New simple shader...Color Coordinates

#81

Maybe we should all forget about unfulfilled promises and help them move
forward from where things currently stand. I think we should all focus on what
you said in the last sentence. I do get the impression that Taron would really
like to fulfill all promises, so…

#82

I had the ‘unfulfilled promises’ in the back of my mind when I suggested the small upgrade idea. I know some people are still angry about historical promises and for that reason I was uncomfortable about the idea of a ‘faith’ based system - getting peolpe to upgrade to pro to boost income. It’s too open to the whole can of worms opening again. So, whilst it would be nice to have a really big upgrade and then pay for it, PMG clearly don’t have that financial luxury and hence my ‘side by side’ idea of small upgrade - small payment.

I hope they go for it :shrug:

#83

Taron, you’re aware of the thread…any news from the rest at PMG?

#84

Wow! haven’t been by in a while.

I have to say that i haven’t paid for an upgrade EVER, since buying messiah 2nd/3rd hand from another user, but would very much pay for an upgrade. i have been on a personal project using messiah for a while NOW and it still is one unique app with quirks, but i still haven’t found an alternative that works as well as it does for me when it comes to rigging and animation for a one-man project. the renderer has definitely gotten better, and the inclusion of more compositing intergration is a freakin’ GOD SEND, so thanks for that Taron.

#85

Hey I gladly pay for an upgrade. $100 for bugs quirks be-gone.
The money would say “hey stop adding all that extra stuff and focus, pinky, focus on thiese annoying things”. Been using since 1999. It and PointOven are great for small one-man shops especially using it with bigger companies.

However, Month 8 on those Taron render videos. Good thing we got Gary-Chikega.

keep it simple but make it great.

#86

Hey guys,
( mumbling before coffee: )
some of the posts made me kind of mad, I must say, even if just for a brief moment, but guys. Don’t misunderstand the situation! This is not the great chance to rip off some developers! You best understand that it’s your choice and not your mercy! If anything I’d want to make the package twice or three times as expensive and a decent update with strong enough changes for $250, I’d think, that would help and show appreciation. Hair shall only be part of messiah:Professional! Do you have any remote concept on how much work that is and how we can only dare to propose hair, if it’s really something special!? I’ve had ideas about how to finally make real looking hair for the last 6 years at least, but never approached it. This would be the perfect opportunity! ( still no coffee! )

We are really with you and this is about staying in touch with all origines of users, professionals as well as students. But the reality is, we are a real professional developer team with a professional application(please, Thomas, don’t!), regardless of its flaws or shortcomings. So, please, once again, don’t abuse the situation. I can promiss you that we are certainly not doing that either! We need you to want our product and to know why.

However, I’m again thrilled by all the response and overall by what you all are saying. As usual, there are fantastic ideas and great informations up there and the major points will be our upcoming focus for sure!

Did the rest of the boys at pmG see this thread? Hmmm, honestly, I don’t know. I would assume so, but then I only know that Fori ain’t much of a thread reader, but Fred and Dan certainly are. Ron probably, too, I don’t know, though. But after some of the posts here, I’d rather give them a digest then to sit through some of the more painful replies. I don’t even know, yet, if all of this makes them hate me now?! We will certainly find out… and I will let you know. :argh:

#87

Actually, I hope they dont go for this idea.

I was sort of hoping to see them finish all polishing and fine tuning with the package, which would include releasing Develop, and finalizing the documentation (whats there is really written very wonderfully, but it seems like some of the more recent features havent been given the same kind of attention as when most of it was written.) so that people owning a copy of Studio Pro would recieve what was originally promised.

After that, and currently for workstation owners, it seems like upgrade costs would be expected, right?

I suspect that people are offering to mention money in case they need financial help, which is a kind thing to do. They probubly know now, how some people feel about that, I would let them follow through with what they intended to release, or make some kind of statement to complete peoples expectations.

So far, the team seems more bent on creating quality tools and steadily removing bugs than trying to build a mega cg empire, with lots of glitz and pr. I respect that personally.

