Windows version !

For me Blender is more complex than Modo, LW, Maya and almost everything else I ever laid my hands on. It somehow goes against my grain (even if the UI is much, much better now). But that's personal taste and how we differ.

Today, Eevee (the realtime rendering in Blender) produces better output in most cases than C3D can do in minutes or hours AND it has a modeling, animation, and rendering tools.

Here I don't agree. Eevee is made for Previz and that shows. Falcon is visually more appealing than Eevee and Cycles (albeit not as fast as Eevee). Falcon is an astonishing good renderer, it only lacks some stuff like SSS etc. That aside, I also like it better than Luxrender.

But other for Blender available renderers like Octane, Vray, Renderman and Redshift are on another level. And none of this is available for Cheetah directly.
 
I don’t want to turn this thread into a blender ad, but EeVee is plenty capable for production. I’ll bet you more production rendering has been done with EeVee than with every version of Cheetah 3d put together.

Maybe we need an ice cream cone challenge to show how with only days of work you can improve on this tutorial project…

(And no, you won’t be adjusting the depth of field interactively with the node system overlaid on a live preview of the rendered output.)

 
A few years ago there was a thread where most of the more knowledgeable folks on this forum tried as hard as they could to do smoke in Cheetah 3d (which is volumetric effect that is along with SSS perhaps the most asked for rendering feature in C3D and the entire justification for adding a whole new renderer…)

 
I still do not agree. And that there is stuff missing I mentioned myself, so no discrepancy there, and of course Eevee is better in something that Cheetah misses.

Volumetric (volumetric light) and SSS would have been implemented if Apple wouldn't have changed so much of the underlying tech. In the end we don't know if it really will happen.

We discussed this before. I do think that Martin could create a great modeler if he would concentrate only on that, but how many Cheetah users would have been left after such a step? How many would use it if it was just a modeler with some subpar free render engine included?
 
Windows has the largest market share, for sure, but the job of porting and maintaining the software for two operating systems would be enormous. Given that the good Doctor currently has to deal with multiple issues thrown upon him by Apple - i.e. converting to Metal for Graphics display and calculations, converting for the new M1 chipset, I doubt he has any available time. I for one would love a Linux port, but I'm just dreaming.
 
Not bad given the constraints, but it’s nothing compared to what I could achieve in a few minutes using 3ds Max in 2000. That video I linked is doing self-shadowing volumetric smoke in real time, and then doing a final render with polygons that are ~2 pixels.

You know how renders like this (or anything involving caustics) require a ridiculous amount of tweaking. Imagine how long it took the guy who did that tutorial to figure out the magic values he provides all the way through. Now imagine trying to do the same thing using Falcon (if it could even do this).
Here's an animation made five years ago when v7 public beta was released.
No smoke but dust, I think animated turbulence in transparency on a growing sphere, at that time I had no licence so the file wasn't saved.
 
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Where do you think we are now?

Now that question can be interpreted in different ways. How many users there are. Or "subpar render engine". Or both.

We can only speculate about how many Cheetah users there are, but probably you're right, not that many.

Falcon is in several ways an astonishing renderer. It just has a few can't dos and several restrictions, the worst of it that it can't handle sss (also more refraction rays really would help). That all those restrictions still exist has certainly to do with Martin's plans all rendered mute through Apple which threw a lot of work at him. We simply don't know what would be there and what not. Even so I wouldn't call it "subpar".

And we do both agree that Cheetah simply can't deliver the same production quality of Blender. But being completely honest, Cheetah's modeler, even with a lot of work involved, couldn't compete with what's possible in Blender (and if you look at the available plugins and what they can do, it outshines some of the pricey professional tools also. In addition there is a strong modeler out there, Silo, which is good software (albeit badly handled by neverwinter, who lost a lot of trust of their customers. Even they included a renderer now because there was obviously some demand). As a more specialized tool (modeling) the customer base would change and it had to deliver more to have some success (that it's only available for mac would be a serious hindrance, too, by the way). So I'm not so sure if your idea of changing Cheetah into a modeler really would be very successful. Im sincerely not convinced. There is probably a reason why Silo for a long time wasn't updated anymore and apps like Hexagon and others more or less died (Hexagon wasn't bad by the way, a lot of promise with rather simple use, and is probably, even being some 15 years old, almost without update, still the better modeler than Cheetah's. It died over at DAZ, probably because there wasn't enough money in it and for quite a time available for free (I'm not sure if it still runs on Win, for Macs it probably doesn't even run on Big Sur)).

Now, just for the sake of argument, lets say that your business model really would make sense and as a newly overhauled modeler Cheetah would be a raging success among mac users (alone that restriction weighs heavily). But that would also mean that a lot of actual Cheetah users would be left behind, imho. Martin, in my opinion, is not in it for the money, but seems to really care about his user base, especially for long time users, and it's probably more important to him to give them what they want (a better Cheetah with a renderer) than raking in more earnings. Also, in my book, as a somehow restricted but "full" app, Cheetah stays a good solution for learning purposes.

If it was only about the money, then both wouldn't make much sense, Cheetah as it is, Cheetah as a modeler alike. With far less effort he could create and sell some plugins for Blender and / or other 3d apps and stop the development of Cheetah all-together. Financially that would make the most sense, at least in the world of 3d, for a single programmer with restricted time and almost non-existing PR (blender-market would help a lot finding customers). Obviously that's not what Martin wants. And I deeply respect him for that (besides being a good developer).
 
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