Besides DAWs, What Other Creative Software Do You Use Regulary ?

[ThomasHelzle]

We have Houdini floating licenses on our license server. I don’t see it as any more difficult than our floating Maya licenses or floating Vray licenses or anything else.

The pain comes when you are a freelancer with a main machine and a laptop and want to go work somewhere else. Since you can't move the license easily, it's pretty annoying. Most other software allows at least two installations or some kind of "home" license or easy transfer these days.
But with Indie it's pretty good now.
The inflexibility is part of why I currently don't update my commercial Core license and went back to Indie.

Cheers,

Tom

[whyterabbyt]

We have Houdini floating licenses on our license server. I don’t see it as any more difficult than our floating Maya licenses or floating Vray licenses or anything else.

It certainly wasn't any harder here. Install the license server, tell it to pick up the account's license, point the clients at the license server. Certainly much less messing about needed than we went through with the first iteration of Arnold in Maya, for example.

[whyterabbyt]

See, i probably would have another opinion about him, if he wouldn't have so smartass-ish-ly made his opinion appear as a fact in some discussions about computational things, and operating systems.

oooooh, irony.

[perfumer]

32 bit Bidule as a plugin in my music player (foobar) so I can use my 32 bit vsts on anything I listen to.

[pekbro]

Houdini pricing has gotten way better. When I first started using it, the full package was $17k, add that to the 10k for your SGI Workstation and you were good to go.

[e@rs]

Paint, Notepad and sometimes when I feel really adventurous, WordPad.

[mgw38]

We have Houdini floating licenses on our license server. I don’t see it as any more difficult than our floating Maya licenses or floating Vray licenses or anything else.

It certainly wasn't any harder here. Install the license server, tell it to pick up the account's license, point the clients at the license server. Certainly much less messing about needed than we went through with the first iteration of Arnold in Maya, for example.

It was more of a personal experience. For some reason one of the MacOS upgrades decided to rename my computer and at that point the Houdini License server went berserk. But the people at SideFX are super nice and helpful so we resolved that within a day or two. In our institution we also have floating licenses and that works well.

[deastman]

Houdini pricing has gotten way better. When I first started using it, the full package was $17k, add that to the 10k for your SGI Workstation and you were good to go.

When I started, Wavefront TAV and a Personal Iris was a whole lot more than that. The last machine I remember buying was an Octane for $22,000.

[THE INTRANCER]

Some very interesting software I've not heard of before, one of which was Touch Designer, which I installed for the first time last night, curiously something that should key into the area's that I'm interested in. It has a somewhat strange UI, and feels more limited than it pretends to be which is kinda odd from first impressions. Not sure how I'll be able to integrate it into my workflow, but it's potentially worth investigating.

So what else do I use...other than DAWs ?

I'll start with..
Maxon Cinema 4D R11.5 XL - (Actually first started using C4D back on the Amiga 1200 back in the 1990's) - Started using it from 2002- first from a PC Format magazine cover disk C4D 5 SE, bought version 6 XL a month later and upgraded it till 2010. I use C4D for everything from 3D modelling to animation.

* Blender - ( Just couldn't commit to it for various reasons - but sanity of it's design seems to be normalising, and looking promising now).

Houdini -( I've had the free apprentice edition for years of but has restrictions and pricing that I can't accept going forward .)

Photoshop CS6 - ( My number one image editing / texture design / text and video FX application ).

ZBrush 2019 - ( Been using it since 2011, Don't use it for sculpting but rather for hard modelling purposes - GOZ export to C4D ).

HitFilm 2019 - Main NLE application. ( Use to use After Effects CS2 but find little use for it these days ).

Fusion 9 - ( Occasionally for 2D image FX and motion FX ).

Davinci Resolve 12.5 - Secondary NLE application. ( Mainly for capturing and editing live video ).

Handbrake - ( A more recent addition for Video / Conversion Decoding ).

Movavi / Screen Video Capture ( Video capturing that I use for Studio One, inc webcam capture ).

Edit Pad Lite - ( Just a great alternative to notepad ).

