirement, adding to the confusion.

For-Profit (Creative) Software Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 in college I used a program called 3D Studio Max at the time that program cost $33,000 when I graduated and lost access to it my options were take out one final loan to pay for it or hope I get a job from my existing portfolio alone I did get a job but when that was over I was back at Square 1 fun fact for a lot of Industries but especially art you may or may not be allowed to show professional work in your portfolio on your resume
• 00:30 - 01:00 you may or may not be allowed to disclose what clients you worked for I wasn't allowed to say anything other than I created photo realistic renders for a major American Retailer as an artist you will rely on your portfolio to prove what you can do and it's especially important for people who don't have a lot of experience or haven't built up a network yet so I needed to work on that without access to the tools I needed to do it I ended up switching Industries entirely first as a stop Gap but then as it became harder to
• 01:00 - 01:30 find Art jobs I always thought I'd find my way back but by the time I had saved up enough money to buy 3D Studio Max and start work on my portfolio again they had changed their payment model it was subscription based and it cost $200 per month between rent and Loans I simply couldn't afford that I used the money saved to buy other software I needed zbrush and substance painter and designer which at the time were Perpetual licenses then I found blender and started the painfully difficult task of learning a whole new 3D software
• 01:30 - 02:00 package there is fundamental art-based knowledge I will keep no matter what software I use but that was still a big loss there's a reason whatever Niche you occupy people will fight about tools spend any time in the 3D art space and you will watch people go to war for blender versus Maya or Cinema 4D and the reason is because they don't want to lose their skills I was good at Max I was a person my classmates often went to for help after graduating I taught classes on it and when I didn't have access to it anymore a big chunk of my
• 02:00 - 02:30 heart or knowledge was gone working a full-time job it took me years to get to the same level with blender if you are a person who relies on software as tools for your job or hobby or whatever you always run this risk now you could become an expert at something and someone will just come and take your tools away and there's nothing you can do wait of course the makers of 3D Studio Max know all that they know people need to use these programs for work to stay on top of up dates between
• 02:30 - 03:00 jobs to keep your portfolios fresh in the specialized field there is another way to pay Flex pricing what does that mean basically you pay every time you open software that seems expensive how much does it cost to open it do you remember Chuck-E-Cheese well we have a similar token based system so you buy a token to open the software that way you aren't paying for time you don't use it how much is a token well six tokens what it
• 03:00 - 03:30 takes six tokens to open your preferred software why wouldn't you just make it one dir Pizza rent okay how much do the tokens cost oh wow that's a lot wait that isn't math right if it costs six tokens to open and you sell them per 100 then I'm left with a remainder well oh because each program costs a different amount to open
• 03:30 - 04:00 well I guess that's a benefit that I can use any program products features services or benefits are available with flex of course and if I open it and use it longer than 24 hours I'll get charged six more tokens and they expire after a year so really it costs money to use per 24-hour period still saving money for occasional users are you though according to this if I open it more than seven days in a month then it costs roughly the same as it does per year less than seven would be occasional okay
• 04:00 - 04:30 special occasion I get to work yeah might as well what happens if I open it and lose power or Internet do I just lose the rest of those hours contact support okay so screw you is the answer this isn't a joke this is really their pricing plan I am on their website if you don't use 3D software do you feel good right now feeling safe I
• 04:30 - 05:00 think we can all agree that subscription services are way out of control at this point but as everything from software to TV to your car's heated seats converts to subscription based pricing and as profiteers reach a ceiling with how much money they could make that way do you think terrible ideas like these are going to stay confined to just one company do they ever companies will always find a way to innovate and profit sh
• 05:00 - 05:30 [Music] [Music]
• 05:30 - 06:00 in 2015 junor modura the technical artist for Arc systems Works red team gave a talk at GDC explaining how they created the art for Guilty Gear xrd there's a lot of good info in it so I'll post a link below in case you want to watch in the talk Junia expressed the importance of intention for the project they wanted to use 3D programs to mimic a 2d look before starting any work they
• 06:00 - 06:30 research ways to do that and what challenges they'd face a few notable things were movement in 2D animation you have an animator drawing a picture for every frame 24 frames equals 1 second often times you'll hear animators say something is drawn on ones twos threes Etc that means a drawing is held for that amount of frames so if you have 24 frames to animate on threes you'll only need eight drawings within a full animation you would change up the amount depending on
• 06:30 - 07:00 several factors there's a lot more to this but basically the more frames you draw the smoother the animation becomes but that takes more time an effort in 3D we have something called interpolation this allows an animator to set key poses and the computer can automate what happens in between them so you can get really smooth on one's animation with less work however if you're trying to mock 2D with 3D that interpolation can break the illusion we're not used to seeing 2D animation on WS burn Tire features
• 07:00 - 07:30 interpolation can also make things like timing anticipation arcs and other fundamentals harder to manage so if you want that 2D look you need to animate the same way you would in 2D so no interpolation or very little and the animator creates a pose for every nth frame another issue they encountered for Guilty Gear was light and Shadow for the most part Lighting in a 3D simulation is meant to replicate real life lighting a cartoon don't always follow those same rules for example with the sphere on the
• 07:30 - 08:00 left its Shadows look soft and the colors gradually get darker as less light hits it on the right the more cartoony sphere abruptly shifts from a light to dark color the line delimiting the shadow is distinct with a hard Edge there is no gradual change from light to dark and unfortunately there's no single solution to this once your model is more complex than the sphere or once you have a whole scene it becomes harder to control the artist's intention in this example I've attempted to smooth the face Shadows for the model on the right using a combination of
• 08:00 - 08:30 shaders strategically animated light and editing the normals the last of which changes how the 3D simulated light sees the surface so that it sees it smoother than it actually is and doesn't create awkward Shadows like it's doing on the left this is far from a perfect example it's actually a really difficult thing to do the Guilty Gear team did an incredible job for every problem they found they devised a solution often times those were multiart as in the case with light and Shadow gen emphasized the
• 08:30 - 09:00 fact that all their solutions could have been done in any software softage XSI which was what they used wasn't special naturally at the end of the talk someone asked if sof Mar was special and if they could do these things in other software packages the exact question was were there some key features of XSI that you could only do in XSI for this game and Junior's response was I wouldn't want to do it in any other software that is simply because you could just go back to any state and continue fiddling with the model without redoing the skins or redoing the UVS the normal editing is
