Adobe has acquired Allegorithmic

Substance has become among most used texturing tools, this is a successful product, it doesn't have real challengers on their procedural texturing field. Perhaps they simply wanted to change their activity to something else.

 

Substance Designer is one of my favorite software of all time. It's pretty much a necessity for me to get things done at the speed I need to.

Sometimes founders want to move on and do something else, and that's fine - though Adobe, which I have very little experience with as a customer, doesn't seem to be the greatest choice as owner. But it's weird to see a founder talk about an acquisition in such an overhyped way. At a minimum an acquisition is a very dangerous thing for the identity of a small company, there's no need to go overboard trying to paint that a different way.

 

When a monolithic company buys and consequently destroys an awesome software, from it's ashes arises a new free open source version of it.
For this case I have only one example: Blender

 

Well given how long it's taking for them just to do the basics of implementing Left click properly through out the editor, I won't hold my breathe... seriously I tried 2.80 recently only to find that while yes some stuff works with left click a bit better in line with the industry.. it seems some baffoons still think one should hold the right mouse button to scrub an effing timeline..I can't think of a single piece of software I've used where you hold right to scrub a timeline if I did I certainly don't remember because it should be forgotable trash .. it was added here https://developer.blender.org/T57918 after reporting it.. something so obvious needed to be reported I unbelievable really.

And this, still in progress..
https://developer.blender.org/T54963

 

You can't deny it's cheap though..

 

yup true, maybe they should have some bug/feature/sponsorship funding...

 

They don't really care about how Substance will evolve otherwise they would not accept acquisition.
They got very successful and adopted almost everywhere, perhaps they got enough managing Substance and just want big money and do something else.Anyway, we'll see how things will evolve and if that affects our licenses.

I buy year updates instead of subscriptions, if Adobe go full subscriptions i will fully switch to 3D Coat and Mari 3D.
What i will miss is Substance Designer, the best tool to make textures with variations in non destructive way.

 

Wow. Well, you have a good opinion about strangers you don't know, that's for sure.

Except that the big boss will be a big boss inside Adobe too. Head of 3D initiative, so he will be responsible for even more 3D projects, and probably will remain the boss of this tool-set too. So nice try.

 

Acquisition can lead to lot of different situations, sometimes bad good , sometimes good.
I'm not aware of how Allegorithmic and Adobe will work together, do you have some insights ?

Anyway, i don't care about that, but more important how Substance and pricing and licenses will change with Adobe acquisition.

 

Just what Sebastien Deguy wrote.

 

Was eyeing armorpaint3d or 3d coat amateur anyways so meh

 

Only catch with 3D Coat is that the Amateur tier is non-commercial. If you suddenly decided to go commercial you would either have to invest nearly four times the amount ($379 versus $99) or you would have to learn a completely different program. A floating license to let you use it on more than one computer is even more money ($568) than that.

It just doesn't look like a good choice in the slightest. If money isn't a problem for you then the Adobe subscription is a far better choice because you gain a ton of valuable programs, but if money is the limit it's even less of a sound choice as the cost of any of the tiers is not insignificant and the commercial tiers are high.

 

3D Coat is good , but Substance Painter has more options like particles for example,it's procedural materials are better working. 3D coat curvature or smart materials does not seem to work very well, many times i got scratches and other smart materials not detecting and not painting on object edges or not painting where they should.

3D Coat needs you to save different files of the same model when you do heavy paint work.
There can be crashes working with 4K or 8K textures, or bug able to ruin all your work and you can't go back.
Most of the time it's good , but it's not as stable as Substance or Zbrush.

 

I don't feel this will be a good thing for me as user, but i am willing to give them a chance.

 

Maybe it's just me, but I would much rather give $379 for a perpetual license, than 20$ a month.

 

Well that's the thing for DCC and art packages, a perpetual license is 9 times out of 10 going to benefit the customer more. 3DSMAX from 10 years ago is probably still fine for most AAA purposes let alone indies. Same for Photoshop.

