Evolver + Autodesk = Free character models?

Hi all.

I just got this email this morning:

But the part that got me curious was these two parts:

All I'm saying is "Hmmmmmm"

 

autodesk is taking over the world, not exactly a good thing, their prices are usually impossible to afford by humble mortals

 

Because I love Autodesk, -1 for you dude
Because I love having everything from one place, -1 for you dude
Because they don't update Mudbox for Mac +1 for you, dude
Because they don't update Motionbuilder for Mac +1 for you, dude
Because they own both Max and Maya and do not even attempt to give Mac users a way to convert from Max, +1 for you dude

 

Monopolies suck - and Autodesk is on its way to creating one. I'm not happy about this ... I kind of liked Evolver but I don't see myself using Autodesk products (that would make me guilty of supporting a monopoly).

 

What would happend if they take over Blender.

 

3dsmax gets worse on every update imo! But it's kind of a standard, so people keeps using it to work with! Dont know about maya, but I guess since autodesk bought it, it haven't improved a lot

I'm entertaining the idea of switching to Modo + Messiah or something like that

I hope autodesk never buys zbrush! EVER!

 

Anybody ever tried to contact Autodesk support? I spent 20 minutes on hold, 10 minutes trying to get them to pull up my account since thats pretty much all this lady does at her job, pull up accounts and fwd calls and all they said was I didnt qualify for personal support - I had to use the email method. Yay.

After a week of support emails that take almost two days to get an answer back and them telling me to do crap that I've already done (and specified that I've already done in my emails) they finally tell me to just delete an ini file and let max regenerate it. That worked.

On the other hand the software I use at work called PDMS from Aveva - I call them up, get an answer in two rings and am talking to a professional that knows the software inside out. Done in 5 minutes.

Actually I haven't seen such horrible support from any company besides Autodesk. Even other big international companies.

 

i just hope that Autodesk never eats Zbrush and C4D !!

and i Totally agree with jashan.

 

Forget about Zbrush or C4D!

I actually had this "funny feeling" that Autodesk is getting ready to BUY OUT UNITY for the past few days...

If you look at all of Autodesk's acquisition and development in the past few years, it looks like they are increasing their presence to get into game development middleware market. From lighting to AI to visiblity to motion middlewares...what they are missing in all these tool chains is an multi-platform 3D game engine! And Unity is a perfect fit and looks very likely to be their acquisition target. I wouldn't be surprise in a year or two Unity to become part of Autodesk to be honest.

 

I don't that that Unity Technologies is for sale. Autodesk might want to buy Unity but that doesn't mean they can.

 

Maybe it wasn't before they took VC..

Now they have significant VC Autodesk can just make a crazy offer to them depending of course how much of Unity they own... That's pretty much how Alias ended up in Autodesk's hands... I don't doubt for a second the acquisition of Beast was to get leverage..

 

I like the free autodesk sculpting 3D app like sculptris on the ipad. It's actually fun to use.

 

Well the Godfather of AD will take a trip to Copenhagen then and make an offer they can't decline

 

kabab is right. Unity is pretty "vulnerable" right now. Now that they have venture capitalists on their back, after receiving $12 million investment just 1 month ago from WestSummit Capital and iGlobe Partners, these guys WANTS TO SEE THEIR INVESTMENT PAY OFF !! So its only a matter of time before Unity are acquired by Autodesk.

Looking at Autodesk's acquisition history -
Revit, got bought out for $133 million in cash.
Alias, got bought out for $197 million.
Softimage, bought for $35 million
NavisWorks, got bought out for $26 million (real time visualization primarily for the infrastructural/architectural industry similar to Unity)
Opticore AB, got bought out for $??? million (Opticore AB, based in Gothenburg, Sweden.Opticore is specialized in real time visualization primarily for the carmakers industry - similar to Unity).
Skymatter, bought for $?? million (Mudbox maker)
Kynogon, bought for $?? million (Kynapse artificial intelligence middleware)
Illuminate Labs, bought for $?? million (Beast lighting middleware)
Scaleform, bought for $?? million (UI middleware)

So, the "lows" are around $25 million, and the highs are around $200 million

I mean, think about it, if Autodesk offers Unity $200 million to buy them out (BBBIIIIIIG PAY DAY FOR INVESTORS!), do you think they would refuse? I think not !

