Very true and I fully understand where you are coming from :)

$200 for a professional product IS amazing. But for the curious hobbyist tinkerer, not so much ;)
Kerkythea did a poll on their site regarding professionals vs. hobbyist (3/19-4/6) 303 votes counted.

Hobbyist: 40.6%
Professional: 30.7%
Teacher/Student: 23.8%
I use it very rarely: 5%

They are really neck-and-neck, but in the end we need to pay the bills.
I understand :)

> Kerkythea did a poll on their site regarding professionals vs. hobbyist

Since Kerkythea is free, that certainly helps to attract more hobbyists. If it wasn't free you would probably see different numbers in that polls.

I really like the idea of having my software easily accessible and helpful to a wide range of people, so there are a lot of aspects of free software that I like. In fact it is this same spirit of trying to be accessible that was one big motivator for me to have my price so low as it is (relative to other CAD programs).

But I just don't see how I could sustain a business with a free product, or even something in the $20 or $40 range.

To give you another perspective, I have been working on MoI for 3 1/2 years so far...

- Michael

No worries Michael, I know how you feel. My uncle has been trying to start up his own game company for the past 3 years. He is just now getting to the point of distributing his product. As an "army of one" its not easy, especially with his wife supporting his dream. If he offered it for free he would be really screwed.

So yes, I understand the situation.

Michael G.

Stick to your guns lad! Go forward with things the way you need to. I plan on supporting you & MoI all the way!

Be not affraid!

Michael T.

Thanks Michael!

- Other Michael

Okay so summer is coming up and I may not have daily access to Maya since I do not plan to take any college courses so I chose Blender for my home use since it is free and I can only work part-time with school and portfolio development, etc. I got it installed tonight and I like it a lot, especially since it imported my Doric Column ngon .obj file without any problems. I tried a quick render in its ray-tracer then downloaded Indigo to try.

All I did was import my column, scale the default cube for use as my ground, switched the default Spotlight to a Sun light, saved out the indigo .xml file then closed Blender without even setting up materials and started the render. When I came back from dinner I got this...



Pretty simple. I see a lot of potential with this renderer. Next I will try Kerkythea, which can do both biased and unbiased renders. In the meantime I'm getting tired of waiting for renders and Quicktime encoding to complete on my main machine so I am setting up Ubuntu Linux on a spare 2.4Ghz machine with Blender, Indigo and Kerkythea for rendering as well as Cinelerra for video editing and Gimp for image editing. I want to see how far I can take this free software thing :)

Hi Joe, that's a great result for not much fussing around.

After you mess with Kerkythea, it would be cool to hear what your impressions are of how they compare.

- Michael

Joe,

It looks pretty good!

Jesse

Thanks Jesse, that was all indigo because I didn't add any custom materials. Very nice free alternative to Maxwell Render.

I did make some time last week to try out Kerkythea. On Linux the UI was a bit buggy, but I got some decent renders out of in in Windows XP. Definitely worth looking more into next week. I also plan to try out Yafray and hope to post some comparisons soon.