Project Messiah Studio Sale

Bad thinking: They didn't have a fixed goal from the start:
- They see what appened and stop the promo when they want.
or;
- They never expected to sell any license at that price. They will tell everyone that the goal wasn't met and refund everyone -> advertising for Free !

I didn't know this product before that..

 

Hercule, that would be like shooting themselves in the foot, so I'm pretty certain that it's not going to happen. The effects of such a decision can very well kill a company. The expression bad press is better than no press doesn't really pertain to specialized tools.

 

I hope so.

 

I've been around the messiah studio forums for about a year and half. I'm very confident that pmG is not up to anything devious here. I've always found them to be very reasonable folks. They're a small company (only 3 main developers) and have been around for about 10 years. They do animation work in the industry themselves. It would make no sense for them to ruin their reputations now.

Messiah studio has been quietly used in the industry for years. I'm sure this offer is simply intended to bring messiah studio out into the light and stimulate the growth and use of the product. With the marketing strategy having worked like a charm, I'd be very surprised if they refunded money rather than handed out licenses. After all this positive marketing, why in the world would anyone of reasonable intelligence want to ruin that by letting everyone down!?

I would say, don't listen to rumors. Only pay attention to official announcements from pmG themselves. As far as I can see, the offer is still up and running. I've heard nothing on the messiah studio forums to indicate otherwise. Things always slow down over weekends as people are often away from their computers (especially when the weather warms up nicely as it did here in MN). I suspect the bar will start moving faster again today as the last minute rush tries to jump on board.

 

I would expect that from AUTODESK maybe, but not from messiah! haha!!!

 

This is an interesting read.

http://www.3dworldmag.com/2011/02/14/pmg-co-founder-talks-10-messiah-studio-project

 

this is getting exciting > today it moves a cm from yesterdays mark on the 100% goal bar !!!!! it's getting closer ))

 

I can't take this any longer! hurry progress bar!!

 

YYYYYYEEEEEEEAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH WEEE MADE IT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

licenses for everyone will be given away by saturday! (perhaps sooner)

 

Yaay! Looks like they are keeping the promotion going for ~25 more hours just in case you missed it.

 

Cool, I bought a Pro license, excellent deal!

 

So when/how do we get the license again? :/
Email?

 

Yep, they'll be emailed to us.

 

a special messiah agent will be contacting you on your sleep!

be ready!

 

From the website:

**Due to the overwhelming response, we are in the process of updating the license system to better automate the management of everyone generating their licenses. We have a 3 day delay in finalizing the transactions, and downloading them into the system. We hope to have license generation up by Saturday or perhaps sooner. You will be getting an email to the email address you provided paypal when you purchased, that will contain the url and login info to generate your license for your purchase or purchases(if you did them in more than one transaction).

 

got my login information and am currently trying to generate my license. wow, this must be the S***tiest, most horrible copy protection I have ever seen in my entire life. I have to create a dongle on a FlashDrive in a file-format that I don't use on any work-related hard-disk because on the MAC I naturally format all my disks with HFS+. It would be fine if I could use my main HD where I put the messiah installation, but no, it has to be some external non-related flashdrive. what the hell are those people thinking?!

 

External DRM dongles are not unheard of although I'll agree that they are somewhat annoying. Vray is the same.

 

col000r:
Don't forget you are never again allowed to format the drive, either. Says so, right in the instructions

But that wasn't what got me down, what got me down was that after I plugged in my stick, formatted it to dos and ran the program, it refused to accept any of the drives I clicked on for licensing, flash drive included. So I am sitting with an app I can't license and thus do nothing with...

Now THAT sucks

 

What I like about messiah is that you can make a rig with stretching muscles and it'll export perfectly into unity! I couldn't do that with 3dsmax, heck, even IK exports badly with 3dsmax!

 

Can you format it to FAT32? I've heard that was supposed to be the safest option. Also, I've heard from several others that pmG tries to work with folks that have licensing issues (like if your thumb drive takes a dive, etc.). They work in the industry and know it's important to keep your software running to meet deadlines.

Anyway, if you can't get it working I would suggest contacting them. I'm sure they're busy with this influx of new users, but I'd be surprised if they didn't try to help you sort out any licensing issues.

 

*** Sorry, I just can't do it... I have never left such negative feedback for anyone except for that Game Programming All In One book where the guy teaches you formulas and actually writes them down wrong in such an obvious manner that even guys who knew nothing about maths (like me) could easily spot it the first read through. So I am deleting my post and just keeping my main notes as highlights. I can't get it across my heart to leave this many bad things for the world to read... ***

* According to the instructions, FAT32 is the ONLY option, not the safest option.
Some guy on their website could only get it to work with FAT16, though

* Their instructions say to have a flash drive in place, then start the app... what they MEANT to say is "Sorry, our app will refuse to acknowledge the drive you select from our own menu, unless you first unplug it again and then reinsert it back in again"

* It is a Windows app using X11 to LOOK like an OSX app, but the menu is still the Crossover menu...
* So the help file is only a single paragraph that gives you a link to ReadingIsEasy
* The only documentation that is available is in the form of the videos on the website... Wait, I lie... hidden in tiny letters that look like comments is 3 links:
1. A site that starts off with Membership Options...
2. Free and commercial tutorials. Commercial tutorials. Incredible! At least they compare the workflow between them and Maya. Did I say Maya? I meant to say "My ya". My ya and My ya again.
3. The actual manual. That's right, they list their user manual last...

