Hello everybody, a warm welcome from the Nemetschek investor relations team. This is our first special day for the Media & Entertainment segment that is represented by our Maxon brand. Thank you for your interest and thank you for joining us. Within the next two hours, you will get a deep insight into our Maxon business, and we would like to educate a bit where the software is used.
At the end, we will have enough time for a Q&A session. Our special day is being recorded. A replay of the session will be available at our website after the event. During presentations, it would be great if you put yourself on mute to avoid background noise. Now, let's start with the first presentation. We will kick it off with our Spokesman, Axel Kaufmann. Go ahead, Axel.
Super. Thank you very much, Stefanie. While I pull up the presentation, which should be this one, someone is nodding, hopefully to be able to see the presentation. Should now be on presentation mode. Let me also say a warm welcome from my side and thanks, first of all, for you having registered for this event, you, Stefanie, and your team having organized this. A special thanks to Dave McGavran, our CEO of Maxon and the Media & Entertainment division, as well as Simon Walker, our Global Head of Training and Learning at Maxon, who will lead you through a middle part of the presentation, giving you some real examples. We will do the meeting in English.
We want to say upfront that this meeting was born by many of you, who have approached us and who have told us that they would be interested in more details and a look behind the scenes. Here's an agenda for today that we roughly want to try to walk you through. I'll kick it off, just to show you the impressive transformation of what the segment has been going through really over the last years. Dave will give you an overview of what Maxon is about and the Media & Entertainment industry and the landscape that he's competing very successfully within. When we talk about rendering, sculpting, animation, or modeling, it might be somewhat abstract for some of you.
Therefore, again, we thought it's be a good idea to have a short product presentation so that you have a better understanding of what are the typical customers that use the solutions and what are the use cases on an everyday basis. Therefore, Simon has prepared, as I just mentioned, something that I really think is thrilling and keep all of us alive. The goal of today's session overall would be to walk away with a better understanding and the details about what the segment, for us it's a segment of the division, went through in terms of a fundamental transformation over the last two to three years.
We'll talk about that transformation in more detail, why we're so convinced that there's an even greater future ahead of us, and what are the typical players in the M&E space, and why we think we're better and stronger positioned here today than ever before. Media & Entertainment, however, might not have received the amount of attention, appreciation it deserves in the way that also how we communicated about it and to capital markets and investors.
By the way, we have not invited the many requests from investors or also business journalists or industry journalists that wanted to participate in such a similar session because we really wanted to have this tailored to you, our analysts, that know most of the Nemetschek story for so many years so well. With this, let me try to kick this off once again.
By looking at this slide on the left side, again, we want to start framing the Media & Entertainment a little bit in the context of what Nemetschek Group is about. You all know the AECO, as we call it, business very well, which represents the core of our Nemetschek Group's business. There we are a true global leader in terms of probably the global leading software vendor for the AECO industry with the longest history in this area.
With our three segments, design, build, manage, we have a full-fledged product offering for all professionals along the entire life cycle of buildings and infrastructure projects. We want to stay, and this is very important, very dedicated as we are to this industry, which offers an attractive long-term growth potential based on several structural growth drivers which we have discussed many times.
I believe that part of our equity story is well understood when it comes to the AECO, also by the capital markets. That is why we would like to take the opportunity to talk a little bit more in depth about the fourth segment that's a little bit outside. It started with AECO, but nowadays it's more and more becoming outside the AECO industry, Media & Entertainment, to form almost a separate business.
Some of you might have seen the article the other day in a German business paper. Despite its ties into the AECO space, we think it might have seemed that, at least from the outside, this division was more like a fifth wheel, I've been using this term, on the wagon for many years, and it's no longer. You will see why and what we have in mind.