Reaktor 6 - (Not so much regularly now, more like a few weeks for a few times of a year to update a current project)


* Don't use regularly, just install regularly to see what's changed and that I can can make use of.

[stanlea]

Sometimes, my mind.

[Aloysius]

iLok License Manager

[pekbro]

Houdini pricing has gotten way better. When I first started using it, the full package was $17k, add that to the 10k for your SGI Workstation and you were good to go.

When I started, Wavefront TAV and a Personal Iris was a whole lot more than that. The last machine I remember buying was an Octane for $22,000.

Yeah we had 4 O2s and a couple Indigos. They may have had an Octane, but I never got to use it. We did have the Maya 1 beta. I am mostly a PRMan guy, so primarily worked with 5 thousand seats of it, on an IBM super computer. We had a renderer contract and did some engineering support for the Matrix among others. Cool times back then, although I was technically an intern.

Oh and the renderman lic’s cost 5 mil at the time, iirc.

[cron]

Some very interesting software I've not heard of before, one of which was Touch Designer, which I installed for the first time last night, curiously something that should key into the area's that I'm interested in. It has a somewhat strange UI, and feels more limited than it pretends to be which is kinda odd from first impressions. Not sure how I'll be able to integrate it into my workflow, but it's potentially worth investigating.

If you've got time spare, the workshop videos are fantastic for getting started. https://www.derivative.ca/Education/Wor ... ograms.asp

From the list of software you use, it seems you're way more advanced when it comes to graphics, 3D, and node based workflows than I'll ever be, so apologies if the following was already obvious to you:

TouchDesigner perhaps looks so simple at first glance because it doesn't deal with arguments (using Max terminology) quite like anything else I've used. Max, Usine, and others tend to have an inlet for every parameter, whereas TouchDesigner hides them in each object's parameter menu. You can still control all these parameters using other objects (or even Python expressions) as you can in Max, it's just that those connections are made by dragging and dropping into the parameter menu rather than into the object itself. There are advantages and disadvantages in terms of patch readability with that workflow, but yes, it's not quite like anything else.

I've considered jumping ship to the similar vvvv because TouchDesigner is SO expensive if you want to remove that 1280x1280 resolution limitation (which is enforced throughout the patch, not just on output.) My original goals were 1. to make unique, reasonably engaging 3D visualisers for Youtube listeners (surprisingly easy) and 2. a video equivalent of a granular synthesiser (which ended up being a crash course in buffering principles and the dizzying size of uncompressed video - still ongoing), so if I keep my goals in mind the free version has certainly been good enough for that. It's been so easy to learn compared to Max too, although the huge community around it compared to when I toyed with Max at university circa 2005 (I don't think Youtube even existed back then!) has no doubt helped there.

[THE INTRANCER]

If you've got time spare, the workshop videos are fantastic for getting started. https://www.derivative.ca/Education/Wor ... ograms.asp

From the list of software you use, it seems you're way more advanced when it comes to graphics, 3D, and node based workflows than I'll ever be, so apologies if the following was already obvious to you:

TouchDesigner perhaps looks so simple at first glance.....

Thanks, that's a helpful insight into this program...The resolution thing I can work around for practical purposes I think, but it's more of a show stopper if it embeds a watermark on anything it exports. I've not tested it out since yesterday to properly explore it, currently working on something big and complex in C4D atm..but from what I did test of it, seemed to like the new graphics card I got recently, an RX 570 8 Gig card. I'll have to see what I can do with the 3D aspect of it that involves importing 3D models... I'm use to learning node based systems, but if something can be achieved by other methods quicker than I'll typically take that path instead if I can. Was hoping Blackmagic would do something with Fusion 9 standalone rather than letting it stagnate in development terms. Still using Windows 7 64 on my main machine, so can't even use Resolve 15.

So yeah.. I'll keep plugging away, looking for alternate paths in moving forward with these creative tools.

[pekbro]

Some things I have used for years that’s not been mentioned are Animate and Harmony from Toonboom also Painter and clip studio. Oh and Storyboard pro, also from Toonboom.