• 09:00 - 09:30 pretty good in soft I'm pretty sure how Maya and 3D Studio Max do it but as much as I know 3D Studio Max has some problems with normal editing at the time XSI had great tools and plugins to help him with that I touched on the normal editing when we went over lighting and Shadow but the other thing he mentioned here was the ability to go back and edit without redoing things that was possible because of the node Bas editor which he demoed at different times during the talk node editing is a type of
• 09:30 - 10:00 non-destructive workflow meaning everything you do can be undone without destroying your Source information if you've ever used Photoshop using layers in a stack with masks is one way of doing this for instance you can cut something out of a photo without actually cutting it out you can always go back to edit the mask and change how the cutout looks node base editors are a type of visual programming the concept of which has been around longer than any 3D software here's an example of a node-based editor so you start on the left with the thing
• 10:00 - 10:30 you want to edit also called the input in our case it's an image of a white square on the right you'd have your output then in between you'd use other nodes to edit the input information so say I wanted to take this white square and make it black I could add an invert node connect them and there you go what's great about this is that if I ever needed to edit something it would just be a matter of changing what's in between if I did something more complex and needed to edit a lower level I could retain the edits after without having to redo them and it's always like this if
• 10:30 - 11:00 you're learning a new piece of software and it has a node editor it's going to function pretty much the same way as any other node editor you've used what makes this especially powerful is that if you know how the software is reading the input information you don't need to rely on the specialized nodes in our example that being the invert so for instance I know this program reads the image as series of red green and blue values it stores each Channel as a float from 0 to one for white it stores red one green
• 11:00 - 11:30 one and blue one since black is the opposite it stores that as red zero green0 and blue zero so if I wanted to make this image black without the use of an invert node what could I do the answer is just subtract one in a visual coding environment math is the most basic way to edit something typically there are math nodes given for any node editor so here I grab one of those subtract one and now I have a black Square this frees me from having to know what specialized nodes a software package may have and if all software had this it would be
• 11:30 - 12:00 easier to learn something new if you're looking for a new program to edit music videos images 3D or anything check to see if they have a note editor the example I'm basing this off of is in blender Shader editor guess I could have just screen recorded doing it in there to animate all this in 2011 when they started development for Guilty Gear xrd exoi was unique for having this option then called ice when genius said they could easily redo things if their models changed that's what he was relying
• 12:00 - 12:30 on so the software did matter once their pipeline was underway if they had to switch software they would need to rethink their methods they might need to create new tools to deal with whatever limitations the new software has so in the end it will require more time more work and more money here's an interesting fact Autodesk the inventors of that Flex payment system we covered earlier owned both soft image XSI and 3ds Max they own another 3D software
• 12:30 - 13:00 package called Maya in 1988 3ds Max was created by a licensing agreement with Autodesk and the Yos group in 1997 Yos sold the rights to their source code for Max to Autodesk in 2005 Autodesk acquired Maya in 2008 they acquired soft deage these aren't even the only 3D software packages Autodesk owns their history is filled with Acquisitions of duplicate and similar products but to summarize at the time of talk Autodesk
• 13:00 - 13:30 own three different software packages that roughly did the same thing class can you guess what happened next [Music] [Music]
• 13:30 - 14:00 [Music] to [Music]
• 14:00 - 14:30 flash was originally released as future
• 14:30 - 15:00 Splash animator by Future wave in may of 1996 I think a lot of us remember flash as being the program that let people create things like salad fingers Strong Bad and Charlie the Unicorn and endless flash games whole Creator communities formed at sites like new grounds and early YouTube which was all Flash at the time but I think we forget that flash
• 15:00 - 15:30 was also used to make websites like the entire thing this is what the original site for Flash looked like isn't it beautiful macromedia approached future wave in November of 1996 no actually wait what does demo mean and samples will they load no other sites wonder if any of these will work oh some of them are
• 15:30 - 16:00 cool Adam Watkins a 16-year-old web Enthusiast has created this fun website using many future Splash animator buttons and and animations all right I'll check it out oh wow remember enter screens I'm going to blur his picture there but it was his picture he's 43 now but I don't know it just still feels weird cuz he's a kid that but I still wanted to show a part of it
• 16:00 - 16:30 because I think it's neat that he made this for his website it's cool when people make art just because they want to and yes I think websites can be art my name is Adam Watkins and I'm from Ohio Wadsworth Ohio to be exact okay the '90s were a different time new talk to me I want to hear from you you can now leave me an audio message that will then be emailed to me that's pretty cool all you have to do is call this toll-free number when it asks for a pin number type in Adam how did you set this up
• 16:30 - 17:00 when you were 16 it's cool hot links oh remember what we called them hotlinks kwi Herman worship page all right butt page read all the stories about butts you want to read I'll come back to that one later Hooters a very nice pair all right look someone actually fell for it 27 years later and he still got someone that's
• 17:00 - 17:30 impressive okay last side I just need to know what jumping bean is I promised and we'll get back to whatever this is should I know by this point in the writing Jumping Bean animated screen beans oh look how his nose wobbles when he moves this animation is in 4k didn't you about 4K in the 90s okay so screen beans got a hold of the future wave beta called cell animator that's a nice fact
• 17:30 - 18:00 help me I must own beans right now I mean yeah absolutely tired of boring clip art yes and it is a constant problem please give me an order form oh going to hide that address probably not the screen beans HQ anymore probably raise complaints and suggestions you know we don't ask for praise enough on the web in 2024 put your praise down below please try some free without any guil now that you've ordered your own I didn't order any I
• 18:00 - 18:30 can't but okay reie and the beans the c f below are available for you to try out a sample file fre your website and presentations and documents and whatever you jackpot okay sorry back to the video in December 1996 future wave was acquired by macr media then becoming flash 1.0 you're wrong Wikipedia just FYI it's only a month off but I doubt this article I found called the history of flash that was written by a co-founder of a company and posted on adobe's website is
• 18:30 - 19:00 wrong got him actually what am I doing Wikipedia is an editable website okay I forget it sometimes but it's always better to help if you can rather than just Clowning on something once macr media acquired Flash the official site changed to a this one isn't animated but I am going to get distracted again look at the stars they're so attention getting okay so Flash 1. cost $249
