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Introducing Orbolt™ Smart 3D Assets


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There's a review field, so everyone can type a comment at this case.

Which may take a while. Good window of opportunity for anyone who wants to farm odforce attachments... lot of great stuff in there, easy money.

if we have the option to lock files there should at least be a means of making a file non-lockable, preferably via a batch command from outside of Houdini... Can Apprentice files be locked & sold?

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I would love it if a studio could run their own little Orbolt store on an intranet, would be a great way to distribute and manage internal tools.

Totally!! -- the amount of tools that get lost between projects is a pain - or people simply forget about them over time or move to different studios.

-- and then sidefx should make some more rnd agreements with those studios :) -- or buy out individual assets... perhaps make an agreement that after 2 years a private asset might become part of the asset store or something like that.

I think the store is a good thing. You can treat it as the exchange and still share your tools for free. I've shared tons of things over the years, that is an attitude. Besides, the real smart guys will reverse engineer assets so they can extend them however they want, the not so experienced guys will simply use an advanced tool they did not have access to before. A good tool is a good tool. And people have already been reverse engineering tools from other programs/industries -- (without having access to the inner workings of it either - sometimes only the idea is enough.)

And if people want to make some money, let them try to make some money, but the market is a supply and demand kind of thing. Perhaps we could even create a thread about what kind of tools people would really like to see developed - and how much you would be willing to give for a tool like that. Use the economics of mass markets to your advantage. If that 3000 people number is even remotely true and you charge $1, that becomes $3000, which is a nice extra for investing the time to develop a good tool. Kickstarter, anyone?

Didn't we try and do this for tutorials at some point in the past?

And yes, time is money, especially the time of an experienced houdini td. The really advanced tools are simply not exposed to the public because they are proprietary to the facilities. But if a td actually would be able to take 1 whole week off to develop some tools for the community, I bet you get some amazing results. But all of us have bills and rent to pay, so you can't just leave your job for pure tool development. If however you have a clear goal, time limit and finincial reward it does become possible. -- And it would not have to cost that much.

There are users on this forum I would gladly pay some cash through something like kickstarter to crowdsource some money for them to develop some tools. -- Whatever they would want to develop. Simply because they have great minds that are currently being applied for the benefit of their studio. But it could be applied to the benefit of the houdini community as a whole.

- Those are a few of my thoughts.

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Can Apprentice files be locked & sold?

Jup, they will become commercial once released in the store. This is awesome because if you happen to have some down-/sparetime, you can simply build your tool at home using your apprentice license and still sell or share it as a commercial licensed HDA. I think this is a key point, in order to make Orbolt a success.

I seriously think they should consider a 'source code' license type. This would allows buyers to bend a asset to their own needs, if a production demands it. Though it would be fair if you couldn't resell this adjusted asset.

I'm still not sure what they do to make this work though: 'Sophisticated licensing that prevents asset sharing and enables secure trials'

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I completely agree with Peter Claes, nicely put :)

IMO the interesting thing is not prices but open vs closed source. What do you guys think about this? Would you favor something free and open source over something that's commercial but closed course? What about free and closed source?

I imagine there will be similar assets in the store. For me the quality is the best criteria to choose from, unless you really need openness.

I think open source assets are a little overrated though. Most of Houdini's assets are also closed, no? When people use them, they don't complain. Because if they want to extend it, they just encapsulate it or create from scratch.

I feel inheritance vs composition is also related:

http://www.javaworld.com/jw-11-1998/jw-11-techniques.html

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i really dont like this, this means just one thing: greedy.

nobody will give their knowledge for free anymore, because other people will be able to sell it...

this thing is a bad idea.

if i wanna assets i would stay on maya.

assets are for nubs :P

Edited by dyei nightmare
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i really dont like this, this means just one thing: greedy.

nobody will give their knowledge for free anymore, because other people will be able to sell it...

this thing is a bad idea.

if i wanna assets i would stay on maya.

assets are for nubs :P

This is both highly speculative and insulting.

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This is both highly speculative and insulting.

sorry didnt want to be, i think this will bring a lot of greed...

your big projects locked??? i dont think so, have you heard about flash decompilers?

i can see the same situation here, programers making decompilers to modify the assets, reusing them and reselling em.

odforce will become a store like creativecash.com, thats very very sad.

:(:(:(

Edited by dyei nightmare
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I really do like the idea and hope that the assets will be checked thoroughly before they go online to ensure high quality and prevent abuse.