 

This scenario would make a good movie, i could imagine tom cruise as autodesk's top manager, or even the Bawss ??

 

It's reality as soon as VC gets involved it's not longer a bunch switched on guys commando coding in the garage now the suits are involved and it's all about ROI...

I think that 12 million is the 2nd round they have taken... It actually worries me they need VC for a meager 12 million it says to me they have very slim margins given the amount of licenses they sell.

Btw autodesk pretty much bought opticore to get a bigger foot hold into mainly Ford and a few other car companies, I had a tinny bit of involvement in that :/

They will buy entire companies and technologies just as a means of have a way in to strategic clients e.g. E.A.

 

i paid 70$ for each character i exported. Doh.

 

Yeh totally. I thought the same when I first heard that news. "Gee, that $12 million seems kinda low". It made me thinks it might drive down the company evaluation if outside company wants to acquire Unity.

And I really hope Unity won't accept anything less than $200 million!! (personally I think UT will probably accept something like $60-80 million).

What worries me is what happen after Unity is acquired by Autodesk. First thing that will happen is Unity will become a yearly update cycle - eg. Autodesk Unity v2011, Autodesk Unity v2012, Autodesk Unity v2013..... which will make it extremely costly for us Independent developers who have to shell out update on a yearly basis.

Secondly, Autodesk will force all buyers to pay extra $1000 for their "Autodesk subscription advantage" - just to get update and support !!

And lastly, because of the tight yearly cycle, Unity's quality will go down considerably. Almost all the products acquired by Autodesk ended up being incremental improvement selling as new features in yearly release - development teams rarely get the time to implement new technologies or make fundamental changes to the software because of the yearly deadline, and comprehensive product testing also suffers considerably. Basically the development teams have less than 6 months to develop, while the other 6 months are for testing.

 

You guys are scaring me I dont want my favorite piece of software to Join the Adobe of the 3d World.

 

I can't believe someone actually still considers Messsiah an option!

Hell, on a Mac Messiah isn't even able to read the directory structure on your system unless you pull out and re-insert the dongle AFTER starting up the software! Their support sucks. I had to send 3 emails (initially, before the rest...) to get a refund and their replies come in the form of auto generated replies that say: "If you still struggle send us an email with the subject line 'I know it's not your fault, but please help me with...'"...and after I did what they demanded, including writing a report on what errors I got (S***, that report took me nearly 3 hours to write with all the problems I experienced) they simply ignored me from there on and i still didn't get my refund. I told them straight that I bought their full license for $40 and I feel cheated because the software is 100% unusable for me.

So this is the difference between the $3000 Maya and the $1200 Messiah: One works and makes my workflow super fast and has more features than what I am even aware of... the other one can't even open up a file without me having to manually eject and re-insert a USB dongle!?!!? What's up with that!?!?

So that is the mystery for me... why anyone on a Mac would want to use that worthless piece of $1200 software...
It is software like that that makes me root for Autodesk: "Woo-hoo! Go, guys go!"
But then you get Solo... which costs virtual nothing and apparently (going on heresay on this) it is quite good...

I'd say if Maya is not an option and you don't feel up to the challenge of Blender's learning curve then the next best alternative is Solo, not crap.

Edit:
P.s. After I wrote this I sent them yet another email to the email address they provided only to get an automated reply listing problem after problem after problem and I thought I'd share with you the part that p*sses me off so much. After days of trying to figure out how to make Messiah work, I found that their installation instructions is bogus, their solutions to the 'common problems' don't work, that some random guy on a forum found the answer (and this is just the registration process so far!) then when the program finally starts, it runs within Crossover and has no included help files as the Help option in the menu points to a site called readingisfun and the credits speak of mandatory car washes for the creators of the program.

Most annoyingly, though, is that you have to have your USB dongle with license file plugged in when you start the app but once it starts, you can browse your computer's hard drive but all folders are empty. To fix this, you have to physically eject the USB dongle and re-insert it back into the USB port in order for Messiah to be able to read the files on your hard drive. Now, before I figured this out, I sent them mails and got this automated reply (filled with incorrect troubleshooting info) that instructs me to follow all the (erroneous) steps before mailing them on another email address with the subject line:

And to make matters even worse, after I spent 3 days trying to figure out how to ACTUALLY register the product and another 2 days trying to figure out how to get the file system to work, I said "Enough!" I don't want this. I asked them for a refund, sent multiple emails, answered questions, wrote them up, as per their request, a list of problems I had... Spent around 10 hours in compiling emails for them to get my refund and then they simply stopped mailing me back and decided to keep my money anyways. First off, I consider that stealing my money by selling me software that doesn't work and not giving me a refund, but then, today, when I got their auto reply, I notice that they didn't even pay attention to what I told them and they are still sending out the automated message that DOES NOT solve the issues! They are still sending out bogus 'help' to people who wasted their money on this cr*p.

So I ask you, with software like that selling for $1200 but permanently being on sale (like for $200 today and $40 when I bought it), is it really a bad thing for Autodesk to rule the 3D world? I think not!

 

If Unity dudes, keep their strategies and plans, Unity will provably worth on the 500M+ (and more) in the future.
But even so, if Autodesk buys Unity, I'll stop using it and use an other engine, UDK or CryEngine are quite attractives.

 

Actually, I think it's not that much about the money but much more about getting support in entering the Asian markets. It's a whole different world there and it certainly helps working with people that have business experience as well as the relevant contacts in expanding to those markets.

Allowing Unity Technologies to sell out to Autodesk would not be wise from any perspective except pure mind- and heartless greed - and I don't see much greed in the people from UT or even the VC companies that UT works with. You see, selling out to Autodesk would drop what UT represents into meaninglessness. Basically it would be 3 guys taking the awesome dream that they have actually put into reality and flushing it down the toilet.

Keep in mind: Money by itself is not evil and neither are investors (at least not all of them ;-) ). Money just enables you to do things you can't do (easily) without it. Just like Unity ;-)

 

^^ that ;-) ... also to keep in mind: More and more people are becoming more and more aware of the power and responsibility in what kinds of products they use and support and what kinds of companies they support in doing so. The days where you could claim that "the evil others" are the problem and you are a powerless victim are really coming to a harsh end (harsh for those who maintain that illusion, and also harsh for those that take advantage from others living in that illusion).

I love Unity - but if Unity was no longer owned by a couple of guys that I trust but instead owned by Autodesk, any reason to use Unity (and there are lots of them) would be outweighed by the ugliness of supporting a company that just buys other companies and trashes them and their products, alongside disrespecting their customers. I found Evolver a rather interesting product - until I received that email message. Now I lost all interest. To me, Evolver is dead. Killed by greed.

We'll see how things turn out but Autodesk is one of those companies that I believe will at some point in time crash and burn. Kind of like what I also expect for Monsanto. This will not happen, of course, as long as too many people don't really care who they give their money to (and prefer blaming others instead of stepping up to their own power).

 

Completely agreed and by the way I'm aware of that monster (Monsanto) and what they do to our food (but that's an other very huge story/thread on its own). ^^

 

in response to the fears of Unity being bought out by Autodesk...

PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not let that happen! though i like some of the autodesk products, i do not like their business practices... not to mention that they really soured me on MAX with their recent release and all it's serious bugs and issues... i tried the 30 day demo and decided to uninstall it after a day.

as to blender being bought out, how can that happen? it's an open source gig and they're doing well enough on their own. besides, it is the answer to all those "max/maya is too expensive" issues.

though, if you really like blender (as i do) then support the people that take their time and money to keep it alive and donate if you can. even a dollar. if everyone that used blender donated a dollar, they would be able to keep making awesome.

 

Using the most basic company wealth calculation which is pretty widely accepted unity would need to be making $165 million a year profit for it to be worth $500 million....

 

Unity doesn't need to be making 165m in profit to worth 500m. They could for example make Unity worth 500m by improving their product and adding more developers/users to their boat. Imagine a company where lots of people depends on their product. It makes it very valuable. ^^

 

Well its certainly the case that the Evolver pro transport options are free at the moment, I just spent all day exporting characters.

 

Sure but 500million is a boat load of money... I mean imagine how good of an engine you could develops for that type of cash from scratch..

If someone is going to spend that kind of cash buying a company it needs to be making serious profits.

 

Isn't only the engine that will cost 500m. It's everything linked to it. The guys behind Unity ( the engine developers) the Unity users (like you and me), the clients (web players, etc). When lots of people depends on something (such as Unity), then it has a hell lot of value. That's why user base is as important as the revenue you make.
If Unity guys keeps improving Unity, adding more features and user base get even more large (those are my assumptions btw), by the time Unity4.0 when out, Unity will have such a value (around 500millions).

 

One thing that I Iike about Evolver is the variety of characters you can create. The thing I don't like about Evolver is how boring and doll-like the characters are. I'm a guy who prefers quality to quantity and the Evolver models really don't do it for me... I can now say what I said about Poser about a decade ago: "It looks so fake... I don't know how to express how bad it looks... It looks like Poser models". Poser used to be my benchmark for ugly and fake. Evolver is, now.

Foolish me... When I first heard of Union and releasing on closed platforms, I thought it meant we could make the game on our end and unity would release it on Playstation. Stupid me! Now when I heard that Evolver was bought by Autodesk I thought it meant they would be improving the quality of the models. Allowing us to make dwarves and elves instead of grown men dressing like dwarves and elves. Add more props and remove the need to paint tech onto your robot and have the metal all stretch and bend as the mouth opens up.

Stupid me again.

Did you see what they ACTUALLY bought Evolver for? They intend to allow you to paint characters into your scenes. Similar to Unity's tree system on terrains, they want to allow you to paint crowds in the same way. This to me says "background extras" not "quality improvements". I don't see Evolver getting any worse, I simply see the exact same product now being available inside of Maya just like so many people on these very forums are always going on about Unity having a built in modelling feature... so now Autodesk has a built in character generator...

The real bonus here, though, is if you just paint one character. Then you basically start of with a fully rigged, textured model and you can just go ahead and modify it to your heart's content. The one thing that Evolver dos NOT allow you to do. For instance, right now, I am in the market for a super-deformed guy in a suit. I need him to have wavy hair and anime style eyes. Evolver can give me a guy in a suit but unless I am useless with it, I don't see it allowing me to scale the head up to 2x normal size while scaling the body features down 25%.

All I'm saying is the free transports for the time being is great for noobs begging for free models. Generic as those models are, I can't see myself making use of the offer. I'll just have to wait and see how things turn out. either it stays the same or it gets better. How this conversation went into the realms of Autodesk Unity... I don't know! If you read the article on how and why this company got started and you see where they are at now, I don't think you need to worry about that until Johachim and the other top dogs retire... at least.

So yeah, stop fearing the improbably possible future and keep your eyes focused on Evolver and let's see if they manage to make it better or not...

 

You are dreaming if you think Unity is worth or will be worth anything like that amount...

Alias only went for $180 million and they had orders of magnitude more paying customers, massive support contracts and very strategic automotive and entertainment accounts.

Softimage $36 million i think..

Solidworks dassault paid like $300 (in 1997) and that business makes some serious cash...