• 19:00 - 19:30 that's not bad and it's a Perpetual license flash 2.0 was $199 and no that wasn't an introductory offer the price remained the same for years after the intro they just kept changing the intro message until the side got all boring in corporate flash3 cost $299 so $100 increase or 50 increase from version one but this price remained until version 5 when it became 399 but even then they had deals where an upgrade would cost 149 all of this is still a Perpetual
• 19:30 - 20:00 license so for the most part flash was affordable in those early years at least for a working middle- class adult or a teenager with Rich parents like Adam it also ran on home computers which these days is something we don't really think about most software particularly work rated software like word Photoshop some third thing will run on our computers take this quote from an Autodesk product manager from 1996 this is a turning point in the price performance Continuum you get the performance of a high-priced workstation software on an inexpensive
• 20:00 - 20:30 PC so this very powerful software for the time was something the average person could get in those early years flash filled several niches one making videos it wasn't like today where we have many different formats editors and browsers capable of playing them the early adoption of Shockwave players allowed flash to fill that slot number two making websites as demonstrated earlier this allowed animations Within websites for links graphics and
• 20:30 - 21:00 interactivity and third because of the robust tool set for animations and the fact that it came packaged with its own programming language people could also make games with it because of all these different uses price ease of use and ubiquitous browser adoption at the time flash took off businesses likewise picked it up even back when it was future Splash both Microsoft and Disney were early adopters so then what happened
• 21:00 - 21:30 previously future wave had approached Adobe about a buyout but they turned them down once things took off with macr media Adobe came back like Co Adobe officially acquired macro media in December of 2005 adding to its massive roster in an online FAQ section directed mostly to Adobe and newly acquired macr media employees Adobe leadership answered questions
• 21:30 - 22:00 about the acquisition and what was going to happen next question will there be a reduction in force as a result of this acquisition so in my experience companies usually just lie here we will do an internal review but hope to keep new macromedia family members something like that yes oh stuff was different in the early 2000s during the week following the close of the transaction Adobe will begin eliminating positions from the combined Workforce the reduction will eliminate duplicate positions didn't feel like eliminating
• 22:00 - 22:30 duplicate ideas from this paragraph V did and enable Adobe to reprioritize headcount resources as it positions that combine company for a long-term success charges and headcount impact associated with the reduction in force as well as other costs related to the acquisition will be discussed during adobe's fiscal 2005 year-end earnings conference call scheduled for December 15 2005 so they let people go right before the holidays
• 22:30 - 23:00 at the time of the acquisition several other notable things were happening one websites the web itself evolved and so did the open- source Tech it was based on we eventually could make fun animations if we wanted without Flash but more so than anything creative or animated people gravitated towards standards there were many technical issues with having a flash-based website but one that I don't hear as much about is just the UI I did a lot of research for this project on the Wayback machine or archive.org which is a cool site that allows you to
• 23:00 - 23:30 visit snapshots of websites and how they looked in the past if you try it out and you go all the way back to like the '90s one thing you'll notice immediately is how different every site looked we hadn't established things like hamburger menus and expanded navigation let alone be able to do that with existing code so everyone did things a little differently flash-based sites in particular were often unique interactive experiences the problem with uniqueness is that it can confuse people and that's really bad if you're trying to sell something these days the design has been
• 23:30 - 24:00 normalized especially for retailed businesses you have a header that will include things like the main menu search and link to the homepage usually as a logo image then the main content then the footer which will include links people don't visit as much as well as copyright info on every internal page you have the same header and footer in the same place the idea that you might not have that or a way to easily track back is a foreign concept at this point for better or worse this is the design
• 24:00 - 24:30 pattern that evolved businesses adopted it and now the typical user understands it you don't deviate from it because you may potentially frustrate a user enough that they'll just leave so if you didn't need a unique animated interactive experience why were you using flash you would gain nothing and you'd inherit all the technical problems and bloat that flash had so people stopped using it to build websites macromedia was aware of these problems before Adobe purchased them there were plans to make flash into something that could translate down to
• 24:30 - 25:00 more web friendly code but they didn't do that right away instead they fired people and if you've ever been part of a layoff particularly one that's the result of a merger or acquisition you know that some institutional knowledge is always lost not saying that's the reason it took them so long to update flash lots of people have speculated and written about that but whatever the reason we know it took them too long to adapt two years after adobe's acquisition of macr media something interesting happened the iPhone was
• 25:00 - 25:30 introduced this dramatically changed things for every pillar of Flash's appeal three years after that Steve Jobs released his notorious thoughts on flash letter to the public which admonished Adobe for all of Flash's flaws that's right 5 years after they purchased flash they still hadn't fixed its issues in the letter jobs detailed how Apple had a special partnership with Adobe and tried to work with them directly but despite multiple requests to update
• 25:30 - 26:00 the security size and speed of flash applications Adobe just didn't adobe's co-founders warno and gki who had a sort of freres relationship with jobs pinned their own letter refuting all of Jobs's points Adobe also launched an ad complaining about the breakup I read the press release in college with my friends in our flash class that most of us are still paying off in Jobs's letter he explained the policy updates that affect ly banned flash applications in their store or
• 26:00 - 26:30 really thirdparty apps that are closed connections which Adobe filed a lawsuit against which was cheaper than software development I guess this Schism wasn't the full reason for Flash's fall but it cemented their block out on mobile devices which at the time was really just Apple's market and if he couldn't play with them you were out Flash the program still exists but Adobe rebranded it to anime it also now costs 2099 per month 2099 time 12 is 25188 which to be fair is what the license
• 26:30 - 27:00 costs for version 1.0 249 before any price increases except that was Perpetual now you have to pay that price per year also JK and now cost $22.99 per month or 27588 per year the price went up as I was writing this get used to that being a theme Adobe did eventually fix the issues flash had you are able to export more supported video files if you make animations with it for web and games it could translate down to something that runs natively in browsers there's a lot of conjecture over what