That's now on the right side, and the next minutes, I'll try to walk you through what we think about this business. Media & Entertainment, that's essentially the Maxon brand. It bundles all of our competencies in this field. If we take a closer look at Maxon, it's a leading developer of professional 3D modeling, painting, animation visualization, rendering, all for the creative industry. Artists worldwide use the software to create 3D motion graphics, architectural or product visualization graphics.
From computer games, illustrations, visualization effects, films, commercials, and much more. Maxon's longstanding clients include the who's who of the global Media & Entertainment industry, including companies such as network and tele stations, Sony, The Walt Disney Company, BMW, Apple, just to name a few. I personally have the pleasure to work with Dave and his team as a coach in this segment.
In Dave, we have a true industry expert with more than two decades of experience in this space. He joined us from Adobe a few years ago and is therefore also one of the veterans and true subscription natives. On the one hand, this was, I would say, one of the main reasons why Maxon was one of the first major brands to migrate from a perpetual business model to a subscription model. On the other hand, his great wealth of experience and his practical insights regarding subscription models proved to be a valuable asset for many of Maxon's sister brands within the Nemetschek Group.
If we talk about numbers, as I know many of you are interested in numbers, you see that also that the 10% share of wallet that the division currently represents in terms of the Nemetschek Group, don't forget, it used to be only 5% a few years back. Within three years, this has doubled. More importantly, the share of the subscription business overall within the Nemetschek Group, that accounts to up one-third. This is going to be already my last slide. I wanted to walk you through what I call the phases of this transformation. When Nemetschek, this is maybe phase zero/phase I, 20 years ago, acquired a stake in Maxon, a German, close to Frankfurt-based company.
The rationale was that this experience in the field of visualization was also an important part for designers and architects in our what today we call the design segment. Initial years of strong growth, Maxon entered a consolidation phase where the company grew at a CAGR of around 10%. Reasons for this solid growth were Maxon's sub-scale size, as well as a lack of some features, such as the state-of-the-art rendering solution that was back then missing in Maxon's product offering. Many things have changed since ever then. When we look at 2018, kind of 2019, those were the years where I would say this was a turning point. Nemetschek, as a group, had to make an important strategic decision regarding the future of this segment.
With the benefit of hindsight, I think it was the right strategic move and the entrepreneurial, brave decision that given the attractive growth profile of this industry, we decided to double down on and go all in the business, and we started a very ambitious transformation plan. The very first steps were to buy out the former Founders of Maxon, as well as appointing Dave as become the new CEO of the company. The last phase, and we can talk about the future, certainly, during this call as well. Until today, I'd like to summarize this phase 2019 - 2021 as an extremely well-executed, and thanks to the entire team, and successful transformation of the entire company.
We would have acquired Red Giant and Redshift, as you know, Giant being the innovative software vendor for motion design and visual effects, and Redshift being more the market leader in, what I just said, the rendering solution, state-of-the-art leading edge. Integrated both of them into Maxon. Basically made it one company become out of the formerly three separate within the Nemetschek Group.
I'm claiming this was the first fully fledged integration within the Nemetschek Group's history. As strict and as consequent it was done under Dave's leadership. We started the very successful move from the traditional license and maintenance model to the subscription, as I just said, which also provided valuable practical insights and tips for other brands and business units within Nemetschek.
In sum, I would say these major steps, and of course, countless other smaller measures, have led to a re-acceleration of the organic growth and to more than a doubling of Maxon's revenue since 2018. With that, really, once again, repeating everyone that we are, as a Nemetschek Group, extremely committed and enthusiastic about this business, handing it over to the person who's responsible on a day-to-day operational basis for that, Dave McGavran. I want to stop my presentation and Dave can pull up his one. Thank you very much.
Hello, everybody. Thanks, Axel. My name's Dave McGavran. I'm gonna get my screen started here. Hopefully, this goes smoothly. Hopefully, everybody can see that. Good. Hi, my name's Dave McGavran. I'm joined today by Enrique Glas, our CFO. I also have the world-famous Simon Walker, who's our Head of Education and Training, and he's going to be giving some great product demos later so you can get a flavor for what we actually do, because it is different, as Axel said, than some of the other products that Nemetschek brings out in the different segments.
