September 7, 2018in News 41 Likes

Software Licensing: Subscription vs Buy Once Software Pricing Models

Software Licensing: Subscription vs Buy Once Software Pricing Models

Software licensing and pricing structures can be confusing, especially if you’ve never purchased corporate licenses or a subscription before. Twenty years ago, perpetual licenses were the only way to buy software. You bought your license up front, and you had the right to use it indefinitely. You may have paid for implementation services and a support contract, but you never had to pay any more to use the software.

As we entered the end of the 2000s, some corporate software began to be offered through the subscription licensing model. Adobe’s Creative Suite as well as Autodesk have moved to this subscription pricing model.

It’s the difference between leasing and buying a car. You still need to pay to service the car/software, but with the subscription model, you get new software versions as they’re released. With a perpetual license, you’re usually stuck on the version you purchased, though the company may offer an upgrade with a fee.

In today’s world with the shift toward Software as a Service (SaaS) solutions and the prevalence of cloud computing, subscription licenses are the norm within CAD software, design software and beyond. There are few perpetual license options still available, especially for corporate software solutions. However, if you do have a choice, which model is right for your company?

Why Choose Subscription Software Licensing?

There are many benefits to a subscription model, and for many solutions, you can only choose a subscription-based option. Advantages include:

— You’ll always have the latest version of the software available. Upgrades are included in the monthly or annual cost. If you need to have the latest version of your software, this is a huge benefit to subscription licensing. • Flexibility — You can add or move licenses monthly, expanding your business as needed. If you only need the software for a short time, this can also be a great way to cut down on costs. • Reduce Capital Expenditures — There’s no expensive up-front cost with a subscription software license. You simply pay on a monthly or annual basis, instead of paying hundreds or thousands of dollars for an expensive perpetual license.• Your software stays current

With all these benefits why would you choose a perpetual license?

Why Buy a Perpetual Software License?

There’s a reason perpetual software models have become less common. Software updates at a much quicker pace today than it did even a decade ago. That requires agility in both hardware and software. Keeping the same basic piece of software for a long life cycle isn’t feasible anymore.

Perpetual licenses can make sense if you intend on keeping a computer for a long time and you don’t foresee a need for updates. If you plan to be away from the Internet for long periods, some subscription-based software requires a connection for verification, so a perpetual license might be necessary. Finally, you can save money in the long run with a buy-once license. If you already own an expensive license, it might be worth keeping it until you need to switch over to a subscription.

Neither model is inherently better than the other, but subscription software is undoubtedly taking over. Holdouts like Autodesk and Microsoft are even switching over to mostly subscription models. It won’t be too long before perpetual licenses are gone forever.

September 7, 2018in News 41 Likes

BOXX Overclocking: Fixing the Lottery

BOXX Overclocking: Fixing the Lottery

 

You may already know this, but in the PC enthusiast world, there is something known as “the silicon lottery.” This refers to the variable nature of overclocking Intel’s K-chip processors. Due to slight variations in the manufacturing process, there’s no guarantee that, for example, all 7700K processors will be able to safely maintain a voltage above the stated turbo max frequency of 4.5GHz; some will, some won’t. For the average consumer, the only way to find out is to try. However, experimentation frequently comes with consequences, which could easily compromise your workflow. With that in mind, BOXX has gone ahead and fixed that lottery for you.

Take our APEXX S3. Thanks to our seasoned engineers, rigorous stability testing, and liquid cooling, we guarantee speeds up to 4.8GHz (across all six cores) for every single S3 we sell. Even better, our engineers work closely with elite motherboard vendors to design a custom BIOS that streamlines our run-in process and ensures continued stability

In light of all this (and in celebration of the 40th anniversary of their famous 8086 microprocessor), our strategic partners at Intel have provided us with a finite amount of Intel Core i7-8086K Limited Edition Processors, their fastest chip ever. So of course, our BOXXLabs engineers went one step further and professionally overclocked these processors to 5.0GHz. Now we offer them in our new APEXX Special Edition workstation. Available for a limited time only (or while supplies last, as the marketers, are prone to say) APEXX SE reaches 5.0GHz across all six of its cores, making it ideal for CAD, 3D modeling, animation, and a host of other professional applications.

Winning the lottery has never been easier.

September 2, 2018in News 41 Likes

Communicating Early Phase Projects with Lumion 8

Communicating Early Phase Projects with Lumion 8

Create an artistic result that best represents your design concept.