• 27:00 - 27:30 really killed flash which is why I covered so much of the history but really if I were a teenager now Adam Jr and I wanted to make websites first off I'd be a unicorn because no one does that anymore but I'd choose JavaScript CSS and HTML because it's free if I wanted to make games there's multiple game engines that are free to learn and well um several other videos there moving on if I want to make animations there's multiple software packages that don't cost what flash does for both 2D and 3D
• 27:30 - 28:00 but now your pigeon hold into that thing what was cool about Flash is that if you learned it it had all these different uses maybe you learned it to do web but realized that wasn't for you and animations were maybe you were an animator but kept leaning into games and since rebranding to animate Adobe has changed the program they narrowed its focus because no one needs this to make websites or games the tools have changed so it isn't the same flash anymore how many times will a person learn the intricacies of a software package only for that to become obsolete
• 28:00 - 28:30 how many times can you go through that how many times can I what happened to the people who are experts in Flash lots of them moved to other software and Tech I mentioned above but I know some people who loved animating in Flash and they've never found a replacement so they just stopped animating I spent a lot of time looking through old flash games and animations on archive.org and yeah a lot of them were amateur or just refits of other games or older games but some were also really good I enjoyed
• 28:30 - 29:00 this one with the paddle ball for instance the controls were surprisingly comfortable and I found it soothing everything learned is the result of dedication and work you put into it some people may naturally pick up something faster but even if they do that's not a promise they'll Master it if you love doing something it's possible to master it even if you suck it first or for a long time I would know but learning isn't easy people put hours weeks months into this piece of sock Ware and for a Confluence of reasons it
• 29:00 - 29:30 went away I know toward the end we were overflowing with flash content but I feel for the people who lost it who couldn't afford animate or didn't like its changes and who never found an alternative tool or simply never had the time to put into learning another one [Music]
• 29:30 - 30:00 to whom it may concern I couldn't finish it in time for them but maybe this will help somebody else B Russell [Music]
• 30:00 - 30:30 [Music] with any software that exists you're going to have competition in the market so from a business perspective it makes sense to buy that competition because then you can make more money oh hey my business degree just arrived they emailed it to me going to print this out web P why do you still
• 30:30 - 31:00 exist I'll fix it later as explained previously Autodesk owned all the major 3D software packages of the time somehow that was legal and it was a loss to anyone who couldn't afford their pricing or people whose favorite software was discontinued but I understand keeping all three updated and consistently improved triples the cost without much benefit especially if they know their customers don't have anywhere else to go that's comparable as it stands Autodesk still has Maya and 3ds Max they're different products but both count as
• 31:00 - 31:30 generalized 3D software they actually have a page on their website dedicated to explaining the differences and which one a customer should choose 3ds Max got full node editing by 2016 because they had ported them over from XSI they took the parts that people loved and put that in other 3D packages they had and I'm glad they did that a lot of 3D software is based on the same Math and Science much of the early research for that came from the University of Utah which received contracts from the US government in the 60s and' 70s to develop various
• 31:30 - 32:00 graphical Technologies for instance when you create an object in 3D space you have to tell the computer how light should interact with its surface these various functions are called shaders shaders can make something look rough or shiny flat or bumpy dull or glowy and everything in between and each visual property had to be developed one of the earliest shaders or shading Al gorithms was Fong it was
• 32:00 - 32:30 proposed by buy tuang fong in his 1973 dissertation for the University of Utah entitled illumination for computer generated images it was later re-edited and published in a 1975 paper as well F Define shaders as a function which yields the intensity value of each point on the body of an object from the characteristics of the light source the object and the position of the Observer Fong was an attempt to make surfaces look more realistically shiny in 1977 James F blin published a paper
• 32:30 - 33:00 models of light reflection for computer synthesized pictures which improved on Fong's approach introducing the blind Fong model every early piece of 3D software implemented blind Fong they might have been writing in different languages using different graphical Stacks but it was the same underlying approach I think there's different types of invention one is something that Springs from Solid Ground Lin Fong that they're incremental but important and necessary steps another is something
• 33:00 - 33:30 everyone knows we need but it's so complex that even if we were to follow the path of incremental progress we still wouldn't get there we would need an entirely different approach at this point there are many different shaders out there with people writing their own all the time much is still shared between them zbrush and substance painter were programs that rethought the entire approach to specific 3D problems especially zbrush Pixel Logic presented zbrush at CRA in
• 33:30 - 34:00 1999 following the pattern of everything we've seen so far their website was way cooler prior to 2005 zbrush is software that allows you to sculpt in 3D similar to how you would with Clay a lot of its tools are based on common clay shaping tools there are several different ways to model objects in 3D and with each you'd use a different type of 3D object some of those are splines or Curves depending on the software you use the terminology may change polygons or
• 34:00 - 34:30 faces nerbs which stands for non-uniform rational be splines and if you learn what that is you could just say it that's the treat was again a type of spline there's more to it than that but the point is there's different ways to model something in 3D on a computer there's a there's a lot more if we consider real life all 3D software has tools and methods of doing each type of modeling and each type of modeling has its pros and cons personally I sick to poly modeling and sometimes use splines for things they're just better at like creating
• 34:30 - 35:00 bases okay they're more useful than that but moving on a polygon which you might remember from geometry class is a plane with at least three sides it's made up of vertices edges and faces when you do poly modeling you are pushing and pulling on those individual elements within the polygons one polygon means you have a plane two or more means you have an element or an island multiple non-connected elements or one connected element are called an object remember when we talked about shaders and blind Fong the way you choose to lay out this
• 35:00 - 35:30 geometry in an object heavily affects how the Shader can display it so when you do this sort of modeling you have to be aware of that otherwise you'll create distortions that make it hard for you and the program to understand the shape if you spend enough time doing this you get pretty fast at it however complex forms like for example a human face or clothing will be more time consuming and it becomes harder to prototype because you're constrained by how fast you can edit these baser elements without making a mess of the geometry that's why zbrush was such an innovation