What I'd like to start with is, Maxon was founded a total of about 35 years ago, before Nemetschek got involved. The brand name itself, Maxon, wasn't very well-known. Cinema 4D, the product, was extremely popular for many, many years. It was used throughout the entire industry.
If you asked somebody what software they use, they use Cinema 4D. They didn't use Maxon, or they didn't use Maxon Cinema 4D. What we wanted to do earlier this year, especially bringing all these companies together, we wanted to relaunch our brand, Maxon. I'm going to kick it off with a video. We like to show a lot of videos, so you'll see a lot of videos today. We're going to start that off with our new brand video. That's something we're actually really passionate about. What makes Cinema 4D and Maxon so special is that actually the original author of Cinema 4D still works for Maxon. He's our CTO. A whole bunch of other people who've been around from the beginning are still with the company.
People are super passionate about what they do, they stay with us for a long time. As we expanded and brought in other people into the group, we looked for companies that shared that philosophy. If you look at Redshift, when they came into the company, they still have the original people who created Redshift. Red Giant has similar, many of the people who started the company, as well as Forger. This brand rollout, what we did is showing you the coming together of all those companies.
Two of which, of course, share the name red, and so therefore, we obviously chose that color. That brand video shows that we're coming together this year as one full company, completely together and fully integrated. If we look at the timeline, Axel mentioned that Nemetschek made the reinvestment in 2018.
Shortly thereafter, we brought Redshift into the company in April 2019. That was a spectacular team to come in and join us. We're really happy to have them with us. They make the world's best GPU render, fastest, highest quality. We'll talk about what that means in a little bit. Very quickly thereafter, in January 2020, we merged with Red Giant, which really expands our growth outside of the pure 3D space where just Redshift and Cinema 4D play.
We're continuing to be busy, and we have a lot of support from Nemetschek. Earlier this year, we brought in a company called Forger in February. Just in July, we had a small acquisition in a company called Bang that brings some great 2.5D graphics to the portfolio. What I'd like to start doing, normally we'd be in person.
Normally, we'd be in a room where I can lower the lights and turn up the speakers. What I want to do is show you a video of what our artists create, and hope that you enjoy that. Please turn up your music if you have it. Hopefully, the video will come across cleanly. Hopefully that came across okay and you enjoyed that.
That's a sample of all of the artwork where our products are used. The joy I have at working at Maxon, or that's my career, is to work with the amazing creative people who make that art possible. When we grew Maxon, we wanted to grow beyond just Cinema 4D. We wanted to grow into the entire post-production pipeline, and we wanted our artists to be able to create in all dimensions. That's now how we look at the world.
When we put all of our tools together, we have a complete group of tools that allow you to do more than just 3D. You can go through editorial, composition, 3D rendering, sculpting. We give our customers an entire package to work with. That's what's really throwing our growth through the roof, is that we're able to put a whole bunch of stuff together, make it more valuable than just any one product, and then make all those products work very closely together.
What do we actually sell as Maxon? We've been really focused this last year on introducing our new subscription line, which is Maxon One. Maxon One is what you subscribe to, and it gets you everything that Maxon makes. It gives you all the stuff that you need to make those videos that we saw at the beginning there.
I think the fun thing is, I'm 100% confident that everybody in this room today who might not know exactly what Maxon is or Maxon does, will recognize something that was played in that video. Maxon is used all over the place. If you turn on your TV, if you watch a movie, if you watch sports, Maxon One was used to create something in what you watched. It's really that pervasive. It's everywhere.
Maxon One includes all of the core products that we've talked about, which is Cinema 4D, our 3D toolbox, Redshift, our GPU-accelerated world-class highest quality renderer in the industry. Red Giant, our toolset that allows you to work with any other software in the industry to bring 2.5D further into the 3D pipelines. Universe, which is our product for making better editorial and better motion graphics.