#88

I totally agree with Taron, hair should be part of professional version. And i think a major update (things like gimbal lock, shadow pass fix, some interface work etc) could be around 250$. It should have enough fixes and enough introduction to some feature requests maybe.

anyways we know pmg is working hard :slight_smile:

#89

NUmbereleven,

I think the point is that they don’t have the funds to do that before more progress is made.

#90

Taron please don’t let it get to you. There will always be some who lose a little
sense of reality in regards to expectations. I’ve seen it on the LW forums.
They want Newtek to take all the 3rd party plugins and add them in at no extra
cost, and etc. Not everybody, but a few people here and there. To quote
“Teahouse of the August Moon”: never happen. I love that movie.

My b/f’s business partner is rather frightening to go out to dinner with for this
same reason.

#91

Hi Taron,

What do you think about the small upgrade idea? (Or is that what you’re mad at??)

David

#92

Well it make us users stand on your side, it was good to break the silence and we love you for that! :wavey:

It brings me to an deeper understanding, I’m no longer feel that it’s most important to deliver MessiahPro in the state it once was announced, no, the most important thing is that Messiah will survive and bring PMG a good revenue, so you can grow! Develop can arrive later and once it does I think we will se an explosion of new exiting plugins to Messiah!

/ Svante

#93

I agree. Messiah if it is to move on, need to kill the expectations from its initial release. We understand and request that you guys move on to aspect of the programs that you know you can complete.

Messiah is a character animation took first. Solve all those demons and then return to the render/shader department.

Use Modo’s business plan as a template. Soon modo will do character animation and then what? I bet you they will use your modo as a template: setup mode. The difference is that they will probbaly devote more time to it than you guys are.

And Taron, stop coding and pimp your name.

You, the one guy that rose in the CG game as Stalberg and the other 1998-2002 alumni: Feng, Metzler,Pascal Blanché, Francisco A. Cortina.

You have not used your “status” to promote a product you are part of. If I was taron, I would have milk it for every thing its worth. Zbrush camp pimp you more than Messiah does. Pop the collar, dog! Become a BRAND! Everyone else is.

PIMP your name. Tutorials. Something. Videos. One month. record. I’ve been saying this since Summer 2005. When one says Taron, Messiah should be akin to. Not Zbrush or LW or anything else.

Messiah: Art of character Animation.

#94

I completely concur with everything in your post Julez.

#95

I think going mad on people who have no concept of what’s involved with hair is useless. I was asked to do “hair” for messiah so often I can’t even count it anymore. People with no idea of coding simply can’t appreciate what that means.

BUT: A particle based fur should be possible in a first step to fill the most pressing need. I found the hair in “Elephants Dream”, done with blenders open source particle based hair quite satisfying and Weggs Hair tests look like they could guide to a good intermediate solution if given some internal workout from pmGs side.

Full styleable hair is not only about rendering and basic hair directions, but a whole concept of tools not currently available in the messiah interface. So that sure is a whole different shebang :slight_smile:

But I am with the people here who ask for streamlining and update animation first.

Another area where messiah is very much lacking is NPR. Outlines and some painterly stuff would help the addressed audience a lot (see Davids work).
These are things in reach (other than a full styleable hair solution).
Put that in with an Edit Sphere overhaul where plane and full free 3D movement works as simple and reliable as single axis manipulations and a lot is done. Then I would buy an update for 250.- € without much questions.

And: I don’t think anyone is trying to “rip off developers” here, but not anyone has an understanding of the time needed for even simple things and 2.) not anyone can throw out money as he/she would maybe like to (nor is it the users fault if there aren’t enough licenses sold to support development).
Times have changed and when XSI Foundation 6 is at 499.-$ you have a hard time to explain why messiah pro should be more expensive, even if the price of XSI may be pure madness.
From the users side, things look very differently, and - as Lyle explained quite some time ago - this will also lead to some people giving up on development completely. Between extremely capable open source software like blender (mainly hindered by it’s GUI) and cheap mass-high-end tools like XSI Foundation, it is almost impossible to place something “made by hand for a living” if you can’t show why it is better than the rest for what it does.
messiah still has this opportunity but it has to become way more simple and streamlined to work with it in a mixed app environment (see Silo/modo).

