New changes to EiAS!!!

Hi
I just get this EITG NEWS, and looks amazing:

Electric Image Animation System v6.6 Universal Binary goes Beta!

We are excited to announce the near completion of the highly anticipated EIAS 6.6. The transition to Universal Binary was a major undertaking and the new version will be packaged and prepared for shipping before 2007. The revised EIAS features breathtaking speed enhancements compliant with the new Macintosh Intel computers. For example a simple test rendering with RT reflections and RT transparency on Dual G5 2 Ghz with 512mb assigned to one camera took 4 minutes and 8 seconds. The same simple rendering on a MacPro 2.6 Ghz Xeon with 512mb of memory took 2 minutes 28 seconds. This is a remarkable 40% speed improvement. If time is essential for you, this is a simply an upgrade you can’t miss!

How could EIAS v6.6 UB be better than v6.5? A simple 40% increase in render speed! Wow.
–Tomas Egger

EIAS v6.6 will be introduced at only $99 for current v6.5 owners. Users that do not have a “Duo” key will be required to perform a key/dongle upgrade to run EIAS v6.6 on new Intel Macintosh Computers. Our key vendor has chosen not to write drivers for the older keys on the new Intel platform.

Limited Time Offer

Order the EIAS v6.5 upgrade today and get the v6.6 UB upgrade absolutely free!

EI Technology Group Names 12 Individuals to Advisory Counsel.

Twelve individuals have been named to the Advisory Counsel of EI Technology Group. This group of leaders in their respective fields of design, investing and sales have made a personal and professional commitment to the resurrection of EITG in the 3D design marketplace. The EI Advisory Counsel is currently offering both direction and guidance in EITG’s development, marketing, and sales efforts. This direct involvement will offer a more cohesive line of communication between the corporation and user base. The counsel has the ability to directly influence the development of software, vision of marketing efforts, as well as pricing and positioning of products. This type of close collaboration will result in a more democratic business process. Here are few of the new members: Ian Waters, Blair Burtan, Tomas Egger, Robert Staehle, Brian Pohl, Uwe Kerpen, Jens Moller, and Stephane Crouzet.

A New Look for a New Era!

EI Technology Group is resurfacing with a whole new look. The old EI logo from the 90’s has been replaced with a fresh, more direct logo that emphasizes the forward direction and optimistic outlook of EI Technology Group. The new orange and gray color scheme reflects the bright future of the company under new ownership and management. A large-scale rebranding campaign will begin in 2007 featuring new print ads, product logos, internet ads, and a new look for the website. We are enthused about revamping the aesthetic of EI Technology Group to suit the vast technological and functional improvements of our products.

…Under new ownership and management?
Many things are happening under the hood. And whatever they are, cant be bad!.
Somebody can elaborate a bit?

FelixCat

changes are not always good… remember Play?

anyways, we’ll have to wait and see. I hope EITG can elaborate a bit more on this, we need more info. At least, from the email, it looks like they want to work harder on marketing, and that’s good.

One not so positive thing, I didn’t think that the mere conversion to Universal Binary would cost me as much as $99. It might have been a lot of work for programers, but I can’t justify it on my end. I guess I will keep running EIAS on my G5’s, and wait for a more significant upgrade.

cheers

Joel

As an Advisory Board member, I’ll be happy to answer your questions as best I can. Any questions I can not answer, I will get you an answer from EITG.

Now onto some comments:

More information about the new ownership of EI will be released by the company soon. However, EI has not been purchased by some outside random entity that has little or no experience with 3D animation software. There will be changes in the business model I’m sure, but the main changes are focusing on getting stronger interaction between EITG and its customer base, implementing new technologies, and improving marketing.

But EI should take the hit?

Joel…I don’t want you to think I’m singling you out, but this cost issue needs to be addressed upfront.

Its easy to say…“The mere conversion”, but this was no mere undertaking. All companies that convert their programs to UB must find a way to charge the user for those months of programming work, especially if it requires a massive transition like this one. Whether they fold the cost of the UB upgrade into another larger upgrade and charge you later (invisibly), or be direct and charge you upfront, the work still must be paid for.

Sometimes a company can be generous. v6.5 was a free upgrade for users upgrading from any other EI version to v6.0 and that was a pretty nice upgrade comparitively speaking. Surely the v6.5 feature set and the universal binary upgrades are worth a “mere” $99.

If you’re a hobbyist, I feel your pain… however, it can’t all be free. Is there any way to factor the cost of the upgrade into your next project, thus effectively making your clients pay for it?

This all sounds like very good news.

Getting a 40% speed boost for $100 is a deal any way you slice it.