Just in October, in another week, we're going to be adding Forger to Maxon One, and everybody who subscribes to Maxon One will also get Forger, which is an industry-leading sculpting application that's available in the palm of your hand using an iPad. That's not everything that comes with Maxon One. With Maxon One, we also deliver continuous value.
The goal of any subscription offering is not just give someone a piece of software and let them use it, but is to give them a piece of software and a whole bunch of tools and update it constantly, so that every day when you come to your subscription, you're getting additional value. We offer Capsules, which is our collection of amazing assets that we'll talk about in a little bit. We offer Cineware, which is where Simon's expertise comes in.
Cineversity is our online training and learning portal, where we have the best examples of tutorials and ways you can do things you've never understood before, how to use our products. That's all in Cineversity. Cineware is our integration into the rest of the industry. We'll go through the details of that, but that's where our partnerships come in, where we work with Adobe and Unity and Epic. We also are now introducing some additional products on the iPhone called Maxon Moves. Moves is the tool that integrates with augmented reality so that you can capture your face or you can capture an object, and we'll show you some examples of that as well as we go forward. Maxon One is all of this together.
When you subscribe to Maxon One, you get all of this, plus all of that learning and integration with other parts of the industry. If we look at each of those products, Cinema 4D is our Swiss Army knife for a 3D application. It was the birthplace of Maxon, and the authors are still here. The idea from the beginning was to take something very, very complicated, which is 3D and motion graphics, and make that very easy to use.
That's why it's become such a staple in the industry, is because you can do very, very amazing motion graphics that are used in broadcasts and motion pictures and games and scientific, all those places. It's actually something you can still use and actually learn quite easily. It's very approachable. Redshift is a renderer, and that in itself is a bit of a complexity.
When you look at some of these examples, what a renderer does is if you were to draw a cube on a piece of paper with your pencil, you would see a cube, and it would look kind of 3D-ish. That's what you would do in Cinema 4D. When you want it to look real or inspirational, if you want to see the whiskey in that bottle or you want that Axe deodorant to look like an actual bottle or that volcano to actually look like it's on fire, you need a renderer, and that's what Redshift is. It makes it photorealistic. It makes it super high quality and makes it engaging. Traditionally, any one of these things might have taken 30 minutes, one hour, two hours for a single frame.
Redshift changed the industry by bringing that onto the GPU, and all of a sudden making this really fast and easy to use, and make it that you can be more creative by doing things much faster than ever before. In fact, we just announced Redshift RT, which is an even faster version of Redshift that just went into beta testing in September. Red Giant is a collection of tools that you can use in other post-production suites.
You might use these in After Effects or Avid or Final Cut or other tools that you would have heard inside of conversations around the media entertainment industry. It's a group of plugins. There's 100 and something plugins. Simon will probably show you every single one in depth. They're used to do things further than you can do in those traditional tools. We call them 2.5D plugins normally.
They're taking 3D concepts and allowing you to do them in a traditional 2D workflow. They're made up of Trapcode, which is the beautiful particles and special effects you're seeing on the screen right now. We also have the VFX Suite plugins, which allow you to do special effects for film and TV, and makes it easier to do extraordinarily complex visual effects and makes it more engaging.
These are all examples made with the VFX Suite. That includes Supercomp and Optical Glow, and we just released Bang into this suite. Magic Bullet Suite. I think everybody's probably heard when they go to your local TV store that everybody should be buying HDR televisions. As color becomes more engaging on your phones and on your iPads, and on the televisions that you watch every day in your living room, you need tools to make that color look spectacular.
We all notice that when we shoot something with our old VHS cameras, if we're that old, that it didn't look as these examples do here, and that's because we're not colorists. Magic Bullet makes it so that everybody who can edit a video can become a colorist, and that's what you're seeing there. Universe is probably one of our most popular products, that is a set of plugins in almost the reverse case.
Often you use it to take some really beautiful footage and make it look older because that's the feel you want. You want it to look like a VHS tape, or you want it to have some really fancy special effects, or you want it to be torn, or all the different things you're seeing here. Universe works inside what's called the editorial suite.
Where a video editor would sit and cut movies together is where you traditionally use Universe. Finally, Forger, the most recent application we've added. Forger is a new version of a sculpting application, and sculpting is where you would traditionally sit on a computer. Obviously, it comes from the actual art of sculpting, but in this case, you'd sit on a computer and design new characters and new creations in the software. Cinema 4D has sculpting.
As Apple's really changed the world with the iPad, there's four times as many iPads in the market as there are Macintoshes, and sculpting really lends it something, the work where you actually want to touch it. When you pick up an iPad and your pencil in Forger, you can create this artwork using an iPad and then integrate it into the post-production workflows with Cinema 4D further.
Forger really gives us access to an even greater market and a very interactive market because people will be holding and touching their sculptures. Who are the people using these products? Who are our customers? That's obviously the biggest question and the most important. We made a very concerted decision here, and it's not like other people in our industry.
We focus very specifically on the Media & Entertainment segment, and we break that into three sub-segments, and that is the 3D DCCs. Those are used for creating content for gaming, for broadcast. That's your TV stuff. That's your Sky Sports. Visual effects, visualization. This is the top end of our pyramid. It's where we started. It's where we probably still have the most of our technology, and it's probably the smallest segment at this point in time. It's going to get bigger every year.
Of the Media & Entertainment segment, 3D is probably the smallest. That's changing rapidly as everybody's expecting 3D to be a core competence. As we brought in Red Giant and other products into Maxon, we've been able to move down the pyramid. We include compositing into that, and that's when you're taking multiple pictures or multiple videos and putting them together to make one composited output.
As an example, I think if you looked at the introductions today, you would have saw Stefanie and Axel had a virtual background, whereas Simon and myself don't. Part of the reason we don't is because in compositing, to do that, to make that virtual background work, you use something called keying. That would be a typical compositing workflow, and the keying in Zoom just isn't up to our standards yet.
We feel inadequate if we use the Zoom keying. Compositing is when you're putting people into other scenes or mixing things together, and that's where Red Giant really plays a strong role. The biggest segment in Media & Entertainment is editorial, and that takes the output from the compositing and the 3D software and puts it into a timeline and tells a story from it, and that's where Universe plays. We play in each of these segments, and we're expanding out in each of these segments.
With that in mind, we also pick a customer segment that's very important to us. They're the highest-end professionals. They're the ones who make the most spectacular explosion and the most specialty Marvel movie or whatever. We do have people who work there. It's amazing, and we love them.
Cinema 4D actually got a Technical Oscar for some of the work it did on the Marvel movies, but it's not our key target because there's actually not that many people in the world that do that. There are many, and a lot of them do use Cinema 4D, but we don't put a laser focus there. At the same point, when you download Instagram or Twitter or Twitch or TikTok, any of these, they have millions and billions in users, and they're doing basic media entertainment workflows.
They're putting special effects on. They're putting motion graphics on there, but they're not paying anything. The market down there is all about advertisement, and so you just do something quick and easy, and it's fun and enjoyable, but it's not someone who's sitting down to work with creative intent, who wants that to be their professions.
We really focus on the broader professional, the people who sit in TV stations, magazines, ad agencies, post-production houses, who want to create the highest quality, most amazing content, generally in the motion graphic space, who are willing to pay for the quality of what they're going to create. We call those the broader professionals. That's really where we focus. We're on the broader professional, and we're focused on 3D compositing and editorial.
What are the market segments at play as opposed to the product segments? We actually are used all over the place. This talks to the growth of 3D and 2.5D in the industry is that it's used throughout huge amounts of the market, let's go through a few of the ones that we're going to see and explain them a little bit.