- It's great to have options, and I'd certainly appreciate an option to access pre-packaged solutions in the heat of production - and I don't see a problem of paying for them, too. After all, if you spent lots of days developing an awesome asset that saves me a lot of time, it's only fair you benefit from that, too (especially if you factor in license and labour costs).

There is a big difference to sharing an example network to communicate an idea or help someone out on a forum to creating and supporting a full featured, tested and documented asset - and if you invested that time, the option to be rewarded for it, if you want to, is fantastic.

Would be fantastic if plugins could be distributed the same way (but that's probably a technical nightmare)

Sure, some people will try to sell trivial things, but just like in other app stores quality will always win. Nor do I expect that the free sharing and knowledge exchange will stop - and why should it? I believe that in this industry people are not primarily driven by money - i mean, everyone has to work for a living, but that's not the motivation why we got into this. And look, There is now this brand new tool to make free sharing even easier!

Carsten

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what is the editorial license exactly ? I read through the description, it seems anything with an 'editorial license' can only be used on news or editorial ?

"Customer may only use the Asset for legitimate, editorial purposes on some issue of journalistic, editorial, cultural or otherwise newsworthy value. Editorial uses include, without limitation, use of the Asset in a news program, news-related website, or news-related video media"

-G

Was this answered anywhere? I'm a little confused as well.

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I have only good feelings about the Orbolt initiative.

Lot's of arguments in favour or against it has been already said.

At the end I think is good to have a centralized place where people can share their

developments, I prefer not to say assets because I think this could be eventually extended to

Python scripts and HDK custom nodes not only HDAs; in the way they want, closed, opened, free or

paid.

I don't really understand why every time a new initiative that offers the closed, paid option, appart from the free opened

is always critisized with really vague arguments trying to demonstrate that the free sharing of information

is going to end because of this new initiative.

I have been using Linux and collaborated with several linux projects from the last 12 years, and my conclusion is that all free or all paid

simply doesn't work (same applies to openess or closeness). A mix of both ways to develop and share is the best option.

You want to share your stuff with everybody, let's do it is great and put free and open. You want to get some profit from it, again do it and

demonstrate everybody that your stuff deserves some bucks.

That said, with the prices people are used to pay in other apps markets, is really hard for Orbolt to offer and opportunity to make some profit for

developers, I think assets needs to be more pricy to get some profit.

If somebody develops a nide car shader that helps a studio to render a car commercial, paying for it 10$ looks to me like a bargain.

I believe good tools could be in the range 50-100$, otherwise is hard to make some profit taking into account the small user base that Houdini represents.

But this discussion is now futil, only the market will decide what is a rasonable price.

Let's see what happens in the next year.

And for those who think SESI is going to put new features as paid assets in Orbolt, simply, they don't know SESI.

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another additional question to Orbolt Owners / Managers :

> wdnt it be good to have the " Donate " option when someone wants to upload an asset but isnt sure about :

- how valuable the tool is for others

- doesnt 'force' anyone to pay in order to get the asset

- .. ( other similar reasons )

> .. or from the downloader 's pov :

- freely evaluate$ the asset

- expresse$ gratitude time after time toward the asset-maker and his 'generous spirit'

- .. ( other similar reasons )

imho , this option could lower somehow the contrast of Free-Vs-Paid picture . =)

for me personally this fits nice into the open-source philosophy too and is not so seen rarely around .

--

was just thinking about this .. what do you odd-members think about this too ?

.cheers

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  • 2 weeks later...

And for those who think SESI is going to put new features as paid assets in Orbolt, simply, they don't know SESI.

well, SESI seems to disagree with you. They already have paid assets at Orbolt. Admittedly at a low price, but not free.

It annoys me for two reasons. Firstly, because I´ve been aksing for a nice mocap tool for ages, and the first thing I see at Orbolt is a SESI-made character with mocap included...not for free (again, very cheap). It also annoys me because so soon into the game, they are already asking for some money, and it makes me wonder if they are testing how good of a market there is for them to release hundreds of commercial (i.e. not free) assets.

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It annoys me for two reasons. Firstly, because I´ve been aksing for a nice mocap tool for ages, and the first thing I see at Orbolt is a SESI-made character with mocap included...not for free (again, very cheap).

But that character looks like a more featured rig than just a simple mocap tool, with cloth sim, textures etc. On the other hand, the Toon character already lets you generate mocap rigs (never used that actually so maybe I'm mistaken about its usefulness).

It also annoys me because so soon into the game, they are already asking for some money, and it makes me wonder if they are testing how good of a market there is for them to release hundreds of commercial (i.e. not free) assets.

If some useful assets get released because they can "self-finance" then it *might* be a good thing, otherwise those might never get released at all.

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