During the initial stages of a building project, your client wants to see how the design concept is progressing. Nothing new there. What is new is how you can present your concept for client feedback. You have a solid sketch on paper and created some models using SketchUp (or similar application) but now you need a concept rendering. Not a photorealistic final, just a solid representation of your design with enough style and detail to communicate with the client. This is where Lumion 8 comes in. Equipped with a variety of tools, this increasingly popular application provides the capability to create artistic 3D renders which accurately depict your design. The result allows your client to develop a clear, overall understanding of your design before they offer feedback.

Styles enable conceptual renders in an instant

Lumion enables you to create images, videos, and 360 panoramas, but when it comes to conceptual renders, the coolest feature is the Styles preset button. With just a click, balanced combinations of effects can be instantly added to your design, eliminating the need to combine or further tweak effects. Simply choose the style you want and in a matter of seconds, you’ll have a professional image.

Most architects don’t want their drawings to look as if they were created using a one-size-fits-all template, so thankfully, the Lumion 8 Styles preset provides the tools you need to personalize your conceptual render. With the click and drag of your mouse, you can apply pre-configured effects which provide a genuine customized appearance. Styles iterations are also extremely easy. To reverse any Styles effects you’ve already applied to your design, simply double-click the handy undo/remove button located to the right of the effect. If you want to temporarily turn on/off an effect, click on the eye icon.

The Process

After you have imported a basic model into Lumion, you’ll have countless options to consider when creating a conceptual render. The best place to start is with Outlines and the best place to learn more about this effect is in this Lumion tutorial video. Once you have Outlines down, you can combine them with different effects and styles to achieve your desired result.

Although some architects may want to immediately leapfrog into photorealism, remember that we’re talking about conceptual renders here and photorealistic renders can take a lot of time. Photorealism is still a great way to present concept designs, but for a faster alternative, why not try a more artistic approach? Oil Painting simulates oil painting canvas brush strokes for an impressionistic feel. Pastel Sketch provides a softer, smoother look with quieter tones and colors, as well as blurred outlines. Watercolor simulates the look of impressionistic watercolor complete with color bleeds and when you combine this effect with Outlines, you’ll achieve that classic architectural concept look where your building design pops out of its colorful background. Sketch provides a true, hand-drawn look while also enabling you to easily remove the color if you want a black & white rendering. Manga simulates Japanese-style animation where colors pop and straight lines and model form are emphasized. Cartoon is just what the title implies, bringing your model into the animated world with soft colors and spatial distinction. Blueprint is also just as its name implies, presenting your design at its most basic.

The Lumion Styles preset (and Outlines effect), are ideal for creating visually striking conceptual renderings—especially in the early phase of a project where you want to put your best foot forward while still keeping stakeholder conversations focused on the form and function of your design.

September 1, 2018in News 41 Likes

Configuring the Ultimate Cinema 4D Workstation

Configuring the Ultimate Cinema 4D Workstation

 

CINEMA 4D, the popular 3D modelling and animation application, offers a wide variety of features accommodating various workflows, meaning a one-size-fits-all workstation configuration does not exist. With the help of lead 3D Modeller and Cinema 4D expert Shane Benson, we’ll look at the most common workflows so you can determine the right configuration for your C4D workflow.

 

GETTING TO THE CORE(S)

3D modelling within Cinema 4D is a single-threaded task or frequency bound (meaning that it predominantly uses only one core). Since the frequency of that core determines performance more than any other variable, a workstation with fewer cores (but higher frequency) is ideal. The process of building up meshes, extruding polygons, and manipulating vertices utilise only one CPU core. If you use C4D primarily for modelling, spending money on a dual CPU workstation with dozens of CPU cores is a waste of money. You’ll never use those additional cores. Since your workstation requires an operating system (OS), you’ll need two cores dedicated to the OS and the balance of cores reserved for content creation tasks. Because a workstation with a high-frequency CPU most benefits your 3D modelling workflow, the safely overclocked BOXX APEXX S3 C4D workstation is an excellent choice.

 

ANIMATION

Like 3D modelling, animation is a single-threaded task (or frequency bound), so if it’s your primary task, multiple CPU cores will (once again) be of little help. Workstations with higher CPU clock speeds perform much better at these tasks, so single socket APEXX S Class and APEXX T Class  workstations are ideal choices for your animation workflow. “Because the Cinema 4D workflow is mostly single-threaded, it makes sense to have fewer cores and higher clock speeds,” says Benson. “Any additional cores will be sitting idle while you are modelling, animating, or rigging. C4D only uses all available cores when rendering.” and

 

RENDERING

When choosing your CINEMA 4D workstation, consider that unlike 3D modelling and animation tasks, rendering your C4D assets is a highly multi-threaded process, therefore, the more CPU cores in your system (or systems) the better. C4D users have a variety of rendering engines to choose from. In addition to traditional CPU rendering, GPU-accelerated rendering is also a possibility and like CPU rendering, benefits from multiple cores.

