Indigo Going Commercial

Stinkie

If they introduce a couple of improvements - especially speed wise, as Indigo's even slower than Maxwell - while retaining the ease of use we have Whaat to thank for, then Indigo will be well worth it's price. Keep in mind, too, there's an Indigo exporter for Blender. Handy for those of us who need to render heavy scenes every now and then. Fry, Maxwell and Vray (not the SU one) don't have Blender plugs - one needs to buy Max, Maya ...

Huge plus for Indigo, IMO.

xrok1

i think most people that use blender do so because its free not because its user friendly. so i can't imagine them getting a free modeller that has free options for rendering, then pay $500 for a renderer???? besides, as long as kerkythea exists who would buy indigo (even though i prefer it)? Now maybe if someone got realistic and solid indigo for $100 while with $25 of that going to the exporter writer, they might get somewhere. otherwise i think their shooting themselves in the head (never mind the foot). its unrealistic to go from free to $500 with no points in between, considering the alternatives out there???????

Stinkie

@xrok1 said:

i think most people that use blender do so because its free not because its user friendly. so i can't imagine them getting a free modeller that has free options for rendering, then pay $500 for a renderer????

My point was that if you'd want to render high poly models with either Fry or Maxwell, you'd also have to shell out for an expensive modeling app - which puts quite a bit of extra strain on the old budget. Indigo does not have this handicap.

kwistenbiebel

@ecuadorian said:

Indigo: 595€ = $774

VRay for SketchUp: $720
http://vray.us/vray_for_sketchup.shtml

Vray for SU is quite buggy and limited compared to the C4D and MAX version, but it definitely outrules an unbiased render engine.

For a render engine that was free once, Indigo now is very expensive

Stinkie

@kwistenbiebel said:

Vray for SU is quite buggy and limited compared to the C4D and MAX version, but it definitely outrules an unbiased render engine.

Yeah, it's a pretty good app. They should make it work outside of SU, though. And obviously get rid of the bugs. (Imagine, for a moment, that car manufacturers had the same, err, work ethos as software devs. )

@kwistenbiebel said:

For a render engine that was free once, Indigo now is very expensive

True. Yet no-one's stopping you from continueing to use the latest free version - which, all in all, is pretty good. Also, it's too early to judge whether Indigo's too expensive or not.

Time they produced a feature list.

remus

It's done: http://www.indigorenderer.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1&t=5764

Stinkie

Guess who got a license?

sepo

So can you tell us what is the difference between commercial and free one.

Stinkie

I can't just yet - can't get the license thingy to work. Will be sorted.

From what I read on the beta forum it's considerably faster than the previous version, though. Someone even said he'd noticed a 23 % speed increase.

Can't wait for the license and the updated exporter. Whaat, get to it! Chop, chop!

kwistenbiebel

So you bought it without knowing what you will get?
Want to buy my car?

Stinkie

@kwistenbiebel said:

So you bought it without knowing what you will get?

Now you mention it.

There are a couple of things I know from experience, though:

really good engine
really good exporter that allows for fast 'n intuitive material making

Don't mind me - just trying to rationalise my actions.

That car, is it, like, really really really cool? Oh ... a car, how I'd love a car! Shall I pay you up front? Wouldn't that be handier for you? I mean, I don't want to make things complicated for ya. A car, dang, that'd be handy! It's got a nice color, doesn't it? Yeah, I'm sure it does! Oh man, I can totally picture myself cruising around in my new cool car! I'm gonna have the coolest ride on the block!

Sold!

kwistenbiebel

I bought fryrender on basically the same conditions (pre release / half price).
One and a half year later I rarely use it anymore because of a lack of Sketchup plugin development.
I told myself not to jump on the same wagon again.

Stinkie

Well ... one cannot predict the future. You always take a chance when you buy an app. Even if you're not an early buyer - I know, I got Maxwell.

Now there's a plugin that doesn't seem to be going anywhere.

remus

From my quick browse of the beta forum i think it also has motion blur, which is quite cool. Not sure if whaat has managed to work this in to skindigo, though.

p.s. Got my license as well, first renderer i've ever shelled out for Hopefully my investment is well spent.

kwistenbiebel

I must admit that I find unbiased render engines not fast enough to spend (big) money on.
Image quality is great, yes, but the hardware is never good enough to be feasible.

On the other hand, Whaat's Skindigo is a great plugin .
I wish the other render engines would work in a similar way. Double click a SU material, choose a preset, change some numbers and hit render. A 12 year old can do it.

Stinkie

@kwistenbiebel said:

I must admit that I find unbiased render engines not fast enough to spend (big) money on.
Image quality is great, yes, but the hardware is never good enough to be feasible.

You are right. But only to a degree, I think. I wouldn't use an unbiased engine if were a pro. Time is money - thus I'd use Vray. Yet, I am not a pro. I am solely in it for the pretty pictures. So at least in my case, going unbiased is a logical choice.

@kwistenbiebel said:

On the other hand, Whaat's Skindigo is a great plugin .
I wish the other render engines would work in a similar way. Double click a SU material, choose a preset, change some numbers and hit render. A 12 year old can do it.

Yes, it is quite the little gem. I've actually bought both SDS and PB out of gratitude. Like you, I wonder why other devs do not adopt Whaat's wysiwyg approach. God knows there's quite a few render engines out there that could do with a straightforward mat editor.

jeff hammond

so there's a mac version out now.. problem is, i can't get any of my models in there... the app seems to open fine but skindigo doesn't work with OS X..

is there another way to get .skps into indigo or is the exporter the only way to do it?

Whaat

@unknownuser said:

so there's a mac version out now.. problem is, i can't get any of my models in there... the app seems to open fine but skindigo doesn't work with OS X..

is there another way to get .skps into indigo or is the exporter the only way to do it?

Hi Jeff,

I am currently working hard on SkIndigo OSX. Please be patient as there a lot of things to fix for it to work properly on Mac.

As of now, the only way to use SkIndigo on a Mac is to use bootcamp or equivalent.

I hope to have a working Mac version out within a couple of weeks.

Dale

jeff hammond

oh nice.
thanks for the info and good luck with figuring out your new mac

no rush..

kwistenbiebel

@unknownuser said:

@kwistenbiebel said:

I must admit that I find unbiased render engines not fast enough to spend (big) money on.
Image quality is great, yes, but the hardware is never good enough to be feasible.

You are right. But only to a degree, I think. I wouldn't use an unbiased engine if were a pro. Time is money - thus I'd use Vray. Yet, I am not a pro. I am solely in it for the pretty pictures. So at least in my case, going unbiased is a logical choice.

I just ran a render in Indigo (skindigo 1.09 version when things were still free) for 10 hours on a 8 core Mac Pro and there is still too much noise to be presentable. The original was 2000Xsomething and I needed to downsize and denoise it a lot.

A biased engine would render the same image clean in about an hour. Even for a hobby I would prefer that.

The Indigo result:

I am not saying that unbiased is bad. As a matter of fact, I liked using Indigo in my spare time ..... I just think that one should be careful spending a lot of money on it.