• 35:30 - 36:00 it's still using geometry but it obscures that from you it gives you a more intuitive way of working because we can all understand how to push and pull on a massive clay you probably noticed in their name Pixel Logic not Pixel Logic a pixel is color information the makers of zbrush created the pixel which according to this article from 2000 in design Graphics magazine number 57 pixels do much much much more or they have up to 64 channels in information
• 36:00 - 36:30 and in the hands of pixel logic's programmers they are unbelievably fast the pixel is proprietary information so unless you worked on zbrush it's hard to say exactly what's going on under the hood but with this Tech Pixel Logic was able to create something that blew past other 3D software of the time and even now I have a fairly good computer but as soon as I get into the 3 to 5 million range in blender stuff starts to lag if I somehow fall into the 10 million range I'm getting a lot of weight Wheels with zbrush I regularly comfortably work with
• 36:30 - 37:00 10 to 50 million poly models one of the secrets of zbrush is it's so-called 2 and 1/ 12d space it doesn't render or display 3D objects similar to how other software does again it's hard to find information about what it's exactly doing but when it launched it was more about creating 2D pictures with 3D puffy paint when you start the program or at least the latest version I have which is from 2022 you have to add an object and then switch to poly mode otherwise you're just painting and not actually editing your model I've seen people
• 37:00 - 37:30 theorize that rather than continually keeping track of every vertex in space similar to other software it's setting you back to that 2 and 1/2 d space on every move then when you turn the model it stores what you've done to that slice and applies it but that's just something I've heard speculated this isn't open source so we don't know if you have thoughts about what it's doing or know something that I don't I'd love to hear it Tech aside you can see how going from poly modeling to this opens up a whole new world for artists almost immediately
• 37:30 - 38:00 the 3D Community embraced this software it rapidly became an industry standard for games animation and film to this day it continues to be extremely popular and with few real competitors one of the things that I believed helped this wide adoption was its unique pricing model you ready a Perpetual license in 1999 zbrush One commercial license was put on sale for a special intro price of 29250 after that expired it sold for 5.85 similar to how flash worked zbrush
• 38:00 - 38:30 1.5 went on sale for $3.99 which was less than version one zbrush 2 expanded the options allowing you to purchase a CD as well it sold for $489 zbrush 3.1 to 3.12 sold for 5.95 four sold for $6.99 4 R6 sold for 7.95 4 R7 and 4 R8 wait they have merched when did that happen I want to see brush t-shirt anyway 4r7 and 4r8 kept that 7.95 price
• 38:30 - 39:00 point but around this time we see the introduction of zbrush core a limited version of the product that sold for the heavily reduced price of $149.95 in 2018 they ditched their old naming conventions and what would have likely been C brush 5 now became C brush 2018 surprisingly to me they still kept the price at $7.95 all these prices have been for their single user licenses which allowed commercial use along the way they've
• 39:00 - 39:30 added other licenses such as educational volume and floating but for their prior 19 years their single user license was a one-time purchase with free upgrades for life at this point we all saw the writing on the wall it was a common thing on popular 3D forms from the time poly count Pixel Logic Zone zbrush Central to see people say they wouldn't mind paying for upgrades but that was never an option that was given finally for zbrush 2019 they introduced a subscription based pricing model $39.95
• 39:30 - 40:00 a month or $179.95 every 6 months surprisingly they still offered that Perpetual free upgrades for Life options now at $8.95 in 2021 pixel logic's assets including zbrush was acquired by Maxon which is another 3D software company rival to Autodesk I really like how this Reddit post put it though Max on quires pixelogic and the world cries out in
• 40:00 - 40:30 Terror that was the vibe personally zbrush was the program that I was able to have when I couldn't afford Max and before I knew blender even existed even when I found blender I still relied on zbrush while I learned I spent a lot of nights weekends and holidays sculpting in SE brush and I loved every minute of it Maxon immediately did away with Perpetual licenses your options now are monthly at 39 which to be fair is 95 cents cheaper than pixel objects terms I
• 40:30 - 41:00 guess or you can pay 359 annually which breaks down to 29.91 a month and I should say these are the prices as of February 20th 2024 which is when I'm writing this update as of January 2025 zbrush is now $49 per month this is [Music] so like I said before there is no competitor to zbrush blender sculpt isn't there yet in my opinion although people like it and do really cool work
• 41:00 - 41:30 with it the closest I found is Nomad which is limited to tablets so I'll carry the underlying art fundamentals but I'm losing another tool oh wait mudbox that's another alternative not that anyone cares and you can tell it sucks because auto desk made it affordable anyway I know it's just a matter of time before my Perpetual license doesn't work with new hardware or an updated OS I know that's going to happen because it already did once with that other software that was a game
• 41:30 - 42:00 changer for several Industries update because they keep happening and I don't know where to put them anymore at some point between 2023 and now January 12th 2025 Autodesk up the price of 3ds Max I look up the exact date but if I take the time to do that then every other software I mentioned in this video May update their price and then I'm just stuck in a never- ending Loop of wanting to finish this but can't because they keep changing their prices and there Max is now $245 per month instead of$
• 42:00 - 42:30 235 also if you're a mudbox fanboy upset about my comment in the last section well I have some good news for the both of you out of all the software I've talked about in this video mudbox is the only one whose price actually went down and now cost $10 a month instead of 15 the only one that went down during 2014 GDC algorithmic the makers of substance products hosted a
• 42:30 - 43:00 panel with EA dice to talk about their experience using substance and the new PBR workflows in their pipeline substance painter was unique at time because up until then again this is 2014 so not that long no my God that was 10 years ago I wrote that line in 2023 the tools for creating Textures in 3D were somewhat limited when you view an object in 3D how do you imagine you get color onto it you probably assume there was some way to just paint on the model right
• 43:00 - 43:30 unfortunately up until 2014 those ways were limited that's not the case anymore and several 3D packages have tools to do this back then you could do this by vertex painting old school games in the PlayStation 1 2 and N64 arrows created a lot of their environment colors like this but it operated per vertex so to get more Dynamic colors you'd need more vertices so higher poly objects which wasn't possible in older game systems another way to get color onto 3D objects is to follow a process called
• 43:30 - 44:00 unwrapping basically you take the 3D object give it seams similar to how clothing patterns are done and lay it out flat then you take that flat template and paint directly on it in a program like Photoshop the reason you need a secondary 2D program is because the tools for painting and image manipulation are a lot more robust than those the above methods are how the various 3D Industries operated for a long time and just to be clear those methods didn't go extinct sometimes it's just easier to paint something in Photoshop or use vertex painting on low