Motion graphics. That is our biggest and most popular, sort of most successful. Motion graphics is design that has movement. It's a motion design. You see here an advertisement for a shoe, a Nike shoe. Cinema 4D would be used to make this. Would Red Giant products to be able to make this. Any time you're seeing something on TV or during sports, and it looks something like this, you're likely looking at something from Cinema 4D. It's our biggest segment, and that's motion graphics. Visual effects is what you see in movies. If you're watching the great new Netflix series or you're going to the movies, you saw the new James Bond movie recently, not sure.
Anything that allows the user to sort of into the story and leave reality as we know it and experience something new and exciting, that's where our products are used. They're used to create all the things you're seeing on the screen right here. These new heads-up displays that are futuristic and different, whether it's a building collapsing or muzzle flashes on guns, spacecrafts flying around.
That's a visual effects segment, and we're used very heavily there, especially with Cinema 4D and the Red Giant plugins. The games and interactive things, so I don't know if we go home and play games or if our kids are playing games, you also want to suspend reality, and you want to experience something new and exciting. Our products are used there for animating the characters or for the intros and the motion graphics that you're seeing on the screen.
We're very much used to create the graphics you see in games. Throughout this time, I'm going to talk about creation because we focus on creation, not the games themselves or not playing back 3D content. We focus on creation. All of our tools allow you to create better content. Art and design. It's been an interesting year for this segment.
This segment is changing rapidly around us, if people have seen any news. We've always been used in the design space, in advertisements and magazines. For car design or car magazine advertisements, they would be using our products to make them more realistic. This year, there's been a major change, if you've heard about NFTs, which are non-fungible tokens. This is a friend of Maxon's, Beeple.
He's been a long time user of ours, and he comes and speaks for us at shows and comes and helps us make our products better. He hangs out with us. This year he sold his Everydays art project, which is something every single day for the last, I don't know, many years, he's created a beautiful design, mostly in Cinema 4D, and he put them all together and made a non-fungible token, which is in this cryptocurrency, Bitcoin, blockchain space, if you want to go read about that. He sold his artwork for EUR 69 million, which is, I think, the largest sale of an artwork for a living artist. That landed him on the cover of Time Magazine, for changing the entire future of business, showcasing Cinema 4D.
He's an artist who uses our tools to create his artwork, and this is something that's really changing right now in the industry, and we're seeing more of this. Unfortunately, in the last two years, this is also an area where we've seen more growth than we probably want in scientific and medical imagery. It is actually quite often used, Cinema 4D, to make, or atoms or molecules or whatever. It's used quite heavily in that segment as well, and it's a very interesting place to go. Hopefully, everybody still hears me. I'm seeing a little bit of a warning about my internet connection. Hopefully, it's going to hold up. Live events. I guess on the counter side, this is maybe something we haven't been as involved in in the last two years.
When you go to concerts and theater and going to outdoor shows and things like that, all of the fancy designs that you're seeing need to be made. We actually play a pretty big role there, and we've been involved in a lot of great concerts, and productions, and there's some great city art events where they use our products as well. There's quite a lot of use across the industry in various different ways. Of course, this is the reason that Nemetschek originally invested in Maxon, and that is in engineering and architectural visualization. Nemetschek knew that the world was changing and that it wasn't just enough to see a hand-drawn architectural drawing or a 2D version of a new house that you're going to build. People want to see them realistically.
Cinema 4D was originally brought in to Nemetschek to make those visualizations more engaging and more realistic. We obviously have actually done quite well in this industry, and we're used all over the place. When we're seeing some of the fun stuff we'll talk about in a few minutes, Vectorworks recently included Redshift as the renderer of choice to make Vectorworks renderings look even higher quality and faster. Graphisoft will be releasing their version with Redshift in the coming weeks. Then, of course, and this is probably the one that more people talk about, but not really many people know what's going to happen, and that is the realities. That's augmented reality, mixed reality, virtual reality. These are all fancy terms.
