CGenie - Professional CG Textures

A foreword

So the results are in and we've been furiously compiling and analysing the results. First a huge thank you again to everyone who took the time to share their thoughts and opinions with the CG community, the response has been overwhelming with well over 3,500 individual surveys submitted (80% increase on last year). As always, your comments and answers have offered a tremendous insight and truly help to inform others on the key trends within the industry.

Over the next couple of months we'll be running a series of articles to cover the results, we'll be covering each piece of software in detail and offering some interesting comparisons of various key elements of the survey. So without further ado, let's look at the high level responses which will offer a first insight into what your compatriots across the world think and the state of the CG competition.

The high level results

To convert the results into scores (i.e. to numerate the segments) a points scale between between 0 and 50 was applied for each of the answers (completely disagree, mostly disagree, mostly agree, totally agree) with the more extreme answers receiving heavier weighting to reflect user opinions fully.

Please note: you can mouse over the graphs for tooltips on the survey topics / graphs themselves.

As well as more responses, there was also a wider distribution of applications this year. This distribution of responses highlighted both the commercial dominance of Autodesk and the open source dominance of the Blender foundation:

The community response was nicely balanced between professionals (47%), students (13%) and hobbyists (37%).

CG software sits at the cutting edge, stretching almost every aspect of computing capabilities. It's therefore refreshing to see that the general impression from the CG community is so positive. The average CG application is described by the community as Advanced, Rapidly Developing, Stable, Innovative and Quick. Very few (7.8%) have an experience they describe as buggy and even fewer consider their software to be sluggish (3.5%).

Overall opinion of software since last year

This year's crop introduced a few new faces to the survey including Terragen, 3D Coat, ZBrush, EIAS, Carrara and Vue - welcome to them all and Terragen has stormed to the top with some outstanding feedback from its users.

In terms of last year's product line up, in what has been a very difficult year for both the companies and more importantly the end users, we were fully expecting to see a drop in all scores. The tough market conditions have no doubt squeezed the end users to be less forgiving or accepting than they may have been in previous years and likewise the companies have been pressed on all their margins.

It's therefore impressive to see three products in particular not only standing against the tide but making significant inroads. For different reasons modo, Blender and 3ds Max all deserve a huge amount of credit for the end user feedback we've received; each for slightly different reasons. For modo it's been a year of taking the great scores from last year into the sublime and Blender has raised its own exceptional standards higher.

3ds Max is an intriguing case with a notable increase in its scores - note the graphs have been normalised based on last year's scores, so even a slight change requires a significant weighting from the end user. In this instance more than twice as many respondents felt their opinion of 3ds Max had improved from last year compared to those with negative responses.

It's easy to attribute this to a 'settling' of the emotions following the various acquisitions made previous to last year's survey, however what makes this particularly interesting is this is set against a marked decline in scores for both Maya and Softimage - the other two key Autodesk products in the survey. So it suggests something different going on with the various products. There's clearly still a lot of work to do on this front, but the trend is heading in the right direction. We'll certainly be looking to find out more about this in our interview with Autodesk.

User Comments:

• 3ds Max - Pull the sword out of that stone! (XBR)
• Maya - Listen to the Beta forums.
• Softimage - Listen to users. Read forums (XSIBase, especially Alive-Creature rigging solution. You have enough to learn from it.). Try to be more open to users' requirements and opinions.
• Blender - Get more full-time developers on board please. You're doing a great job and you're doing it at a reasonable pace. But you should be way ahead of where you are now. You should be implementing cutting edge techniques and can afford to be a bit more experimental than your competitors but you're too caught up getting things up to speed... So hope you find funds and sponsors to get more developers on-board. You deserve it! Good luck!! :)
• Modo - Keep listening to your users and communicating with them. Would it be possible to be more transparent with new features in public? Let forum members comment on how they want to see animation implemented for example. Before the feature is released and it's too late to make major changes. I like how Blender has public builds and open development process.
• Lightwave - With the introduction of Core-i believe Newtek has managed to alienate their current lightwave user base. Development/bug fixes have slowed to a halt and forum activity has dropped off. As a lightwave professional of today, i find myself in a position where i need to either consider learning a new package or continue to wrestle with lightwave in its current state and hope that core will deliver what i need in a 3d application.
• Houdini - Thank you so much for the respect you have for the amateur user base! Also it'd be great to have training here in Toronto.

Market share growth

Analysis of the market share and growth/decline related answers from users revealed this interesting perspective on the potential growth/decline of the various packages in the coming years. ZBrush appears to have strong support to storm towards even further dominance. 3ds Max will continue to grow with Cinema 4D, Modo and Houdini becoming key competitors. Maya would slip down the rankings to the fifth or sixth most popular application. Lightwave users appear to be going through a bit of a crisis of faith at the moment - perhaps not surprising given the hugely ambitious rebuilding going on for CORE, but it's certainly something that NewTek should keep an eye on - certainly communication/marketing appeared to be a recurring theme in user feedback.

User comments:

• 3ds Max - I love where Max is going with XBR. It's very long overdue though.
• Maya - Maya is a dinosaur. I hate that I have to use this for work sometimes. However it is the industry standard so I must know it and work in it sometimes.
• Houdini - a small price drop and everyone will be using Houdini!
• ZBrush - Thanks for all the free updates; for a piece of software that has changed my workflow entirely; for allowing me to put more detail into what I do and without stemming the flow of creativity.
• modo - Superb software package, with an ever growing sophisticated tools set no 3D modeler should be with out a copy!
• Terragen - Positively the best landscape/3D rendering package on the market. And affordable.
• Vue - Take your software to more university's it's here that future professionals and users are trained and many times, VUE is not in the training package.

Value for money

Last year there were a few who questioned whether Blender should be 'allowed' to compete on value with the commercial products. We disagreed and included them for good reason. First it becomes a ridiculous impossible argument very quickly - is it fair to compare a £30 product with a £3000 one? What about £500 vs £1500 etc. This is about value. A free product may be very poor value if its awkward to use, unstable and has a weak feature set. Likewise a commercial application will be considered good value if its feature set and capabilities match the price point assigned.

This point is thoroughly proved by the results. Terragen proving for you an excellent package for the purpose it advertises. Even more impressively Brad Peebler and the folks at Luxology actually increased their price recently and it still achieves an almost perfect score for value. Know Brad said this had been a decision that they had considered carefully, well this is vindication of both that move as well as perfect demonstration of the difference between price and value.

3ds Max and Maya still languish in the lower positions in the value rankings. The key issues you appear to have raised are around issues like a lack of a PLE edition, upgrades being too frequent and the general price point being too high. We'll raise this when we interview Autodesk and hear what their thoughts are around this.

User Comments:

• 3ds Max - Would love to see an apprentice version for home users that can't pay thousands.
• Maya - Please re-think your license system. I was studying one year in America, but I am from Europe. It was not possible for me to buy an educational version of Maya in America and keep using it in Europe due to license restrictions, which I find quite ridiculous for educational licenses. That seriously made me switch to another software package (Blender) altogether, although I really like Maya, too.
• Softimage - Bring back a Foundation version that provides a bridge between the free Mod Tool and $2995 professional edition.
• Modo - I have felt in conflict with virtually every piece of software I have purchased. Modo is the exception. Their student pricing set me on a great upgrade path as I transitioned to being a professional.
• Cinema 4D - Lower your prices. Love the product. Hate the pricing. If this trend continues, I'll move to another app. Not because I want to, but because I'll have to. Maxon, in those 7 years since I started with v8, your competitors have not only maintained their prices, some have even lowered them substantially. Raising prices for both the full & point releases is managing to alienate both new and returning users. Since I started using C4D in 2003, the price for a x.5 point release has gone up from under $100 to $700. The cost for Studio has gone from ~$3k to ~$3,700. Maxon must also re-evaluate upgrade pricing x.5 to full +1. For example, a 11.0 user will likely end up paying a lot more than a 11.5 user when v12.0 comes out. Not everybody needs the x.5 upgrade, as it only targets a smaller subset of users. However, full +1 upgrade targets ALL users. Niche upgrades hurt general users this way. Development costs money. Staff costs money. Piracy hurts your bottom line. I get it. However, you're pricing yourselves out of both the high end and hobbyist markets. Recent r11.5 reviews have noted this. How do you think your users feel?
• Lightwave 3D - Hope to see Core kick off soon and rival that of higher-end companies with a much better price point.
• Houdini - Please keep the PLE and the HD versions.