For Unity however, or an application that has to adapt constantly to changing hardware, then yes subs are a brilliant move. Unity has to be subs, it's unsustainable otherwise and both Unity and we prosper from that.

I didn't like the price of Maya either, and I won't pay it. Learning blender.

 

Yeah, I agree that it makes more sense for Unity.

I'm still not crazy about it, but it makes more sense.

But beyond that, I'm actively avoiding software that doesn't have a reasonably priced perpetual option.

 

Yeah and anyway Unity is actually great in the fact that it's totally free if you're skint

 

Well... Since you can't mix licenses, it means that if things don't work out for me and I stop having a Unity subscription, if I want to open my old projects, I simply can't. That's why I'm not thrilled about Unity's lack of perpetual.

And opening old pro/plus projects in Unity free (even by mistake) is grounds for receiving accusatory e-mails from Unity.

So I'm actually not that thrilled about the free option existing.

 

Why subs only ?
For indies there could be one year license, the final price is the same as using subs. This is what Substance allows, you choose subs or year license, both result in the same price you pay.

 

Same, but I was looking primarily at the two programs he was listing and the other program is a one time purchase of $19.

https://armorpaint.org/

 

Because subs fit the pace of development. You get what you pay for without paying too much or too litte. Try using Unity 5 and it becomes clear how fast the tech world moves.

By contrast you could use Photoshop from 15 years ago, and likely you only use features that were from 15 years ago. The sub does not benefit you, but perpetual does.

Perpetual with Unity is a curiosity that will quickly cease to be relevant and there's no guarantee it will keep on working because a) you might run it on machines that have wildly different hardware, b) it's sensitive to hardware while PS is not c) I actually had a ton more reasons but you know what you're a smart guy. Figure it out.

Anyway I use https://www.getpaint.net/

 

Try Krita, another good one.

I was meaning subs or year payment, for example Unity plus, you can pay 35$ per month, or 300$ once per year, it's almost exactly the same.
I agree that user must pay for new features a company invest money in, could it be subs or royalties. You pay for improvements, bugs fixes and new features or services.
(But there is some few exceptions , Zbrush 4 for example).

 

Why not pay a years worth of subs the first time you buy Unity and if you want to upgrade, pay an upgrade fee that is around 50% off a full year price? So if you want stick with Unity 5 you don't have to pay for upgrades you will never use.

 

On the other hand, you really don't have to (although you can) pay for Unity unless you made more than $100K in the last period (*with some other rules, I'm not a lawyer, yadda-yadda).
And when you publish your game, you pay $300/p, you'll have the Plus version for a year (you can support the release). If you don't make more than $100K in the period, and you have finished the support of your release, you can stop your subscription.
If you make more than $100K out of your game a year, $300/p per year is not a big deal.
Now, if you have a big team and you barely make the $100K then you're specially unlucky.

 

It's a good deal indeed.

LOL

 

But 12x 20 + 50 is still lower and you get a lot of material stuff, too.
I hope that the option is still there when I can go with the pay out option

 

Quixel hits back at Allegorithmic with new Mixer beta free for everyone.

https://quixel.com/blog/2019/1/30/the-year-of-mixer

 

Why 12x? I can keep the perpetual license for 2, 3, 4, 5 years.

 

When you subscribe, you can keep it after one year if you pay additional 50 bucks.

 

Are we talking about Substance? With the 20$ price point being so popular, I thought we were talking about Adobe.

Allegorithmic's current licensing is fine, great even. They even have flat out perpetual 149$ licenses for each of their software.

The fear is that their licensing will eventually harmonise with the rest of Adobe's software and it will be 20$ sub, no other option.

Which is what I was referring to in my comment about me preferring a semi expensive perpetual license over a somewhat cheap subscription only license.

 

I think Allegorithmic's pricing model (subscribe to own) was great.

 

Mixer is not Substance Painter nor Designer.
It's just what it is, a multi texture mixer, there is no procedural materials, you can't make textures from scratch.
The other issue is you must buy MegaScans to use it, not sure it will work with your own textures.
I also hope they will make Ndo suite a stand alone product.