The idea is how do we take 3D and virtual worlds and mix them together or engage in those in a more interactive way. It's very early days for any of this stuff. But there is a lot of people talking about the industry, and we're sitting right where we want to be in this space. In the last two keynotes, Apple has been talking a lot about how 3D is going to change the world. To do so, they've been focusing on Maxon and our workflows. Here you're seeing some technology that Apple developed that we've included in Cinema 4D that allows you to take photos of objects, and from multiple sides, so you take 30, 60, 80 photos, and then you can bring that into Cinema 4D, and it turns it into an object that you can work with.
That reduces the complexity of one of the hardest things, which is how do I go from nothing to a 3D model. You can now work with your iPhone and Cinema 4D, take a bunch of pictures, and you can get started right away, and I think Simon will show a little bit of that as well. What makes Maxon special? What separates us from the rest of the industry? I think the first and most important, and I talked about it a little bit today, and that is the Maxonians, the people who work here. We have artists working at Maxon who use our products every day to create the content. We have the original ideas behind the products still working here, still wanting to make those products amazing.
Every single new person that comes into Maxon has the desire to change the world through creative expression. They want to work on the products that change the way we look at movies and theater and TV and all these artworks. They're all very, very passionate, and they get to design the products the way they want to create this new world of content that we're seeing when we watch TV every day.
We really have a company that's driven by artists and the engineers making the product that you're seeing today, and we're really fully focused on this segment, and that's kind of unique in our industry. There's a lot of companies that do things, but they usually have a whole bunch of other businesses on the side, and Maxon is fully focused on these products.
With that, those Maxonians have created extraordinarily powerful tools. You can see that you have the highest quality content that you watch in movies are created on a laptop or on a desktop just using Maxon One. You can get started really fast, and you can change the way you've been able to create things and go from a 2D workflow into a 3D workflow quite easily. That's always been a staple, and when we look at bringing companies into the mix, we want to make sure that the products that we're creating are easy to use. There is a lot of tools in the industry that are very, very complicated to use. You can do the most powerful things, but our products can do that, and they're easy to use, and they're joyful to use.
They bring a smile to your face, and they engage you to be more creative with examples and sample assets and presets that you can use to get started. Simon will show you how easy it is to use our tools in a little bit here. Like I said, our tools now span the entire creative pipeline, and this is the way we look at this.
Traditionally, Cinema 4D only existed in the 3D space, but through building out new tools within the Maxon One product line, acquiring new tools, combining the tools together, we now can show the entire post-production process from pre-visualization to 3D to composition, all the way out to editorial, and so that our products are used throughout the entire creative pipeline. If you use our products together, they're going to make things easier for you.
You can take a Cinema 4D object and put it into a Red Giant scene inside of After Effects. You can take the sculpture that you did in Forger and bring it directly into Cinema 4D, and all of that is rendered with Redshift. We brought in all these tools that have the same philosophy for how we create them and have our artists work on them. We also made them work together, and we brought the most passionate people together to give us an entire toolset for the entire post-production industry. Finally, the final thing I want to talk to is what are we focused on in the next years. You've seen that we've gone through some extraordinary growth, and that enough is keeping us busy.
We have a lot of new customers coming in every day. We want to make sure they're happy and passionate and making the creations that they want. We also have a very strong focus on where we're going. I'm going to talk about three specific things that we're going to work on in the next years that'll keep us very busy. The first is a term we put around our asset strategy. That is a term we use called Capsules. What I mentioned is when you want to sit down in front of a Cinema 4D and you want to make a car, or you want to make a plant, or I had to sit down and make this stamp. Let's say we wanted to do that in Cinema 4D. You would start with nothing on your screen. That's really a frustrating problem.
