I'm a bit of an unusual user in that I go back to 3DSr4 for DOS in 1994 or 5, but I haven't been professionally using it for a long time (still in IT, but left art and game industry) and for the last 10 years or so I'll use it regularly for six months and then be off doing other things and it will be up to a year before I sit down again with something I want to do.
This time it's been actually a bit over a year, and I haven't been keeping close tabs so Mental Ray and iRay being gone and the new Arnold Renderer World caught me offguard.
Now I'd love to be corrected if I'm wrong, but what I see is I've lost two renderers that I could use for production work and they've been replaced by nothing - if I want something nice that isn't covered in watermarks I have to pay $600 for an Arnold license. So now I have a car that cost me another $1500, but if I want to actually drive it anywhere I have to pay another $600, a um carry the 2, 40% increase to have what I had last year? Even if you say Arnold is a better renderer overall, the way to do that is leave the users with what they had and give them the option of buying Arnold. And no matter what I'm going to be paying something, because if I want Mental Ray capability back I'll have to pay $300 for that.
Like I said love to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I work for another big Silicon Valley corporation a few miles away, and I can just see the Powerpoints about turning rendering into a new profit center.