For me, the problem with pmG/messiah from day one was that the people doing it were too involved in their own universes to be really aware of the importance of the basics. This hasn’t much changed from 1999. The parts where this works are the parts that keep people at it - superfast rigging, no weight painting, expressions etc. But then there are areas (different ones for different people) where people are going mad a million times a day. For me it is the edit sphere and camera navigation (coming from XSI), for others it is inactive keyframes or multi-parameter editing or the missing search and replace in expressions.
For beginners it is things like F1 not being Help and instead Help being buried in a right-click on the File tab but not being available in the normal File dropdown…

I know just too well how often this has been reiterated already - and I know f***ing well why.
The “world” isn’t good or bad towards pmG, the world simply doesn’t care.
Create something indispensable and people will recognize, use and love it - and pay for it.
Leave too many quirks in it (especially in the basics) and people will go elsewhere.

Listening to you, Taron is like listening to Stahlberg telling how easy it is to create good female characters :wink: It may be true for you individuals, but it surely isn’t for everybody.

So, to end this long post: Both sides, users and pmG have to move. The users look willing to… :thumbsup:

Have a nice day!

Cheers,

#96

I’ve been also wanting to revert attention back to the plug-in that Taron released. I’ve used similar things in xsi and its a great help for compositing.

So, thanks Taron - for these:

ColorCoordinates.mp

NoiZette_Ball quicktime

#97

Sounds reasonable to me.

#98

Rereading some of the thread, its clear the only consensus we can reach is that all of us want pmG and Messiah to succeed and continue its evolution. :applause:

For the record, I paid $1495 for Messiah Studio 1.0 when they first announced its availability, and still wouldn’t mind paying a little more, just to get the product in a truly complete state. The free upgrades are outstanding, but releasing Develop can only lessen the burden for Messiah’s programming maestros. Get that out in the next update, and let the legions of hard core users fix the edit sphere, and zombies and dynamic parent in place and whatever other vermin bother us, so the main developers can focus on Hair. Or vice versa.

Whatever keeps Taron and company motivated and eager to please. Even if they have to follow a tortuously long development cycle like zBrush.

Speaking of which, how does Pixologic manage to survive when they haven’t charged for an upgrade since 1.23b, for or five years ago? Did they sell some of their technology to ILM? Is Google a silent partner? Or did they really sell a million copies with the sudden promise of 2.5? Perhaps another tactic pmG can try (pay now for hair later). Or maybe pmG and Pixologic should join forces and morph into a complete 3D Solution (and still never charge for upgrades). :buttrock:

Bah. I see reality oozing in and suspect 3D is about to get really expensive again. :shrug:

#99

Ahem.

I think there are a lot of myths regarding Develop in the air…
AFAIK, it is just a tool that helps you setting up your plugins parameters, variables, build interfaces for it visually etc.
It doesn’t allow you (please correct me if I’m wrong) to do anything that the current SDK can’t do. :sad:
It just makes it easier and more convenient.

It is an advanced form of the plugin wizards that are part of XSI and other software.

So: Forget about changes to the Edit Sphere from outside Developers, more Import Formats, changes to the Graph Editor or Zombies. The SDK is great but extremely limited in it’s reach, otherwise a lot of those things would lie behind us already.

I personally think as of today that Develop is actually the most unimportant part of messiah. Nice to have but without a much deeper SDK not too much of a feature and a lot of work to maintain.

K.I.S.S. time IMO

Cheers,

#100

Sir ThomasHelzle,

Then that makes sense they chose to put it so far down on their to do list. So, if it won’t help you customize Messiah to an extreme degree, hopefully they’ll go nuts and rip open the SDK so super coders like yourself can remedy the smaller (I’m guessing the edit sphere wouldn’t be too complicated, though it’s probably the most complicated and mind-boggling edit sphere ever invented) frustrations.

Knowing this, I like another free upgrade, before 3.0 is offered, out of spite. :applause: