We are not happy with this situation, as we have already lost sales and got mails from confused would be customers.
Octanerender is a registered trademark and what they are doing is not legal.
We have worked very hard on octane, and it has become very popular as a result.
Its a shame to see people trying to profit from our hard work like this, at our expense.
Comments appreciated,
Radiance
well, if i'm the guy behind this software i would at least make clear that my app only works together with octane and have big fat links to refractive on my front page. because he too won't get satisfied buyers if they receive something useless and learn afterwards that they need to spend more money to make any use of it. having links to refractive somewhere hidden in the faq text isn't clever and also doesn't feel serious. also, if he was clever (and serious), he wouldn't have named his software "octane render powertools" if there is a trademark connected to parts of this name. apparently he takes the risk getting sued for that but doesn't care.
i know that you are not happy with how that tool is made in general, but what could you do apart from sending the lawyers? not much i'd say (and may be an expensive and complicated task and still may end disappointing for everyone).
on the other hand refractive could buy google adwords for octane, octanerender, physically unbiased rendering, etc.pp. - it is not that pricey and would help beeing still on top of the search results...
„The obvious is that which is never seen until someone expresses it simply ‟
As far as search results go on google I get refractives site when I type in "octane"
It p´robably took 6 to 12 months before refractives site was even listed on the first page.
Its jut the way stuff goes.
Dont forget that every larger program has plugins, people advertise just like they want and feel fit.
Octane power tools is the only real plugin so far to my experience that is official on the net.
In the end-user world Im using octane at work because of power tools, I wouldnt if power tools wasnt around.
Me telling this, showing it generate free advertising for octane it self. Mouth to mouth advert is better than zeros and ones on a serach engine.
The animation features are lacking in octane which has been deprioritized. That is your agenda and priorities that decide what happens here, but know that it creates a void because it has been on the road map and layed off for the future.
Atleast I got the impression when a user asked about poser or something and asked for the Collada/render man deal.
Ive never encuraged the renderman hook, Ive always been speaking for FBX and my point stands.
You will never be able to control/dictate everything when doing software, but you can motivate people to follow a progress.
As for octane power tools, it states in the first line on the site that its an animation tool for Octane, and that is just what it is nothing more nothing less.
I cant see a legal/practical problem except clients who might get confused.
Then just scale that up to coorporate level with either max,maya,xsi. How many mails does Autodesk get from newbs asking about why max breaks due plugins, plugins dev sites etc? Ithink its a huge number in all due respect and they cope with it completly transparently to my knowledge.
As for Power tools, its great, makes me use Octane and refractive should encurage anyone to use anything at disposal.
As does any company "if the stuff works"
RED has released RED CINE-X which basicly "renders" Foundrys "STORM" completly useless and its a commercial software, they have made a statement on their site that they close down STORM development because it costs money and RED CINE-X comes for free over at RED.
The best deffence is development and has always been.
I'm a bit disapointed to see what is going on here.
I am very interrested to buy octane powertools, because it's a great tool to make anim waiting the octane official solution...
This little clever software replaces the lack of the original software for now in this area.
It is very bad that refractive software and hmk have this kind of issue.
Maybe he can modify the name? I understand that this is annoying for refractive that is web site come before the refractive
site in google.
But, I think, the better solution is to talk and try to find a solution together.
I'm think many of your customers will not be happy if this app disappears.
And is this true that hmk is banned from the forum and is license deactived? sad, very sad.
Please radiance, I understand your reasons, but I hope you and hmk can resolve this problem.
I'm a bit disapointed to see what is going on here.
I am very interrested to buy octane powertools, because it's a great tool to make anim waiting the octane official solution...
This little clever software replaces the lack of the original software for now in this area.
It is very bad that refractive software and hmk have this kind of issue.
Maybe he can modify the name? I understand that this is annoying for refractive that is web site come before the refractive
site in google.
But, I think, the better solution is to talk and try to find a solution together.
I'm think many of your customers will not be happy if this app disappears.
And is this true that hmk is banned from the forum and is license deactived? sad, very sad.
Please radiance, I understand your reasons, but I hope you and hmk can resolve this problem.
Quoted for agreement. What a great tool that would make using Octane that much nicer. That would be a huge bummer to stifle the development. Can't you work something out? Seems both parties would benefit in the long run.
Windows 7 64bit, Intel Core2 Extreme CPU X9100 3.06GHz, 8 GB Ram, Nvidia Quadro FX3700M.
I'm a bit disapointed to see what is going on here.