• 44:00 - 44:30 poly objects to get that retro feel some people simply prefer older workflows or they like to work directly with the tools provided by their 3D program or game engine now anything you look at IRL isn't just color It's a combination of the Shad or attributes mentioned earlier so when you start creating more complex or realistic objects there's situations where something could be for instance red and shiny all over and dull or dirty only in particular spots modern shaders like principled bsdf give you multiple channels to input that data and each
• 44:30 - 45:00 channel can have its own image texture most of them as a black and white map indicating each end of the attribute Spectrum so you need a tool that will allow you to individually paint all these attributes and ideally you want to see that in real time as you're painting it rather than switching back and forth from Photoshop to your 3D program substance painter did that and once you understand painter something that used to take an hour could take you maybe 15 minutes text work was never my favorite but substance changed that it kind of changed
• 45:00 - 45:30 everything there were some competitors at the time one I tried was a middleware add-on called quixel Suite it similarly let you view your 3D model as you painted but it allowed you to work directly in Photoshop that was discontinued around 2018 and replaced with mixer which is their Standalone tool quickel mixer still exists but it was acquired by epic games in 2019 luckily that means at least for now it's free to use if you want to try it out algorithmic the company who owned
• 45:30 - 46:00 and developed substance painter had a previous Flagship program called designer both tools have a learning curve in my opinion but designer is definitely the steeper one remember when we had the discussion about nodes that's what designer is instead of painting your textures by hand you create them procedurally what you're looking at now is all math B berter is one of the most incredible artists I've ever seen and I think it's hard to wrap your head around but when I say this is all math I mean every detail for instance the flowers on
• 46:00 - 46:30 this dress she modeled each petal individually with nodes using black and white Maps here's a demo of how she did one do you ever just become speechless by someone's work creating textures procedurally has its pros and cons the biggest one being that it's expensive to render and happier on your system the pro is that it's infinitely scalable you'll never run into a situation where you zoom in on something that starts to pixelate in
• 46:30 - 47:00 this example I'm using blender's procedural brick node texture on the left and a baked out version of that on the right from far away they look the same but the closer I get you'll start to see a breakdown of the image texture version if this were in a digital 3D space as you moved closer the details would become more visible not less just like real life well unless your farsighted or nearsighted um anyway both painter and designer have non-dist Ive workflows meaning as junior said previously you
• 47:00 - 47:30 can go back and edit a root layer or node without breaking everything that comes after it at launch substance painter was $75 I'm just going to give that a minute Perpetual license $75 designer and painter together were weight free t-shirts free licenses by drying Lots is cool what did the shirts look like though H together designer and painter were $150 by 2017 they were 299 with the
• 47:30 - 48:00 introduction of live a Proto subscription model that cost $1 19.90 per month by 2019 they were individually 150 at this time they also introduced a full subscription licensing which was either 1990 a month or 239 a year you know where this is going don't you Adobe acquired algorithmic in early 2019 yeah there was an adjustment period from the time Adobe announced the acquisition to it being finalized so in 2020 the substance 3d.com site was still selling licenses for substance products
• 48:00 - 48:30 however at this point they had dropped the Perpetual models you could purchase directly from them like I said before I had purchased this much earlier we were able to download the latest version before the switch to Adobe happened once the switch happened Adobe continued to charge $1 19999 a month for the core substance programs painter and designer for $50 a month you get a mod program and 20 more assets per month I don't know why that makes it double but okay surprisingly an early quk of algorithmic was that they sold Perpetual licenses on Steam for all of their products even now
• 48:30 - 49:00 you can get perpetuals of substance painter and designer air although you need to pay for every upgrade and starting this year they up the price from 150 each to 200 also I don't consider steam software the same as Perpetual local software as many people already know with digital libraries if something is on Steam that means they can take it away anytime they want so whenever Adobe decides not to do that anymore I'm guessing it's a contract negotiation with algorithmic but that's just a guess they will remove it from the store more than likely I will have
• 49:00 - 49:30 to find Alternatives but once again I'm losing another tool another tool another social media platform another game another show another movie Another another at least I have beans I can even make my own what is that Microsoft says goodbye by to clip art since the 1990s Microsoft Office
• 49:30 - 50:00 provided libraries of drawings users could simply click and use and many of the most recognizable images were drawn by one woman Kathy Belleville she ended up at Microsoft working on PowerPoint in 1995 she left the company and came up with the idea for screen beans screen beans is a series of simple black stick figure guys wearing hats maybe you've seen the one of a guy jumping up in the air clicking his heels in celebration or the one where there's a guy with a light bulb over his like he's just had a great idea luk Beville designed the figures to
• 50:00 - 50:30 be universally relatable and she sees them everywhere bille I've been to Africa and seen them on a menu I've been sitting on planes and seen people walk by me with them on t-shirts luk she sold those drawings to Microsoft but she did not get rich off of them bille everybody thinks because they've seen your art all over oh you must have made millions of dollars on these things and I think for a 100 images they paid me $10,000
• 50:30 - 51:00 once damn it I knew they look familiar okay for legal reasons this isn't screen beam it's my own thing he's not black but very very dark blue and the shape isn't the same on purpose it doesn't match the drawing on purpose uh but okay redact my earlier statement we don't even have beans [Music]
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• 51:30 - 52:00 subscription models go hand inhand with cloud-based software together known as software as a service or SAS you have something installed locally but the company you purchase from can restrict your use of it they can require you to have an internet connection to use it you don't own the software you're renting it we're all familiar with this by now but the other thing you might not realize is that this also drastically changed how software development happens when I was looking at prices for substance I found a page on adobe's website that didn't list all the
• 52:00 - 52:30 information you'd expect it was showing me different plans but not what programs were included in them funnily enough when I checked it out on a different day same exact page I saw an FAQ section at the bottom that clarified what programs were included turns out the whole FAQ section is a Content fragment whose information is pulled in after the page is loaded so if that call fails or some other error occurs you don't see it so on the page meant to help you compare plans it sometimes won't show you what
• 52:30 - 53:00 software is included in those plans now this is a really common relatively minor bug and to be fair their new code does a way better job preventing the issue this isn't bad because of a bug it's bad because of the business decision to bury the data and I know it was a business decision because back in October of 2023 they did display the software information at the top of the page move fast and break things was famously said by Mark Zuckerberg men is a