I'm a big fan of this company

3ds Max has again made significant improvements on last year's scores. Again we see the interesting contrast with both Maya and Softimage, the latter which has taken a huge hit. Cinema 4D appears to have also slipped by a fair amount compared to last year.

User Comments:

Highest usage rating

You all rated the applications based on your opinion of their capabilities in several criteria: . We left the more specialist applications off this listing as they clearly only focus on certain tasks.

modo users appear the most satisfied all round with their application - you can see the various strengths and weaknesses of each application however in this chart. For example, modo clearly lacks in texturing capabilities vs Cinema 4D, however in modelling the order is completely reversed with modo being extremely highly rated for its capabilities.

User Comments:

• modo - Shader Tree still relatively incomprehensible to many.
• 3ds Max - For the future of 3D Studio Max, I feel that the majority of digital artists would flavor to use a fully functional integrated 3D texture based platform, which could give the artist the ability to produce, save, load and edit maps such as diffuse, bump, specular etc.. This integrated 3D texture based platform could provide the artist the use to save out various file formats, at different resolution sizes. Another major request is that Maya has a render slider bar for the user to see their pre or current render's. This simple slider allows the artist, designer or architect to view their work with visual, on the fly saved rendered feedback. This function would be a fantastic asset for 3D Studio Max users, rather than using the A to B function in the ram player. With Kind Regrards Mark Robin P.s. I know it seemed like alot.
• Maya - multithread, multithread on all features, mainly dinamics, nparticles...
• Blender - Keep going! But more and better compatibility with other softwares is needed.
• Cinema 4D - Implement Mudbox/ZBrush-like sculpting tools now!
• Lightwave - Make Core easy approachable (as in intuitive, not as in feature limited). That's the key. And start doing marketing! At no point in time since LW 5.5 (when I started with it) I have seen you guys caring for other countries than the U.S.
• Softimage - Please import CAT to Softimage, you'll got the perfect software!

Conclusions

This year's survey has revealed some very interesting results. For me modo has stood out on almost all accounts and has had a pretty much stellar year in its users' eyes. We'll need to have a chat with Brad to find out what he's been putting in the water at Luxology HQ. Blender and Houdini have continued their excellent performance with strong performances in most categories. 3ds Max has also had an interestingly positive year, in a much more incremental fashion as you'd expect from a product with so much more market share and age, but nonetheless it has been diammetrically opposed in most movements compared to the other Autodesk products your responded on, so we'll look to chat with Marc Petit and the Autodesk team to see if we can find out more.

On the more negative side, Cinema 4D, Lightwave 3D and Softimage have all suffered this year - all for differing reasons, we'll look to investigate these results further explore if these are temporary instabilities caused by programmes like the CORE upgrade or whether they are symptomatic of deeper rooted issues starting to surface.

In addition we'll be running a series of specific analyses to tackle the data from different angles. These will range from focusing on a particular topic to splitting the results to compare the views of professionals versus hobbists as well as a more detailed review of the results in certain areas like software capabilities. Finally we'll reveal some other snippets like who you voted as the no. 1 company to work for and your thoughts on whether commercial or free software is most likely to provide you with a career in the industry.

In the meantime, please email or leave a comment if there's any particular extra analyses you'd like and we'll do our best to build it into our plans!

Related links:

• Big CG Survey 2010: Interview with Luxology
• Big CG Survey 2010: Industry Perspective
• CGenie Survey 2009