Unity in today's market I'd be surprised if they got over $50 million for it (which is nothing to scoff at).... $500 million is a massive amount of money and no share holders will approve an acquisition of that size unless there is some massive revenue behind it regardless of the people behind the company, userbase or features...

 

Sigh...

Autodesk already owns Maya, 3DS Max, AutoCAD, and so much more...

They own the 3D world now. Did someone say MONOPOLY?

 

I don't know where this number comes from, but it's a bit silly.

If a company can easily last for 10 years with a stable income, it only needs $50 million a year to be worth $500 million.
There are scores of people who would love a company which profits them $500 million over 10, 20, or even 50 years.

Longevity of a company, IMO, is as important as its "value" (however that is determined).

To be honest, I don't really believe you can put a value on a business. It's more of a GAMBLE than a VALUE. No one knows if the business will prosper forever, raise or decrease yearly, or crumble within the year. That's why I call it a gamble.

"Using the most basic company wealth calculation which is pretty widely accepted unity would need to be making $165 million a year profit for it to sell for a gamble of $500 million." or something closer to that, probably with more use of the word "gamble", lol.

 

Maybe when big giants like EA crumble, it'll happen. As long as these corporate monsters live, they will almost definitely be buying Autodesk products for the sole reason of "That's what you use!"

I mean, I naturally assume Autodesk's biggest revenue is from major gaming or animation companies like EA, Pixar, Activision, Disney.


If only we could fall back to the days where PC games were made by small underfunded indie teams. Oh wait, I guess they still are! Hehe, they just have to compete with the giants, which IMO is happening in a very great way thanks to Steam Google Android.

 

Not today, my assumptions are for the future of Unity (if they keep improving Unity, adding more features, making it more robust and stable, getting more AAA studios and user base) yes, they will worth something crazy on those lines.

 

MONO-POLY? You mean MULTI-POLY? ^^

 

It's not a gamble its a straight up business traction which gets done day in day out its not some kind of voodoo...

I've been personally involved with 4 acquisitions one of which was a company I started...

Usually when negations start they take the companies profit and multiply it by 3 and work from there its very standard practice ask any M&E banker/lawyer/accountant....

 

well its realy nice that the avatars arer free now, i downloaded one myself but:

it has 86.000 polygons!!!!

isnt helpful for gamedesign right? xD


Greetz
Robert

 

What transport option did you use? You should be able to get the meshes in multiple different levels of polygon count, and even the high-res ones tend to be well below 86,000 ploys.

You haven't downloaded a version that includes all of the levels of detail in a single model file have you?

 

I first tried Evolver some weeks back, and I was underwhelmed by the character customisation. Its not very sophisticated at all, there are lots of limitations and not enough base content. This, along with not being confident enough about how the output formats would turn out, prevented me from spending any $ exporting.

However, once Id been able to test the exporting for free, I thought it was worth the time creating half a dozen or so characters and exporting them in a variety of formats. It does certain kinds of characters just fine, and I think there is scope to do further customisation of the exported model files using other tools.

I think the main things it has going for it right now are the wide range of export options, and the licenses offered. I've been appalled by the terms conditions attached to models that can be generated by most character customisation software to date, say for example the cost of getting stuff out of Quidam that can be used in games.

 

well thanks elbows i think im kinda blind xD

just opened the file, saw the count and closed cinema xD
had not much time to look at it in detail...

yes it has all levels...

Greetz
Robert

 

No problem.

Forgot to mention in my list of Evolver positives, the ability to export facial expressions as either bones or blend shapes.

 

just to know: is evolver going to be free forever after autodesks current plannings?

I cant imagine that thr spent milions just to have a website where every one can built characters for free...?
I can simply build one and animate with animeeple, i dont even have to change settings it just works....
No need for maya or 3ds....

 

I imagine that this is mainly directed at Arch-Viz clients.