GETTING GRAPHIC “On message boards, forums, and social media, C4D users often complain about the application being slow, and even after upgrading their machines, they see no improvement,” says Benson. “For example, they’ll discuss slow viewport speed, especially when using a very dense mesh or trying to cut holes in the mesh using a boolean. Their solution is to buy a bigger and faster GPU, however, this is incorrect because C4D does not use the GPU for boolean operations. Like the other modelling tools, it’s a single-threaded task, so throwing money at a bigger, faster GPU will not improve viewport performance.” Another misconception is that the key to improving C4D performance lies in a double precision GPU. “Many C4D users think a big, beefy GPU with double precision will accelerate performance,” says Benson, “but that’s not the case. C4D uses the CPU for computation.” Benson is quick to add, however, that the application does take advantage of double precision on the CPU. According to him, the limited availability of double precision (as well as reduced speed compared to single precision on GPUs) is one reason why MAXON is not making use of the GPU outside of OpenGL.

“Remember when Apple came out with the new trashcan style Mac Pro? Everyone was raging over it because it had two workstation-class GPUs,” says Benson. “Many C4D users were ready to jump ship from their PC workstation over to the new Mac Pro. The idea was that those dual GPUs were really going to make C4D come to life. What most of them didn’t know was that Cinema 4D does not require a dual GPU system. It will only use one GPU, (whichever one is driving the monitor). You can have four or five GPUs in a machine and C4D will still only use one. Third-party render engines like Octane Render and NVIDIA Iray have been ported and bridged over to C4D and these engines can use multiple GPUs. However, they will only be used for rendering when using those particular render engines. If a user does not have any of those GPU render engines, then having multiple GPUs with C4D would be useless. Many C4D users were very disappointed with the new Mac Pro, believing that its dual AMD FirePro graphics cards were really going to shine, not knowing C4D would only take advantage of one of them.”At large VFX or animation studios, this type of confusion can be an unfortunate byproduct of the relationship between the C4D user and IT personnel. A VFX artist may have to rely on an inadequate workstation which causes C4D to run slowly or the rendering and simulation processes to take hours. The user then pleads their case to IT which responds by purchasing the most fully-loaded system on the market. But it’s unnecessary since a mid-low-end NVIDIA Quadro card works fine in many workflows. You can opt for bigger cards, but since the majority of C4D video tasks are done on CPU and RAM, (in most scenarios) you can avoid the higher cost associated with top-of-the-line GPUs.“At one time, Cinema 4D was really favouring the gaming GPUs like the GeForce GTX cards,” Benson says. “The higher clock speeds on the GPU, along with the lower cost as compared to NVIDIA Quadro cards, made them a great choice for C4D users. Nowadays, both the GeForce and Quadro GPUs work fine with Cinema 4D, even though the GeForce drivers can sometimes be buggy. You have to either roll back to a previous driver or wait for NVIDIA to fix them.”

 

SSDs

Regarding the role of solid state drives (SSDs), Benson says that adding them to your C4D workstation won’t significantly improve performance within the application. “The only area that would see improvement would be faster times for launching the program and accelerated loading times when opening a scene large scene file,” he says. If your workflow requires frequent loading and saving of large scene files, you should definitely opt for fast SSDs. Aside from application-specific speed improvements, a fast SSD will make your C4D experience more responsive overall, with less perceived lag when multi-tasking.

 

THE IDEAL C4D WORKSTATION

“A desirable machine for Cinema 4D would be an overclocked Intel Core i7 with 24-32GB RAM, and either a GTX or Quadro graphics card,” says Benson. “I mention GTX because I know some people are on a budget. Also if you were to opt for the less expensive GeForce card, you could then spend more money on an additional machine with lots of cores specifically for rendering. This takes the load off of the workstation. In fact, the ideal setup for C4D users would be a single socket machine (like an Intel Core i7) for when you’re working. Then, when it comes time to render, the job could be offloaded to a machine with more cores, or multiple machines on a farm.” This is where the BOXX Workflow comes into play.

 

THE BOXX WORKFLOW

Benson’s description of the ideal C4D solution typifies The BOXX Workflow— freeing up your workstation for modelling and animation by offloading rendering to a dedicated rendering node. BOXX offers a number of dedicated rendering systems like the desk side renderPRO module or rack-mounted renderBOXX. Each system is easily scalable, allowing C4D users to build a render farm as their business grows and workload increases.