5D
Midphase
While I agree with you that you shouldn't give money to Maxon, I think you're missing out by not considering 3rd party render engines. The entire industry works on them, and I like to believe that they have done their research and determined that it is the best solution.
and another good point........
In general yes, it is indeed a good point.
But on the other hand, from a company perspective, as Autodesk grabbed Arnold and Maxon got Redshift, no DCC vendor should be too dependent on a third party renderer which is owned by their immediate competitor. I also think, from the user side, that it is an uneasy situation not having a usable internal renderer. This is literally the situation with C4D when you're doing anything more complex than a few cubes.
Additionally, there is a massive move happening towards individual artists for years, when the indie licenses came up in the first place, and Sidefx being one of the first, most prominent and very generous one.
A big chunk of the artists using these indie licenses live in less developed countries, with subscriptions for renderers ranging from 300-600+ Euros per year with no indie pricing anywhere, this leads to a dead end in a lot of cases, when you can create mind blowing stuff but incapable to render it because you can't afford render tokens or the licenses to run on multiple machines.
But even in western countries, especially with covid having put the industry in total chaos, it is a big question if you want to put up several thousand euros when you don't know what's gonna happen in two months. This year, so far, was totally crazy, in my case.
I can tell you a little personal story. I started a project in April, which should've been done within two weeks. But several months later I'm still stuck because of some communication issues between agency and client. I initially subscribed for a month to C4D and Redshift because C4D's internal renderer is a huge POS. Now I've got to extend the license and constantly remind the agency of this expense and defend it over and over.