 

Free till end of August. I think they intend to ask users to share textures for free, though. No more selling of textures, but just free sharing thereof.

Weird thing is, I thought I'd at least get myself 1 free transport so I have a fully rigger character for later use so I went there and funny thing... my transport cost me $39. Way to go free! ????

Yeah, last couple of days I have been having issues with Mixamo also. The plugin doesn't work. I uploaded my model 8 times, left the plugin in LOADING mode for a total of 3 hours... nothing. So I sent them an email and the guy told me to check my logs. Turns out the HTML page is waiting for a callback and checks for it every 2 seconds but it never finds it so... nothing! They guy said the guy doing the plugin will be back next week so I just have to sit tight... See, they have this free tool to create skeletons and skin your mesh with them... Awesome! Apparently it takes minutes to get a lifeless mesh to a fully rigged model that is ready to have Mixamo motions applied... It takes minutes... I just have to sit tight for a few days until the tech guy comes back and fixes the plugin...

So instead I just used the t-pose from a motion library I have and skinned the model myself. Done. And today I get an email from another guy at Mixamo saying that he noticed my upload and that I didn't rig the character. He asked if I had any problems with the plugin and informed me that he took the liberty to rig it for me. He even attached a free motion to it and I can now just download it and enjoy. Isn't that awesome!?!? One of the guys on their end took my model, put it through the free rigging tool they provide and gave me a free motion as a bonus. Now I just have to pay $49 to download my model that I uploaded!

Awesome....! ...wait... what????

 

Has anyone tried using MakeHuman for game development? http://www.makehuman.org/ - I think now that Evolver is "on the dark side", it would be nice to be able to use MakeHuman instead. Last time I tried, the meshes were kind of crazy but I'm sure that there should be solutions to that ;-)

 

@MrDude: i cant tell u about the mixamo thing but for evolver: there are still paid parts, like facial animation costs 30$, u may selected this in download and annother thing for 9$ but i dont know what....

@jashan: i tried makehuman, realy nice models but the polycount is like for movie renderings


Greetz
Robert

 

Its not true that facial animation still costs $30 at Evolver right now, its free, they just have the old prices left in various descriptions on the site.

Using Cheetah3d I have been able to export Evolver facial morphs as Obj files that work well with the Mega-Fiers morph stuff. I was very pleased to discover that this co-exists just fine with the rigged animated .fbx version of the model in Unity, so my character has all forms of animation available within Unity without any obvious problems. Yay.

 

Yeah , the Mixamo thing they explained to me though. It is free to rig the character and see how well it works, but the service is not free. Free to rig it, but costs you to buy back the rigged model. Now that they explained it, now it's no longer a shock. At first, they said "try it for free" then the plugin didn't work so I never got to do anything. Next thing you know they tell me they did it for me and I owe them $50 to get the model back. THAT was a bit of a surprise! Again, now that they explained the whole "rig for free first, then pay to keep your changes" business model, now all is fine.

With regards to Evolver... I was a bit confused because when I got the email, I went to check it out, was able to get to the transport option but it failed to do the actual transport. When I went back again the last time to try it again so I can at least have one working model... now suddenly the transport screen is asking for money... Well, I figured that since I don't really care for that level of quality anyways I wouldn't bother any further and so I didn't. Having them rig my models is a nice option for when I am feeling lazy and having motions available that I don't have to run through 3 separate programs (especially difficult now that Motionbuilder is no longer available on Macs and that was usually the first step...) to convert it into a usable format... that is nice.

I think I'll just stick to using the rigging service (now and then) and now and then get a motion (that I don't feel like converting from my current motion library) but I don't see myself loosing any sleep over the models, though. I am still curious over how Maya is going to incorporate the Evolver tech, though... Native or plugin or like the Unity - Maya experience where you have to have two programs to use the one file ... Very curious to see how they implement this tech and what they are going to do with it... but if they just leave the models as is and only allow you to paint them into the scenes as is... then this is really, really boring news...