Recently on Flame-news it was reported that the Foundry would no longer fix bugs or develop for Furnace on Flame. We spoke exclusively to the Foundry to find out if Furnace was “end of life” on Flame. Here is the official response from CEO Bill Collis:
“We currently support Furnace on Flame 2010, and will fix bugs which appear which severely impact your ability to work with the tools and which can’t be worked around. We don’t support it on 2011 though in practice we’ve given it a light test, all appears to be good, and if major bugs were to be found we would probably fix them. This decision was taken due to very low sales volumes across all Autodesk products in general.”
As Sam Edwards (flame user) pointed out on flame-news, for the price of the Autodesk version of “Furnace for flame you can buy NukeX which has most of the functionality with furnace core included”.
Flame is a very strong product and has been for years, ironically for much of that time, Sparks (plug-ins) greatly aided the creative process. It is understandable that the Foundry does not see its future in plugins for Autodesk products, but some form of plugins are key to extended functionality in the Flame/Smoke product line.
No one is suggesting this is a ground breaking decision but it would be great to see a model that did allow for new spark/plug-in development or a translator that allowed other plug-ins to function in the much loved Autodesk system products.
I do hope that instead of just letting Furnace die, they let someone else, (Genarts?) pick them up, as they are invaluable in Flame, particularly for film work.
Bummer, makes sense from a Nuke point of view thow.
I’m quite sure that Furnace will still be there as OFX, but will Autodesk ever suport OFX plugins??
When the price is 5 times the previous promo it’s not surprising that volume is low.
Autodesk Composite Supports OFX. I find it hard to believe that they would not support it in Flame.
Also, on a similar note, what about Keylight?
a far as 3rd party plugin Keyers, its all about Primatte.