Any suggestions or feedback on pricing of XMESH?
We are going to be more than supermesher…so no lowballs!..the question is how much more!
cb
Are you still planning on charging for savers but giving loaders away for free?
thats the current plan and i think we would all prefer that.
the alternative would be to have some sort of ration [e.g. 10to1 or 10loaders + 1 saver = one xmesh/bundle] but then a render farm of 100 machines might need [worst case] 100 loaders, and you might only have one person who is saving from it…i would rather charge a bit more for the saver only than have people go through that.
of course - we have to charge enough for people to want to buy it, and for us to get enough revenue to advance it and further support it - so it’s a little catch22 as always!
cb
Make loading free, so freelancers know they can use it to generate files that someone else can read without worry. Same way you do with Krakatoa.
Charge a lot for the saver, since the licenses will only be in use during rendering. $1000? $2000?
Offer a rental program, like $300 plus $50 per day. The $300 gets you a two week license, and you can buy exporting on a per day basis if you only do it occasionally.
Offer very generous quantity discounts in case a facility wants to standardize on it. Like if they want to replace PC2, not just buy something to do the occasional export to another facility.
Give less generous discounts on additional hosts. So maybe 40% off a second host, 60% off a third host, and 80% off additional hosts after that, so long as they are all on the same license file.
You’re going to have to be generous with the demos. It’s something that has to be tried. Pretty pictures won’t help. Guess that’s no different than Deadline, though.
Chad - 1k to 2k? do you think that’s reasonable? we were thinking 400-600 for a seat of XMESH for MAX and then add other packages as time permits, interest dictates. obviously i would love to charge more…
i’m not sure about what a site license would cost: generally we dont do that. but i’m sure we can come up with a 10pk license discount or somesucch.
we pretty much rent everything, even if it isnt obvious from our website. so yeah, there would be a plan for xmesh rental.
cb
I guess it’s just a matter of how someone uses the product. There’s two obvious use cases, as far as I see.
One is to bake out meshes for speeding up your workflow/render. Anyone using it in this case will need it a lot, so a studio will need to buy a lot of copies. You make money on the quantity, and low support costs per copy. You’re competing with some pretty cheap/free solutions there.
The other use case is when you need to send assets to another application/facility. Those users will need the application much less often, so they might only need one copy. But they’ll get a LOT of value out of it. Your main competition there is probably Alembic, and I’m not sure how much or when that will be a serious alternative.
Other than steeply falling quantity discounts, I don’t know how you could charge less for the first use case and more for the second.
are you guys going to buy it? if so, how many licenses would you want?
cb
Supermesher is $125 or 500 for a 5 seat pack so i’d say stay in the 200-500 range?
I’d love to see a “TD’s BACKPACK” 
which would be a bundle of Krakatoa, XMesh and Frost. Maybe even Deadline although the “free mode” with just 2 slaves is fine for caching.
On the one hand, i believe we have deeper and larger scale support for max features and other plugins and it truly is a platform for a facility rather than just a plugin.
on the other hand, i believe that supermesher is underpriced [and i’ve told Matt this!]
and on the third hand - i would rather charge more for what are clearly niche products to ensure that they work well, that we can put real resources into developing them further and that future support is there for the people who use them.
so all that being said - i want to charge as much as i can without being ridiculous, so that we can have a dedicated group of people tied to expanding the xmesh universe.
any other feedback?
cb
Well, we still need to figure out if we can use it in our pipeline. We don’t want to get locked into a proprietary format, especially since we do so much with other applications, ones you aren’t going to support out of the gate. That’s also a limitation of other meshing systems, too, but at least we know the spec for realflow bins or PC2 or alembic or whatnot and can make a reader/writer for any future need we have.
I’d have to talk to our production folk about how many copies they could use once we did have it in the pipeline. Probably not many up front, 2 or 3? They’d have to see how it worked for them in practice and how much demand they had for it. That’s the thing, if they’re only using it for 1 out of 5 shots, or only when moving between applications, it would be less. If there’s routinely baking out all sorts of animation as part of the scene assembly for rendering, then it might be more. Certainly not more than 10 copies though. We’re actually not that big of a studio.
Chad -
- we could support alembic, but i think thats problematic for a variety of reasons…
- i dont think our format is secret, but i’ll confirm. as i’ve discussed with you - i have no problem sharing info with select studios in exchange for an agreement [you wouldnt sell a saver format for other platforms, keeping it for internal use for example]
3 we have alpha/betas for maya, soft and a prototype for nuke. other than fusion, what other tools do you require?
cb
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Hmmm… A license-free XMesh->Alembic converter, or XMesh->PLY or XMesh->FBX or whatever converter might alleviate some of the apprehension about lock-in. I’m sure we’re not the only customers to wonder what will happen to our XMesh files if we don’t keep up support or whatnot and 3ds max 2019 requires a recompile.
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That’s fine with us, we would just need to get the spec. Seems reasonable.
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Fusion and Unity are our current targets, but we might have additional needs in the future.
- Chad
One of the challenges is usage. For us we would just use it as a supermesher replacement and even then only a handful of times per year. We’re such a small facility that I honestly just don’t have the time or really would see any value from deeper integration with max. I don’t think we’ve even started up the xMesh beta plugin yet. We had one very specific usage scenario for one job we wanted to test it on but haven’t had time and that job went away.
It’s kind of like shotgun in that regard, it looks like something that we could really integrate if we needed to automate large portions of our pipeline, but we just don’t have the time or resources to integrate it that deeply so it wouldn’t get used very much and would have far less value than a studio that has dedicated developers to maximize its value. The only data we regularly transfer is static meshes to other studios (FBX works fine for that) and linking to Nuke which I already solved mostly with my Nuke’Em script. (Nuke’Em 2.9)
So from our perspective the value is pretty low ($150-300 range seems acceptable) unless we could be sold on usage scenarios that are easy to implement and would pay themselves off. I used to think that moving 3D data and rendering into Nuke was the future but I’ve had a change of heart recently so I’m not convinced that I want to build a pipeline with that future in mind either.
The transfer of data is reAlly just a side effect. Xmesh let’s you do all sorts of fun things with assets, but yes it is just a building block and without frequent use cases such as complex rigged animation, or very heavy scenes that you want assembled at render by deadline it isn’t going to be a common tool. Otoh, once you wrap your head around things to do with it, you can’t live without it,
Cb
So the trick is to set the price low at the start, then hike up subscription by 30% per year?
ha! no, i dont want to do that - thats why i want to set the price at the right price at the outset!
cb
Or backwards seat discounting. Charge $100 per seat and then $100 + $10*N-Seats after that. 
Yeah it’s kind of going to be a very different tool to different people. If you could also develop the tools to pull together the Lego pieces together then I think you would have a great package right out of the box. So that might be how you want to look at it: charge a lower end price ($150-$350) that will be a bargain for big studios who are going to use it for deep pipeline integration and then make the big $$ off of the tertiary tools to leverage it. Which is kind of how you are marketing PRT right now. The PRT saver/loader is cheap but then you build an ecosystem of tools to leverage and manipulate the data like Krakatoa leverages PRT.
What is cheap enough for you to consider using it at your facility? how many seats would you need? 10?
395? 295?
cb
We would need 4 seats. Not sure how much we would be willing to pay. I don’t think we’ve used it yet on a project. I would say $300 would approach the “if we need it we’ll buy it when we need it” price. It might be an automatic buy to have on hand for $250 (x4 = $1k).
I can’t really put a value on it yet just because I don’t know what to do with it yet. Which was kind of our position on frost. It looks cool but we don’t see the immediate application.