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Cinema R25 Release


Guest Igor

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Having been out of work for most of the past two years through the local Covid lockdown, I wish (not too seriously) that C4D was $2.99 for a 6 month period for me. 

 

At a certain point if the cost of a coffee is too burdensome for half a year's subscription, you have to suspect those kids probably aren't interested in C4D. 

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Students do ask questions. It's usually the teacher's job to give them answers. And you're basically saying you spent a semester telling people that C4D is a great choice, but not great enough that they should spend $2.99 to access it. How great can it really be if you don't think it's worth $2.99?

 

If you think it's not worth $2.99 you should tell them it isn't and that they should happily go the free route instead. If you think it is worth $2.99 you should try telling that to the students.

 

As for why you're using C4D instead of Maya (which is free), you should tell them you thought C4D was better, and that in the long run over the course of a career you thought the expenditure of $2.99 was probably worth the long term investment.

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Not to be devils advocate, but how is so different to spend $2.99 in software as is spending in notebooks, pens and whatever kids are using these days? Either school pays for it, or students do.

 

On the other hand, is there a legal reason why they are doing that? perhaps in Germany free stuff isnt allowed by law or something.

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3 hours ago, MazurBr said:

As you can see below when you try to get the student license it says "FREE" but then you read the red small letters in red and you discover that you have to pay a $2.99 "service fee". 

 

To me it looks like it is the OnTheHub Kivuto estore that is charging the fee. So Maxon has handed off all the work involved in getting this coupon code, for all your students, to another company. And that company is charging the fee to cover their costs to provide this service. What is involved in this? It looks like the company checks the credentials of every student to ensure they are a student. You have to use your schools email address, which must get verified to ensure it is legitimate, then you probably get an email with the coupon. So that is the service you are paying for. 

 

https://estore.onthehub.com/p/MaxonOne?&pr=true

 

Maxon will still be incurring costs on their side such as bandwidth download costs and authentication servers etc... 

 

As much as you would all like to think, Maxon is not Autodesk. They are not the same size or have the same income. So handing this off to an outside company to deal with would actually save them money by not having to build a separate system, and support it, when it brings in no value. Plus it would have made it much faster for them to get this offering out to students.

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49 minutes ago, MazurBr said:

In the end this will hurt Cinema 4D in the long run, as people won't teach it anymore.

 

People won't teach it because it costs $2.99?

 

Books cost more than that yet they're somehow still used in the higher education field.

 

There are other alternatives, sure, but if some student is looking at all the options you cited, and settling on one out of the bunch for their studies and career because it saves them $2.99 over the rest of the year, I anticipate bigger problems ahead.

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@BoganTW, @luchifer

Have you guys taught classes as instructors at schools / colleges / universities before?

In practice it is almost impossible to get students to willingly pay for extra software or books unless the school enforces it.

 

Yes, I completely agree that rationally it makes no sense because those same students do not think twice about ordering a $5 Starbucks coffee every day. But I tried convincing groups that I taught myself a few times in the past to spend a small amount on software, and

it. just. doesn't. work

 

Nor can you as a teacher enforce it unless it becomes part of the requirements of the curriculum and the course outline - which means convincing the department at the institute where you teach to purchase a school license. And unless it's a relatively small sum (a couple of hundred $$) or a free school license is offered, the school is not going to allow for the extra cost. Not when AutoDesk provides free school licenses, and your college is already paying through the nose for the Adobe suite.

 

The institute where I teach classes have all AutoDesk products, Houdini, and Blender available pre-installed on all workstations, and via a software deployment system free for all students at home.

 

If Maxon would provide free campus licenses it would go a long way to generate good will towards the software. If not - well, not many of my students are aware that Cinema4D exists. They all know about AutoDesk and Blender, of course.

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30 minutes ago, hvanderwegen said:

@BoganTW, @luchifer

Have you guys taught classes as instructors at schools / colleges / universities before?

In practice it is almost impossible to get students to willingly pay for extra software or books unless the school enforces it.

I have, at two different institutions in Melbourne. And I can't see the mention of a one-off $2.99 charge eliciting more than a shrug from the students at both campuses, many of whom would spend twice that much daily on public transport to and from the school.

 

I'm talking about Australian students though and can't speak for how things might be wherever you are.

 

Telling them they need to learn and use the software to pass the course might possibly do the trick. 

 

"Nor can you as a teacher enforce it"

 

Huh? At the institutions I worked at, the teachers enforced things all the time. One dumb muppet of a teacher made all her journalism students use Windows Movie Maker for her journalism class as she was too stuck in her ways to use anything else. Another department charged late fees on film equipment (when it was returned late), and encouraged the students to pay those fees by telling them that if they didn't pay, they couldn't pass. Most of them paid, and also thereafter stopped returning the equipment late.

 

"which means convincing the department at the institute where you teach to purchase a school license. And unless it's a relatively small sum (a couple of hundred $$) or a free school license is offered, the school is not going to allow for the extra cost. "

 

At the last faculty I worked at the school seemed more than happy to pour money down the drain on the dumbest stuff imaginable, including equipment that got left on the shelf and software courses run by lecturers who barely knew what they were teaching. And they were happy buying stuff like Final Cut, Macs, Adobe subs and a bloody enormous set of computers for data storage. Again this is all probably moot though as I'm talking about where I worked, not where you work now.

 

5 minutes ago, MazurBr said:

It's obviously you never taught professionally  to keep repeating this. 

