CityEngine Released

[cyphyr]

Quote from their web site:

"A fully functional trial version of the CityEngine software for non-commercial use will also be available for download on May 23th."

Now the question is just exactly what is meant by "fully functional trial version".

Richard

[sjefen]

Quote from their web site:

"A fully functional trial version of the CityEngine software for non-commercial use will also be available for download on May 23th."

Now the question is just exactly what is meant by "fully functional trial version".

Richard

I don't want a trail version. I would only use that to test if I could handle it, but for
7000 it's almost not even worth trying. 700$ would be ok.

[cyphyr]

in an ideal world (yeah right whatever lol) a "fully functional trial version" should be identical to the licensed except that your not allowed to use it commercially. So as long as you don't make any money from it directly you should be OK. I would assume that if you make an image with it that you then sell or is part of a commission you've won then you would need the licensed version. We'll just have top wait and see wqhat their understanding is.
Richard

[sjefen]

That's why I would like to buy it. Cause maybe one day I make something that I would like to try and sell.

[old_blaggard]

hopefully there will be a educational edition

Yeah, so that we students only have to pay $500, which is obviously in our price ranges .

[rcallicotte]

o_b - LOL

I know it's tough.  Decisions, decisions.

[scott8933]

There's some rotoscoper prog out there that costs something like $10000; made by an outfit called Imagineer, and all their apps are so overpriced, its almost like some kind of running company joke.

Periodically they have 90% off sales. I suspect its the only time they ever sell any product.

Someone has their head stuck back in the '90's when apps like Prisms cost $60,000 and people actually paid that.

I'm not saying that City Engine shouldn't be charging that based on their R&D and what the app is capable of, I'm just saying that a $7k price tag will put it well outside the hands of most artists and small shops, which is a real shame.

[lightning]

there will be no educational edition Pascal who is the CEO of Procedural Inc told me that they do not have the resources or support to do it

[Will]

then they will have trouble marketing it

[cyphyr]

there will be no educational edition Pascal who is the CEO of Procedural Inc told me that they do not have the resources or support to do it

So has Pascal given you any indication of what the limitations of the demo will be?
Richard

[scott8933]

Perhaps we could make a collective plead with the company to rethink that to something more along the lines of Real Flow's $3500. Personally, I think they'd sell way more that way... but realistically I'm sure these decisions are pretty well made at this point.

[Oshyan]

Many companies have a policy of providing much less (or no) support to educational and other non-professional versions. I don't see that resources and support should be that big a problem. But it's their decision to make. Still I think they would get more than 10 times the number of customers if they reduced the price by 10x (e.g. $700 instead of $7000), so their net income would be the same or greater (I would say probably much greater!). This results in an increased support load, but that doesn't necessarily increase linearly with the number of registered users. In fact a smaller number of users paying a large amount will expect much better support than 10 times the number of users at a lesser price would.

- Oshyan

[Seth]

i think this price is gonna force people to download it illegally...
i hope the free version announced will be good
some videos on their blog too : http://blog.procedural.com/

[pascalmueller]

Interesting discussions going on here ;-)

Yes, the price was a hard but well-thought-out decision. As mentioned by JimB, it is mainly reasoned by the person-months you will save (and we positioned it in the price range of Maya, RenderMan etc). However, we will offer educational pricing for universities, but not (yet) student versions.

See it from the positive side: it does not cost $20K like other superb high-end software such as Massive (which actually is less unique than our app ;-)

Stay tuned on our website...

Regards,
Pascal

[JohnnyBoy]

Yes, the price was a hard but well-thought-out decision. As mentioned by JimB, it is mainly reasoned by the person-months you will save (and we positioned it in the price range of Maya, RenderMan etc). However, we will offer educational pricing for universities, but not (yet) student versions.

See it from the positive side: it does not cost $20K like other superb high-end software such as Massive (which actually is less unique than our app ;-)

I just hope you consider the hobbyist/independent artist market at some point in the future. Anyway, the software looks brilliant and I wish you great success.