• 53:00 - 53:30 philosophy for early Facebook's rapid development as mentioned before the open source Tech the web runs on is basically in a state of constant change if you work in web you're probably used to that but web has always known fast development software hasn't with web you get a lot of stuff for free because the end user is going to run your code within a program they already have their browser but with software you get nothing for free even if you use some kind of framework it's still more work overall software doesn't
• 53:30 - 54:00 lend itself as well to the move fast and break things philosophy but businesses who run on a quarter schedule like it since it's possible to deploy software to users via a cloud-based system you can get updates more often not like how it was in the past where a user would need to hop on the modem and download a large update or even further back where your update was simply waiting for the next version of the software to come out this ease of use means expectation have changed on both sides there's pros and cons to this but mostly cons Pro you
• 54:00 - 54:30 can roll out experimental features and see if users like them con you will have experimental features pushed on you whether you like it or not pro you can receive customer feedback and implement it a lot faster con you are now quality assurance for a software that you pay for monthly so if something breaks you lose work time or Worse your files may be come corrupted especially if you can't roll back the changes or if files
• 54:30 - 55:00 aren't backwards compatible for the programmers if you push something that breaks your customer software you are going to need to fix that as soon as possible or pully update entirely so however many hours nights or weekends that takes this has also contributed to software's Rapid Evolution as mentioned several times throughout this video one of the biggest problems with not being able to afford software you need on the job is not being able to keep up with it I don't do much video editing in college I made animations and I put stuff
• 55:00 - 55:30 together for my demo reel back then I remember learning Adobe Premiere in an afternoon it was just that easy when I started making this video I downloaded it again thinking it would be a good way to Cobble everything together it was not so much has changed that I would need to spend time relearning it the program's complexity increased over time which is normal with any software but now that growth is hyper driven by external pressure so a lot of updates aren't based on need or optimization or even things customers want and again unlike
• 55:30 - 56:00 Perpetual licensed software Premier now has a variable price if I reinvest time into it I may not be able to afford it later so is that upfront hardship worth it for this project no the decision to not use Premiere was easy another Adobe product I needed was Photoshop luckily that hasn't changed as much but some things did for instance since I've used it they overhaul the brush system it used to be that you could select a brush shape and then toggle between erasing or drawing with
• 56:00 - 56:30 that now the brush shape is tied to the type of tool that it is so if I were to switch between a brush and an eraser my brush shape would change as well after a long time Googling because I didn't know what keywords to use I found a solution you have to hold down a key while you switch in order to maintain the old functionality the reason I'm not telling you what key that is is because I've already forgotten it I also found this other guy who wasn't happy about the change period end of story that's how it has always been and that's how it should be if I wanted the smudge tool I would
• 56:30 - 57:00 have selected the smudge tool before show more brains than sense about him insisted that this was an improves would work with your chosen tool they could have at least filter the brush only the brushes and presets that work with the tool SEL why would there be any reason to make my tool selector something complete then you can select otheres as an option from the option have since 1988 I I go back
• 57:00 - 57:30 if I were in charge at Adobe I'd fire the product manager and hire someone who understands how to implement changes better this is outrageous and disrespect and I understand software often changes in ways customers don't like but at least in the past if you didn't like something you could keep your old version of it now in Creative Cloud you only have the last couple versions available to you and you will
• 57:30 - 58:00 slowly be forced forward even for people who find ways around it if they want to remain professional they'll still be forced to learn whatever the new way of doing something is both Adobe and Autodesk have student plans that are free and that's great but students graduate if companies want people to use their programs they need to know how to use them oh sweet there's my Master's in business certificate um I don't really feel like printing it controversial opinion time for certain software
• 58:00 - 58:30 companies should consider making it free for everyone and I mean commercially free too not everything if you're able to sell a piece of software with Perpetual licenses then I think it makes sense to keep selling it like that but if it's something that costs for instance just offthe wall no reason $200 a month then you're pricing out everyone except businesses for years some of the largest software companies have have aligned themselves and changed their models to chase businesses not individuals and yes
• 58:30 - 59:00 I understand that was the point of the whole Flex pricing model but if I an individual wanted to purchase tokens as poor a financial decision as that would be I still could look I'm at checkout maybe I'll do it maybe I'll skip rent this month so I can open a nearly obsolete 3D program seven times if someone works for a company then that company should be licensing the software but when a person leaves that job they should still have a way to access it what small amount of money people make from selling their art
• 59:00 - 59:30 videos music Games Etc is nothing compared to what companies would gain if more people knew their software if no one on the job market uses the software a business purchased from you why are they paying you thousands for Enterprise licenses their best candidate for a role may be someone who used 3ds Max like five years ago but now they use blender because that's all they could afford also if you are one of the companies responsible for me losing multiple tools over the course of my lifetime I am
• 59:30 - 60:00 going to avoid you like the plague because you will do to my client to my employer what you did to me make it free for individuals to use personally and commercially and you'll have less competition popping up all the time that you have to buy business degrees revoked Bachelor of Science and business administration revoked master of Business Administration revoked yeah I figured
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• 61:00 - 61:30 in the unlikely event this video's message isn't heard and acted on by every CEO in the world and things continue on the path they're currently on what can we do as consumers of these products how to protect ourselves from predatory software practices something you'll hear a lot of people say is Go open source in the 3D space blender is recommended a lot if you're someone who wants to learn 3D and is having trouble deciding which one to go with with I would recommend blender to you as I said before I learned 3ds Max in school worked with it and Maya
• 61:30 - 62:00 professionally blender can do everything the others can I don't feel hindered using it for sure there are areas of improvement and because Max and Maya are geared toward Industries they'll have better tools to speed up workflow but for my purposes blender is perfect I made all the animations the Motion Graphics and I edited this video with it and then I donated to them because it's open source and I wanted to continue to exist also I bought the socks and shirts please open your merch store again blender I need another fix also maybe