The "How to use this incredibly daunting application" documentation is not included with the product but you have to go to ProjectMessiah.com, click on the 6th tab and click on the very last link to go to a site called www.eggswhyzed.com to find what should have been included with the product in the first place...

* Click on license in the main menu and read about the mandatory car wash for employees.
* An interface that makes me feel like I am drunk cause everything just seems out of focus... or low quality graphics...
* Speaking of low quality graphics, try reading the manual I spoke of... Try clicking on "Introduction" and see what is the first thought that comes to your mind
* Then try reading the "What's new PDF" and see how professional that download looks...

And to add insult to injury, they still won these awards:
Seal of Excellence - Animation Magazine
Innovation Award - Computer Graphics World
Technology Top 15 - Animation Magazine
Best of Siggraph - Animation Magazine

* Lastly, did I mention it comes complete with 2 uninstallers so you can be sure to get rid of the demo also?

 

@MrDude: They did have some issues with their license generation, but the reason for the weird DRM is that the Mac version is just the Windows version running in an emulator. (If the location of the menu bar wasn't a dead giveaway, the file dialog box certainly is.) You need to go to "Desktop -> My Computer -> [NAME OF YOUR FLASH DRIVE HERE] (D"

Don't go any further than that point and make sure you select the drive name.

The "(D" might be a different letter if you have multiple hard drives attached. "C:" is usually the boot drive on a Windows box. (@Microsoft: It's 2011 and Windows 7 *still* has this legacy "feature" from CP/M? Is WordStar support really all that important today?)

The flash drive must be formatted using the older FAT32 (or FAT16 if it's an older, low capacity drive). That's the "MS-DOS" format option on Disk Utility.

 

It's a 3D animation tool aimed at the high-end of the market. Believe it or not, it's not a huge market, but it is an old one: even the mighty 3ds max originally started life as a tool aimed at AutoCAD users, while LightWave's first appearance was in the form of a TV videographics package named "Video Toaster" for the Commodore Amiga.

When your users are likely to have learned the ropes using tools as old as these, they'll also be bringing a lot of 'baggage' with them in the form of interface expectations. That limits how radical any new user interface can be.

And, yes, it sucks that "Project Messiah" is a Windows app that's been rammed down the throat of CrossOver Office, but seriously: the Mac is still barely 10% of the market. What did you expect? Even Adobe famously switched from leading on the Mac to leading on Windows some years ago. This might not be the case in a few years, but for the time being, I'll take whatever I can get. And $40 for a tool this powerful is pretty good going.

It could be a lot worse. I first got into technical authoring while trying to create a game using a high-end 3D graphics library. The license fee was in the five-figure region, for which you received: a CD with the binaries and include files, a "README" file containing a changelog, an occasionally inaccurate API reference, a demo that we were explicitly told not to use as the basis for our own work, and... NO user guide AT ALL.

So, for $40, I admit I'd have preferred something with better documentation, but I've found it pretty easy to wrap my head around. Which is weird as I hate the GUIs on the usual packages—3ds max, Maya, SoftImage, etc.—with a deep, burning passion. (I prefer Cheetah3D, although Silo is growing on me. My graphics background is in publishing, graphic design and, back in the late '80s and early '90s, 2D pixel art and animation. 3D modelling is a big mental wrench.)

 

They are selling it as a Mac product also, but they really shouldn't. It's completely unusable on the mac. It's so bad it's not even funny. After getting the license working with an old memorystick I finally found lying around the house, it froze my system when I clicked the maximize window icon. After a hard-restart it froze again when I tried resizing the window by dragging the window-corner.

I gave up on resizing and tried to work in the smallish default window-size. I wanted to import a file from modo. In the open file dialog when I select just .lxo instead of all supported files it jumps to only displaying the first 2 or 3 letters:


Well, I find my file anyway and it loads fine. Now I try to rotate around it and the hud icons start to jump all over the place. Dance, little messiah icons, dance! << video!

I write an email to their support and promptly get an automated reply:



Compact, yes... but a little hard to read...

Now... At this point I decided that I wasn't going to work in messiah and didn't want to have anything at all to do with dmG. - If that much goes wrong in the first 5 min of trying out the program, I can only guess how much fun it would be to try any serious work in that. If they're incapable of creating a proper Mac port, they should NOT sell it for the Mac.

I asked for a refund and they returned my money. At least that part was easy.

 

Hmm, I haven't encountered any game-breaking bugs or annoyances on windows yet. I'm just happy I didn't opt for the Mac port.

 

Great discount, I wish I had grabbed one of them!..

 

The deal went on well after the goal was reached. I think they were planning on it taking longer. Anyway, they do still have the deal going on, but they've changed the prices to $60 for basic and $80 for pro. Still an incredible discount. Not sure how long they plan to keep milking this. Perhaps it will slowly work it's way back up to the normal prices.

 

I picked it up at $40 and it installed without a flaw on Win7 64. I paid $2 for an intro tutorial and was importing into Unity in no time. I rather like the interface.

 

"Install messiahStudio 32bit version first; then once your license is working, if you purchased PRO and are on Windows, you can install the 64bit version." (?????)

New features in Version 5: "You can now save quick renders to disk. We only support .BMP at the moment though".

Looking forward to it.

 

I had bought two licenses. One for Mac and Windows. The Mac installer gave me grief I guess it's a hack not a true mac binary. I may upgrade my laptop's SSD to double the capacity so I haven't installed it to windows just yet as they lock serials to hdd. Maybe I should just pick up a cheap memory stick. God I'll probably loose the thumb drive with my luck ha ha.

 

actually you can install the 64bit version directly on windows and license it. had no problem with it at all