 

I would not be in a hurry to say how it will be, but I agree that there is hardly anything good (

 

My missunderstanding

 

It's all good, I misunderstood as well judging from my previous reply to Ryiah.

 

That sucks but well, I won't stop using it. There aren't any true replacements for it, the way you can send your own (and other people's) substances created in designer to substance painter is just amazing. Mari seems like an interesting alternative but it's not as used in game studios as substance, and it's way too expensive. The way designer and painter work together is wonderful.

 

True. Might as well pop in on armor paint 3d and see what's up.

 

Photoshop 1996
Lightwave 1997, 2004, 2008
AutoCad R14 1997

 

Looks like Adobe is now soft launching the doubling of subscription prices in Creative Cloud for certain apps. Anyone think this will expand to all of their apps soon?

https://twitter.com/verge/status/1124001024455344129?s=19

 

I see Affinity Photo selling many more copies in the future.

 

Yes. I wouldn't be surprised in the slightest if they increased the price of the rest of their software if this increase goes without being challenged by enough people. Speaking of challenging it, I just cancelled my subscription to Photoshop.

 

This may or may not be relevant, but some folks have been saying versions back to CS2 or CS3 are now free to use? Supposedly they contain all of the real functionality you'd need from Photoshop anyways.

 

Adobe shut down the license servers but you still need a valid serial number, but even if it were free to download and use last I heard it wasn't working correctly on newer releases of Windows.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/adrian.../07/download-adobe-cs2-applications-for-free/

 

I'm all for standing up for our right to be cheap, but I use photoshop every day. I depend on it. What else could I use? I haven't looked into the free alternatives but my hunch is they won't suffice....

 

See that's the difference with me. I can't remember the last time I updated it let alone needed it. If I used it on a regular basis it would have been a difference story.

Affinity Photo is a frequent recommendation here.

https://affinity.serif.com/en-us/photo/

 

I stopped my CC subscription the second time the price was hiked on me. The IT department at work also says that pricing there has increased dramatically.

I understand that there's inflation, and that they're adding stuff to CC, and so on and so forth, but the increases still seem somewhat rough.

It'll be a while off, but I think I'll get my team to transition over to this for our next project. We're pretty sure it does everything we need, it's very well priced, and we only need to buy it once.

That's easy for us being a small team who doesn't have to share work with others, though. If we were, say, a graphic design studio making stuff for a variety of clients then we practically wouldn't have a choice.

 

Krita and Gimp 10 are great alternatives, they just need to be faster.

 

From their first announcement of CC I said their endgame is to make everyone dependant on it, nuke the backwards compatibility and then jack the prices up. Everyone who ever fell for their "intro pricing" bait is to blame for this being a thing now. This could have been prevented through boycott. Corporations always do what they think makes them the most money.

I too use Photoshop daily, but stayed on CS6. For the stuff that I do, none of the alternatives are viable. One day I'll be F***ed too and will have to buy into CC for at least one project. First it'll likely be InDesign CC that I need, then probably Illustrator and Photoshop. I have little to no hope, that Affinity is going to save me from that, unless my clients start using it themselves and stop sending me Adobe-based templates that I'm supposed to work with. Sooner or later OS incompatibility is gonna force my hand anyway. I'm still holding out on windows 7.

I bought some other tools to give the competition a boost, but I don't use them at all. Really catching up with just Photoshop CS6 is a gargantuan task and might not even be possible. I don't mean just replicating basic functions that suit the average user, I need to be able to open any old photoshop file ranging from CS1 to CS6 and have all the layerstyles, smart objects, smart filters etc. be replicated 1:1, with proper color management and CMYK mode. And the brush engine needs to be close enough that I can replicate all the main brushes that I use and paint something that looks like it was painted in Photoshop. So far Krita seems to be the most promising to me.


Creative Cloud was released 7 years ago, that's a lot of money I've saved during that time by staying on CS6...