• 62:00 - 62:30 make 3D printed stuff that would be cool earlier I mentioned needing another program to couple everything together and for that I ended up using another software that is a free version Da Vinci resolve unfortunately it's not always as simple as telling people to go open source because not all open source is the same for example in the devop space just recently a company called Hashi Corp yeah that's the name adding Corp to your name is such a great way announce that you're a real life villain anyway Hashi Corp changed the licensing of
• 62:30 - 63:00 their industry dominant terraform from open source npl Milla public license to a BSL or business source license meaning depending on a lot of factors from that point on you have to pay for terraform is a tool that allows you to quickly set infrastructure for any server-based solutions like websites apps software as a service if you're wondering what any of that means please don't save yourself I wish I didn't know but long story short it's something that's holding together a lot of the things that you use if a company wanted to remove it from their stack it would be a lot of
• 63:00 - 63:30 work because of the nature of Open Source licensing you can still get the version prior to the license change however especially in this space it's important to stay up to date so if that code base is not maintained then it becomes unusable shortly after Hashi Corps announcement some Debs took the OS code and created open tofu which they plan to maintain so go open source but just like anything else there's no guarantee something will stay open source so what else can you do two learn universals and
• 63:30 - 64:00 look for software that has them the ability to script tasks or code add-ons non-destructive workflows like layers or environments like node editors are things that don't take a lot of time or effort to learn when they're duplicated in other software for instance I didn't know a whole lot about Da Vinci but I got pretty far with their Fusion node editor just poking around number three engage in online learning communities provide education if you can for a long time I've hesitated to make tutorials on
• 64:00 - 64:30 things I know mainly because I don't feel like an expert on anything especially when it comes to Art and production practices however what I can do is focus on the software I use I can take the questions I had learning it and provide those answers directly on wiks or stack overflows I can also contribute to documentation sites this especially helps during times when something has gotten too expensive and people are looking for Alternatives finding answers may be the thing that helps someone detach from an old piece of software side note if you do have the ability to make tutorials or classes please consider doing this in a text based way
• 64:30 - 65:00 rather than a video one for starters that makes the information you give much easier for web crawlers to document thus extending its life even if the site goes down but also because we're delus with videos and they're not as easy to search as a text based tutorial would be number four I struggled with whether or not to include this one and I decided I wouldn't just say learn to code because that's no small task learning something like a note editor or any visual coding environment can be a step toward that but if you don't want to code it'll be a lot harder to learn it but what you can
• 65:00 - 65:30 do as mentioned before several software packages come with the ability to program your own tools and workflows directly for instance Photoshop word blender it's symbiotic since people will often sell the tools they make or provide them for free which increases the value and usage of the software package so even if you can't code you can still get involved with these communities you can support people who do make new tools a lot of them make their script free on code repository sites like GitHub maybe there's a plugin out there that can help you transition
• 65:30 - 66:00 and you can begin collecting resources to carry elsewhere if there's not an easy way to install an add-on then at most you just need to learn enough to run those scripts if you want to you could help QA or battle test for the people who make them finally and this one is less concrete but I think it's important we need to keep talking about this stuff I know complaining about subscription Services has done little to stop companies from forcing them on us but we can try to be constructive instead of just venting to one another although that's important too for
• 66:00 - 66:30 instance ex Danel art made this list if you're trying to get away from Adobe products you can find it here and there's also a GitHub form of this by Kenny NL with some more alt program suggestions we shouldn't wait for a profit-driven company to act like they're not driven by profit we can find ways to walk away as a group if you have more actionable steps for this list please let me know I didn't mention it previously but the man who created C brush went by the nickname pixelator in the early days of zbrush he answered questions and posted
• 66:30 - 67:00 updates on the zbrush forums I think a big reason this tool was so helpful to artists is because pixelator was an artist himself waro the co-founder of adobe wasn't just a business owner he's also known for his algorithms substance or the company algorithmic goes all the way back to the early 2000s they didn't just start in the 20110 with a groundbreaking lineup they made earlier attempts to solve problems and those evolved over time the people who created these things were passionate about them there's a story behind not just every program but every
• 67:00 - 67:30 technical structural and design decision within those programs that's hard one knowledge that we're not keeping track of or very rarely keeping track of I'm not going to propose a boycott of any specific software software company because I don't think a boycot would work in a previous section I said
• 67:30 - 68:00 companies making industry standard software should consider making their products free for individuals and while I still think that's Diamond advice for burgeoning software companies I don't know if that would work for established ones who've already lost their users [Music] trust because even if all these companies started selling their products for a dollar tomorrow we still know their ultimate goal they are still going to try and dominate their Market push out competitors and charge as much as possible while not actually improving their products because Improvement and
• 68:00 - 68:30 Innovation require expensive internal teams and at a certain user saturation Point software Improvement directly conflicts with increasing profit so we'd end up back here eventually all we can do is walk away forever at the start of this video I admitted that I was willing to pay a lot for a piece of software but eventually it cost so much that I couldn't even save for it it was simply out of my
• 68:30 - 69:00 reach back then I couldn't recognize it but I was never going to use that program again and eventually just like XSI that program won't exist and neither will the company making it as soon as a customer Exodus starts they won't recover it takes surprisingly little for these companies
• 69:00 - 69:30 to combust all that being said I wanted to prove my thesis wrong I don't want there to be nothing you can do I don't just want to complain and I don't want to anesthetize anyone so what do you do when you don't have power in the
• 69:30 - 70:00 world I know it's not much but it's something I can do also Autodesk the donation is because I want to support blender but it's a little bit of spite like at least $5 worth of Spite and you know what while I'm at it
• 70:00 - 70:30 and moving forward I'm going to be more selective about what I choose to learn and I'm going to be more open and share that knowledge with others as for the things I've already lost I'll find some catharsis maybe through ART has anyone ever tried that
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