I am very interrested to buy octane powertools, because it's a great tool to make anim waiting the octane official solution...
This little clever software replaces the lack of the original software for now in this area.
It is very bad that refractive software and hmk have this kind of issue.
Maybe he can modify the name? I understand that this is annoying for refractive that is web site come before the refractive
site in google.
But, I think, the better solution is to talk and try to find a solution together.
I'm think many of your customers will not be happy if this app disappears.
And is this true that hmk is banned from the forum and is license deactived? sad, very sad.
Please radiance, I understand your reasons, but I hope you and hmk can resolve this problem.
i really dont understand the trouble. yes octane render tools are on top when searching on google (octane rendrer) because they paid for the ranking.
Under "What is Octane Power Tools" they put a direct link to refractivesoftware.com.
I think "octane render tools" are useless without octane. so octane must benefit from this tool.
Some people (licensed customers:) only use octane because of the existance of this tool.
Do you really think you lost customers because of this?
When i read about some rumours about hmk being banned out of this forum, it makes me real sad and disappointed.
i really hope this is not true!
first i read about abstrax leaving rs and now this.
btw if you google for "octanerender" rs is on top and opt on page two:)
Why was hmk banned? Octane Power Tool is a valid solution to the problems faced by Octane users. From the example given on his website;
"So your render time is about 250 minutes which is around 4 hours, and your export/import time is 1500 minutes which is 25 hours, this is bad." - because of import/voxelization issue. This problem has been voiced out by many users since late last year (when the old development team was still around) and still no concrete measure was taken to overcome the issue. Having Octane Power Tool is a blessing to the users who are just doing camera and light animations.
I agree with other users here that Octane Power Tools would be helpful to generate more Octane licenses to Refractive Software since every Octane Power Tool user will definitely need an Octane license. If Refractive Software really is losing sales right now, it's definitely not because of Octane Power Tool. Refractive Software should look back and check the customer satisfactory level or complaints as disgruntled customers will spread their issues on other boards and telling their experiences to others.
Just develope octane to do what his plugin does and more. Shouldnt be any issue a lot of software has plugins from different developers look how many are available for 3dsmax do you have to pay 3ds max to implement the new plugin you are developing?
I've prepared this post to explain what has happened here,
as nobody here knows anything about everything that has happened.
I'll try to explain it to the best of my ability.
You are happy to reproduce this response on other communities where people might be discussing this.
I don't like banning people from the forum and have not done it before unless it is really necessary, and has a valid reason.
I have done it with 5 people out of 4000 customers over the last 2 years, so rumours on other forums about 'evil radiance bans half his customers' are very far fetched.
1. In General - Regarding the fact we're a business
The following statements apply in more generic sense (not just for HMK) but for previous cases too:
I am generally very easy going about what people do on the Octane Community Forums, but there is a very important thing that everyone needs to remember,
this is not an open-source project or a discussion board website, but we are running a business.
We have to pay our salaries for developers, admin/support people, webhosting companies, office rental, equipment, etc... every month and we need our beta license sales to keep the show running.
A valid reason for me to remove someone's forum priviledges is due to a grievance that results in the user using his account or registering new accounts,
to make posts on the octane forums to 'discourage' other, potentially new, customers from buying a license, by writing obscene posts that are blown out of proportions and really don't apply to any other customer.
If I allow this, we will very soon have no new customers anymore and we can switch off the light and fire all employees, and then OctaneRender development would cease to exist.
2. HMK / Hisham Medhat - OctaneRender SDK Licensing for plugin development
HMK is aware of the fact that his Octane Power Tools will be obsolete in a few weeks, as we will be releasing an array of new integrated plugins very soon.
He has asked us to apply for an SDK license to develop one or more of these.
We had him sign an NDA, which we got back in scanned for with just a signature and a name.
(Later he even broke the NDA by posting details about our SDK license on various forums)
We provided him with an information sheet, and heard nothing for 2.5 weeks.
We tried to do our due diligence, as licensing an SDK to a stranger can be extremely risky for us, but we failed to get any information on him,
we did not find any place of residence, even a country. He has used alias adresses in a few countries.
These 2 issues forced us to deny him the license, aswell as due to what happened next (especially his aggressive reaction):
3. HMK / Hisham Medhat - Customer PM spamming
On a monday morning about 2 months ago, We opened our support mailbox and found about 30 mails in it, and about 30-40 more the next day.
As it was august, about ~70 of these were out-of-office replies messages from various customers of us.
