Altair Inspire Render and Studio version 2019.3 is now available

[The_human]

really no reply after 7 days ?! is here forum?!

Hi The_Human, sorry for not replying you sooner, I really missed this. My fault.
Regarding your questions:

thanks for your reply, I hope to see the official version soon

[claudio]

thanks for your reply, I hope to see the official version soon

What do you mean?
The official version 19.3 is already available.

The Inspire Render page is here:
https://solidthinking.com/product/inspire-render/

where you can register to download a trial version.
Once registered you also have access to tutorials and other material.

Thanks,
-Claudio

[Robert]

Altair has been a huge success...at pretty much destroying a very loyal and energetic user base.
I hope the original creators of Thea got a nice payday out of the deal....really good guys with tons of vision.

[claudio]

Altair has been a huge success...at pretty much destroying a very loyal and energetic user base.
I hope the original creators of Thea got a nice payday out of the deal....really good guys with tons of vision.

Hi Robert, thank you for you feedback.

Have you tried Inspire Render?
Can you give us a feedback on what works what not for you?

Thanks,
-Claudio

[3DCGdesign]

destroying a very loyal and energetic user base.

Hi Claudio, he was not commenting on Inspire. He was lamenting the loss of a vibrant community. Large companies do not understand or care about community. They wait for a community to grow big enough for them to notice, buy their product out from underneath them, and then hang the community out to dry... big companies do not learn. But then, that is a bonus for the communities, as they will find another community.

A big company thinks the community will buy their next (usually) over-priced product which is usually stripped down and not an improved version, and this may be the case for a few users... they may follow along. But the community, the people who came together to enjoy and share around the product, they were there for something more, and this loss is felt and is real.

The exception I can see may be V-ray who somehow manages to maintain a vociferous community. But of course my guess is more than 80% of their user base is on cracked software. Also, I see a large community around Autodesk products, but as a former member of that community myself, I left them because I did not like the way Autodesk products price-gouge and do very little to actually improve their product or listen to their community.

[claudio]

destroying a very loyal and energetic user base.

Hi Claudio, he was not commenting on Inspire. He was lamenting the loss of a vibrant community. Large companies do not understand or care about community.

I'm sorry but I'm still confused.
Are we talking about large companies in general?
About Altair specifically?

Thanks,
-Claudio

[mrwip]

Hi Claudio,

To be Honest, I think he's talking about both cases. The whole Thea + Altair adventure is a typical example of what happens in this kind of situation.

1 - Thea was a small "family" business with a large and really committed and dynamic community, bringing a new and efficient tool (2010- )
2 - It evolves at a fast pace, releasing new exiting things rather often, being at the edge of technology (2010-2014), with Presto being the most shiny example of that
3 - To go further it needs more founding and a stronger sales department (2014-2016)
4 - A big actor of the market seize the opportunity to buy a nice piece of software, promising everyone that the future will be bright and that everything will grow fast and nicely.
5 - They buy the tool and lock everything into their own convoluted management system.
6 - The link between users and developer really quickly fades away, less and less announcement are made, people of the original team are tied up with complex NDA and Company Business Objectives that are far from their hands.
7 - The Company follows it's own agenda, giving this new little tool a small seat in a big amphitheatre full of their other products .
8 - It often ends the same :
- The tool become a rentware program to match the cash flow objective of the big company .
- Development is really slow and obscure (no more roadmaps or clear objectives).
- The community feels abandonned and slowly turns somewhere else ( even if they keep on using the tool).

Honestly, we all saw it happens to many products, Sketchup being one of the most "cliché" example, and I think we all feel a bit sad that more or less the same thing happened to Thea.

Inspire Render is sadly a good example of this distance between most original users and the objectives of a big Company that is used to do something else entirely. I know you guy works hard on this tool, and this post is not intended to blame or hurt, but it is nowhere near what Archviz users (the base original users) needs. The tool is complex, hard to use, and far from what other actor of the sector are proposing (Lumion, Twinmotion, Enscape).

[dbalex]

100% what Jean said.

We had something that worked well (studio) and it's now gone, we had an opportunity to use thea in blender, 3dsmax,... gone. We had contacts with the developers and a responsive forum > gone and we had a pace of development > gone.

Even the new v3 beta program takes forever to start, why?

I was seriously interested in inspire render and even made a long list of feature-requests and all, but the software isn't for me and not responsive for big archviz scenes like the studio was. And the future doesnt seem too bright either as you promised a 3 months release, I didn't see any news since a lot longer then 3 months. To be objective, I don't know how many bought inspire render but it shouldn't be so much people as there is no post at all in that part of the forum.

I'm so loving thearender that I'm trying to learn c4d as it's the only software that supports animation and you can render with thea. But I'm afraid you're going to drop that one too as it's getting hardly any response on the c4d forum from the development.

Don't get me wrong, I looove thea and for me it's still the best quality/speed ratio for my workflow. That's why I'm still here while many others already left. I'm just testing other renderers as I'm afraid the future is not so bright for us old theausers. I'm still hoping for a change and a boost in development and communication but I don't see that happen anytime soon.

Could you just put a v2 studio with filmic and denoiser? I would buy that for sure, no need for extra crazy features. Just the old studio with filmic and denoiser for the archviz user and compatible with the latest thea4su plugin, count on me to buy that one and render some nice animations out of all my still scenes I made over the years working with thea.

[d4m4rk]

Could you just put a v2 studio with filmic and denoiser? I would buy that for sure, no need for extra crazy features. Just the old studio with filmic and denoiser for the archviz user and compatible with the latest thea4su plugin, count on me to buy that one and render some nice animations out of all my still scenes I made over the years working with thea.

99% sure that's not gonna happen but still +1

[3DCGdesign]

No offense intended toward you, personally, Claudio.
We've just all seen this movie before.