$99 for UB is not bad… I am sure the photoshop upgrade to a UB will be a hell of a lot more… and very few useful features

Cj

I’m not saying that EI has to take the hit for Apple’s switch to Intel, and I agree that the users need to pay for the programming efforts, who works for free other than the people who work for free?

What I’m saying is that I can’t justify the upgrade to 6.6. EI won’t be getting $99 from me for this upgrade, I can’t justify it. Perhaps, when they release 7.0 I will take the hit, justifying it with… I don’t know, HDRI rendering, or whatever new features we see at that time. But native operation of the software under OS X for Intel is not something I really need right now.

The 40% increase in performance, that’s actually not a feature of 6.6. It’s a feature of the Intel Quad Xeon chips.

don’t get me wrong, I’m happy EI is almost ready with the UB version. But at $99 I won’t be needing it for the time being, perhaps next year.

Joel

I guess, because I have a few MacIntels, I am excited for the release…

Cj

I like the list of folks on the Advisory board. Based on some of the names I see listed I’m hoping that there will be some work done on the API soon and that we’ll see some more really cool 3rd party plugins to take advantage of that.

As far a 6.6, if I had any mactel I’d upgrade but since I don’t I guess I’ll be sitting this one out.

I’m glad to see that there will be some advertising forthcoming, maybe we’ll get some new faces around here.

A.

3d is just my hobby – when I have time. I own EI and own a Mac Pro and think $99 is a screaming deal to have a universal binary version. It’s far cheaper than my other UB options (C4d or Modo).

I’d pay another $99 to have a multithreaded camera that doesn’t require me to use Renderama.

Good news indeed!

I hope EIAS becomes a bit more stable under Intel as well - as of now it crashes too often, and there are quite a few “annoyances” when rendering. Among them are sending to Renderama - sometimes it works, most often it don’t.

Wish I had the 6.6 version last week - could have saved me a few days renderingtime (!).

So I’m ready to cough up $99 - after all, it’s only money, and when speed is of essence and the deadline is like dark clouds overhead, $99 becomes rather trivial.

That’s my 2¥

Will there be any other enhancements besides UB?

obviously a concluded port to intel is great news by itself, because this means that EIAS is still alive and kicking!!

on the other side, i’m not sure what to think about the speed improvement statement. are you comparing a 2.0 ghz G5 double processor with a 2.6 ghz intel quad core? of course, if not counting any multithreading (which hopefully will come in one of the next updates!) a mere 30% of speed enhancement is caused by processor speed differences. so it reads more like an effective 10% speed increase to me - not bad anyway! or did i miss something here?

like paulchiap, i’d like to know if there have been included any other enhancements, especially for renderama?

cheers

markus

$99 is about £55 Stirling. Chicken feed really in todays economy- it’s about a weeks shopping for groceries for two, or a couiple of meals in a reasonable restaurant. I’d guess EI actually priced it as cheap as they could without them losing out too much.
It looks like a really promising development for EI.

Personally I think the most exiting announcement is the formation of the Advisory Counsel.
How often have we heard complaints about the parent company not listening to its users?
Hopefully these guys will fix that problem and have some effective input into the company. Also, through this board and Postforum I feel that they are ultra accessible, not a feeling I necessarily get with EI.
Good luck to them all!
Mike.

the email mention about orange and grey colour scheme, and Brian mentioning about

EI has not been purchased by some outside random entity that has little or no experience with 3D animation software.

is that a company name start with “L”

Great news. I wonder about the shaders/plugins issue, though: how fast developers will react and how much they will charge for upgrades.

Right, juanxer
And i wonder too about the shaders/plugins that are a bit down. TripleDtools for instance. They have a very nice shaders but i´m not sure if they are allready in bussiness. Konkeptoine seems a bit silent too.

FelixCat

On the third party stuff I can shed some light.

I’ll let the companies in question detail this themselves, but Northern Lights, Paralumino, Konkeptoine and Ramjac are all going to move to UB. In the case of Northern Lights, Blair has trumped everyone and will have all his products ready for the 6.6 release (or just after it). Woooo!

I have no information about Alexey Kondratiev’s plug-ins…

There is some very positive information about TrippleDTools but I have nothing concrete so I’ll keep my mouth shut. Perhaps someone else knows more…

Matt has posted some additional notes about 3rd parties in the EI Development Status forum.
http://www.eitechnologygroup.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=6686
Ian

v6.6 is obviously mainly about UB support.
Is there any reason to upgrade for those of us still on PPC (or windows)?
(new features, bug fixes, enhancements)

I’d like to know that too as a PC user.