Free is never completely free. If a software product is missing a feature you need, or some feature is broken, the work around time you spend has an opportunity cost associated with it. If I have to just through several software packages to convert my models to work with Blender, or if I have to recreate my models in Blender, the cost of Blender just went up by the cost of my time.

The nice thing about using a service like MacZot is that it gets customers onto your update/upgrade plan, usually in large batches. Mirye Software ran a deal on MacZot a few weeks ago on Shade Designer.

In running these types of campaigns, there are a few considerations -

Is there a good chance you’ll get an upsell later?

This can be on renewals or on upgrades. You should carefully differentiate these two – a renewal extends the current license for a specific amount of time, compared to an upgrade that lets a customer move to a higher level of product.

If you have a short initial renewal period and/or desirable higher levels, then it’s a really good investment. For us, it was a really good for Shade Designer because the most popular version of Shade is Shade Standard, which is a $200 upgrade.

There isn’t a renewal option on Shade Designer – once you acquire it, if you want to get the next version of Shade Designer, you need to buy it again.

Do you get a cross sell opportunity?

Once you sell to a customer, it is usually that much easier to sell them something else. When we sold Shade Designer, we had subsequent sales of content, including two 3D characters Hanako and Tully, each of which run for about $49. These products are desirable because character design is extremely difficult and these are ready to use characters for 3D artwork.

Does the promotion cause long term devaluation of your product?

This is a bit harder. If you keep your promotion term down to two weeks or less and the exposure narrowed to a specific group – probably no problem. If it is longer than this and, you also have sales channels, you can see some push back from those channels because they will begin to see a reduction in sales – this is where price protection issues come up.

If your product is constantly on sale, then using a service like MacZot will contribute to the perception of devaluation. Also, along with devaluation, you also increase the risk that customers will expect to buy on sale and simply wait until a new sale pops up.

Does your product require intensive support?

If you have a product that requires a lot of support and you don’t have a separate way to charge for it (or a way to keep your costs very low), then you are setting yourself up to lose. A good way to offset this is if you already have developed a community based support system – forum, group or mailing list.

Much of the work related to Shade 10 E is focused squarely on localization, re-writing much of the support material, but there’s been a few technical updates that will likely get rolled back into the Japanese version.

The first article was on the changes to the Shade figure window, but the second one is much more substantial – the 3D manipulator tool. Check out  Shade 10: Introducing the 3D Manipulator.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft was a horror writer who wrote primarily in the 1920s-30s. Although real fame eluded him in his lifetime, his works have enjoyed regular revivals, including many films that were based loosely on cosmic horror works.

Shade was first released in Japan in 1986. After a successful but brief availability in English in the late 1980’s, Shade did not make another English appearance until E Frontier America was formed. E Frontier America was sold to Smith Micro, along with a portfolio of software products, including the excellent character animation product Poser. That left Shade without a venue outside of Japan.

Mirye Software Publishing is a property of Proactive International, and was formed to provide a publishing venue for technology titles. What that means is that products can get into retail venues – both physical and electronic. Shade is now published through Mirye Software, including localization, pre-sales, marketing, technical support and more, though E Frontier Japan will still handle the Japanese language market.

I was first aware of Shade back in the late 1980’s when I lived in Japan. Shade was extremely expensive at that time, and to this day still is the dominant 3D software package in Japan. Over the next few months there will be a steady stream of news about Shade.

TrueSpace is a Windows only 3D modeling and rendering package that’s been available for over 20 years. Recently, the company was acquired by Microsoft for their Live Earth project. This runs parallel to Google’s acquisition of of SketchUp! a few years ago.

My previous experience in using TrueSpace (years ago) wasn’t very positive – mostly because I couldn’t appreciate the user experience in comparision with other tools on the market. That being said – this is a very powerful toolkit.  But first – how good is the COLLADA export? While its believable that Microsoft will build up and release improved versions of TrueSpace, I couldn’t see investing in building models in a format that could easily get tossed onto the waste bin.