 

Come to Australia. Many things are different here.

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And as I said, they charge us a fortune for the lab licenses, while Autodesk stuff is free.

 

So what? RED cameras are really expensive too, and don't get given out for free. So the school had the bright idea of buying cameras and then making students pay for the course so they could use that equipment. The teachers weren't paying for the equipment themselves and frankly didn't care what it cost.

 

Also, the students who found the course too expensive didn't bother taking the course. And the students who thought what the course was offering was worthwhile, ended up paying the course fees so they could do it.

 

This also worked with an animation and compositing course, where the campus invested money in equipment and software. Afterwards, they charged students money to do the course, and any student who thought the course was good value, paid the money, came to the school, and learned the software and used the equipment.

 

Maybe the head of the department could be convinced to put the annual fee for the students up an additional $2.99 - or six bucks for the year, I guess - to pay for the cost of that C4D subscription. I'm pretty sure at the school I worked at, they spent more than that on free donuts for the students on opening day though.

 

This must be why they call Australia the lucky country.

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The discussion is upside down. The student version is the cheapest and best way for a company to enshure that their software will get used in the future. If maxon can not afford to give it away for free thy have a major problem. If they are not willing to, they make a huge mistake. The 2.99$ are a nice indication for a student what kind of company they are dealing with. And if they want to bind their professional future on it and students are not stupid. Dont forget. Maxon wants them to use it. They are the future and are absolutely free to decide as they like.

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1 hour ago, MazurBr said:

Sorry, but this is ridiculous. You're talking like Maxon were a small new company that needs to build a new system. They are not; they already had a system in place and it worked fine. Until the beginning of this year Cinema 4D's student license worked exactly like Autodesk - just sent them an .edu email and proof of enroment (ID or ttranscript) and you were good to go. There is absolutely no reason for this stupid change

When I worked at Maxon it definitely felt like a small start up, part of the charm and fun of the company at the time. But in the last 5 years they have definitely expanded, and taken on huge debt as well.

 

I am not familiar with the old system by I was sure this one you mention has been in place for a few years now. Since I also questioned why students should pay at the time. But this company they are using easily fills

the need to verify a student is who they say they are. Yes MAXON could have probably paid them to remove that fee. But I can see why they chose this solution instead of having to hire permanent staff to handle all the verification steps involved. I guess if enough institutions reported this as an issue they may work out a deal with that company to pay the costs. But it looks like this company is set up to work as a service and as I mentioned it was most likely the fastest way for Maxon to move to a new solution that can be automated

and work in with their new licencing system. These are all guesses mind you, from a product design and delivery perspective with a thought to ROI.

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7 hours ago, MazurBr said:

They started doing this shit in the beginning of the year, if I'm not mistaken. They charge $2.99 for the student license. Ridiculous. As you said, students are unwilling to pay even that, specially when they know they can get Maya, 3ds Max, Blender and others for free.

 

Needless to say, it was very embarrassing for me as a professor to apologize to both my students AND my whole department, after I spent a whole semester convincing them to let me use Cinema 4D instead of Maya in my Intro to 3D Animation class. 

 

As you can see below when you try to get the student license it says "FREE" but then you read the red small letters in red and you discover that you have to pay a $2.99 "service fee". 

 

 

Maxon299FeeDickMove.jpg

 

LOL!

A "service fee" during activation. What service? The 0.00001seconds of CPU time that the server needs to check if the serial is legit?

What a joke, holy crap!

 

EDIT: Now that I think about it, yes they need to check if someone is legit a student. But other companies do that for free as well. It's free advertising, free way to bind new users to your software. It's dumb taking money for this.

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Adobe charges $30 a month or more for Photoshop. Or whatever the price is. I'm sure this is significantly more than whatever the free photo editing software packages charge, yet they do it, and seem to be doing okay. Some students might choose to go the free route there, whereas others will just go, nah, I think I'll learn Photoshop instead. This is worse than the $2.99 for six months, which is like 50 cents a month, or around 12 cents a week.

 

So students have lots of options versus C4D at this point. They can learn Houdini or Blender or Maya instead. (And I know a lot of animation grads here in Melbourne who are Maya folks, and nerdy VFX folk locally who are big on Houdini - plus a pretty big mograph scene locally who all use C4D as their main package).

 

Students who are choosing between the three likely need to also consider what they want to do. I notice the mograph folk gravitate to C4D, the game animators have all learned Maya, and the VFX nerds are using Houdini. This is well known.

 

If someone wants to do Mograph, I'm assuming they'll be picking C4D. Maybe they'll talk themselves into doing it in Blender or Houdini instead, I dunno. Good luck with learning the latter. Nothing is stopping them using the former. Yet some still go for C4D, go figure.

 

Blender is the amazing free software which is so great, you still can't give it away to some people, as some people still choose to go for C4D instead. I've seen a bunch of those people locally. The Blender heads locally are also really big on free photo editing, free editing, free whatever, and tout it like a philosophy, but some others don't care. And the C4D people locally I've met are all quiet happy with it. (Ditto the Maya and Houdini folk for their stuff. The Houdini folk seem particularly pleased with their lot FWIW).

 

Anyone deeply irate about Maxon charging three bucks half a year for access to a working version of software for students is probably angry at a bunch of other stuff instead and just using it as an excuse to blow their tops in this thread. That's how it seems to me.

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