The remaining ~25 were annoyed, angry customers who complained about receiving spam thru the 'you have received a new PM from ...' mails you get from our forum when you receive a PM.
About ~12 of these people thought someone had hacked our webserver and stolen valuable identity information.
Most of them requested the removal of their private information from our database.
After doing investigations, we found that HMK had been sending spam mass mailings on the forum with a loop script (1000's) to advertise Octane Power Tools to them.
This was completely unacceptible, and I promptly contacted him and told him this must stop immediately or I will remove him PM rights.
After an angry reply, I did so.
I got an extremely angry/aggressive reply that because he bought 2 licenses of our software, he should be allowed to use our forum PM system to market to our customers at his will.
This is not allowed and is in our license agreement. It's also something that NO OTHER COMPANY would allow either.
If you buy an OctaneRender license, you own a license to use the software, the community forum account and PM priviledges are a service we provide, but is not part of the software license, and can be revoked if abused.
The reason why he was do annoyed with this is probably because we cut off his mass-mailing marketing system which he used for selling more OPT licenses.
4. HMK / Hisham Medhat - Forum influences
This is less serious, but nevertheless quite annoying for our developers.
People (interested in purchasing a copy of Octane) are asking on our forums about certain features that are currently not fully developed or missing.
As a result HMK keeps replying to their questions, implying the use of his OPT tools to get that particular job done.
Although I don't have an issue with that, once we start getting e-mails of people telling us that they would rather buy another renderer than buy ours and then a hack like OPT tool to do a specific thing,
this means there are probably other users out there doing the same, without e-mailing us.
These are people we lose sales to and won't be interested in our plugin products coming either as they have already purchased another engine and will be annoyed in the near future they spent their budget on it instead of the new 'OctaneRender for XXXX'.
5. HMK / Hisham Medhat - Patented trademark advertising via google and loss of sales of OctaneRender
Since HMK started using google adwords to market his Octane Power tools, we have had many problems.
Although he states he is not breaching any patents because 'octane' or 'render' is not patented,
he is clearly advertising on 'OctaneRender' and 'Octane Render' as a google search of today shows (see attached screenshots taken today 31/10/2011 at 12:33 (NZ/Auckland)
We have seen a noticable drop in license sales from the day the adwords campaign was started on our sales stats.
We have had quite a few people contact us in confusion to ask what they need to purchase to get 'octanerender' which they read about on a forum or heard from a friend.
Although HMK points out that this is all explained in detail on his FAQ page buried in his website,
this is all well for english-speakers, but we have many people (russians, italians, french, chinese) that do not, and as a result confuse both products with negative results for us.
We have received one person asking us for a refund for his OPT purchase as he wanted to purchase an OctaneRender license (he was a chinese person, using google translate to talk to us via e-mail).
6. HMK / Hisham Medhat - The drop that flooded the bucket
All these problems mounted up to a lot of stress for us, and we are already very stressed to get our final version of OctaneRender out of the door asap, aswell as the new plugins,
that I decided to cancel and refund HMK's licenses and remove him from our forum, to prevent further damage.
After this he created a new account and started posting his anti-octane post in our demo forum (where we have new customers inquiring about purchasing a license),
which forced us to block his IP, as we can't lose more sales over this debacle anymore.
This last effort by him was enough for me to, after remove forum access, deactivate and refund his licenses.
The rumours he may be spreading that we are also deactivating licenses of people using OPT are untrue (that would be extremely rude and unfair for us to do)
We have given him a lot of opportunities to correct his multiple mistakes and he has always reacted aggressively and non-objectively.
We have given him a chance to develop a real integrated plugin, but if only he had been fair and ongoing about the due diligence required, he could have had a great product out in a few weeks.
Personally, I think he has just been 'riding our coattails' of success, trying to get as much money in his pockets without regard for anyone else,
knowing that it would be over in a few weeks anyways, as OPT will be obsolete in a few weeks.
I take no pride (and hope that neither you) in recommending a tool for purchase to a new octane user that costs a fair amount of money (in relation to an octane beta license), which will be useless in a few weeks, it won't result in a satisfied octane user in the end.
I hope this explains everything to all of you,
and the different problems that added up to the end result of removing HMK from the forums,
I hope things will quickly get back to normal and we can focus on our next release again without further unnecessary stresses like this.
Due to the events outlined in this post, I kindly ask the other forum members not to advertise or recommend OPT to any other forum members (new and established alike),
as there really is no more point in buying an OPT license right now with the plugin products coming.
Yours,
Radiance
Director, Refractive Software LTD
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