We'd call it the blank screen problem. How do you go from nothing to a 3D object? This is the same if you're using an editorial software to make a movie, or if you're trying to put together a composition, or you want to do the color grade on that movie you just shot. You want to get started with creative inspiration. We bring gigs and gigs and gigs of cool things in our Maxon One subscription called Capsules that allow you to get started faster.
We have a whole bunch of 3D models. There are trees, and there are cars, and there are people walking around and motion capture that we actually went out to a theater and captured. There are the muzzle flares that you see on a gunshot. There are presets that give you choices in how your colors should look.
There are materials that you're going to put on objects when you're using Redshift. Some of them are really smart objects that you can see here, where you say, "I just want to be able to make a city, and I want the city to sort of feel similar, but I don't want to design each building myself." We can give you a smart Capsule that allows you just to say, "I want four stories, and I want it to be three stories deep," and you'd have a slider. Then this really complex thing becomes easy, where you just say, "I want it to be this high and this wide," and all of a sudden, I can create a whole city very quickly. They start from very basic models like a tree.
They go on to very complicated things here, like building and landscapes that you can create automatically. When we work with Apple together as one of our partners, now you can actually create your own assets by taking photos of objects and bringing them directly into our capsule browser and start using them wherever you want. We're going to be investing heavily in this.
Every month right now, if you're a Maxon One subscriber, we're giving you additional models and samples and HDRIs and materials and all these really complicated things that give you more creative tools. Every month, when you log into your Maxon One account, there's more fun stuff to play with to inspire you to get your creative project started. A lot of other companies are charging for that.
We decided that it's just a great idea to give those to our customers, so we have a team of people working on these, and every month, you get additional stuff. So we're going to continue to make it easy and fun to create new content with our Capsules. The second main focus is Redshift Everywhere. Redshift, when we acquired it, was the best, highest quality, fastest renderer if you were using a Windows machine with a modern NVIDIA GPU and CUDA exactly the way we want it to be used and not much variation. So we've been working really closely with the Redshift team to make it so that no matter where and how you want to create 3D content, you'll be able to use Redshift.
In that time period, Redshift is now available on the Mac, and soon we're bringing it out on AMD computers, on Windows, and you'll be able to run it on any computer that you want to. We also bring Redshift not just into Cinema 4D, but Redshift is used inside of Maya, 3ds Max, Houdini, even Blender, because we believe it's the best and highest quality renderer out there.
If you're going to make realistic renderings, we want you to use Redshift, and we're going to bring it to you no matter where you're creating content. Vectorworks is part of this story, and last month they included Redshift in Vectorworks. When you're making your architectural renderings in Vectorworks, you're now going to be using Redshift. Redshift will also be included in Graphisoft in November.
Two of our sister firms who want to have the highest quality architectural rendering, they'll be using Redshift as well. We're going to be talking more about this in the next year. There's more stuff coming, but we'll be focused on making sure that anybody who makes photorealistic or realistic renderings will be using Redshift no matter where they do that work.
Finally, and most importantly, no product in the M&E space ever is used by itself. No matter what you look in creative output, you're going to see multiple tools. You might see Photoshop and Illustrator and Final Cut and Avid, all from different companies. The challenge for all of us is to make the tools that our customers use work in the world around us. With that, we talk about a technology called Cineware.
Cineware is already released, and it's already been in After Effects for years. I mentioned it being in Allplan, Vectorworks, and Archicad. With Vectorworks and Archicad, they also use Cineware to include Redshift. We've recently partnered with Unreal, with Epic, and also with Unity to bring 3D models from Cinema 4D directly into Unreal, as an example, or even Magic Bullet Looks, the color grading I talked about. We can be using that inside of Unreal as well. It's just another place where our tools can be used. If you created that city scene that I said as a capsule, you could bring that into Unreal, and while you're working on your game, you can be changing those settings directly in Unreal without having to go back to Cinema 4D.
You can take the content that you create in the Maxon tools and use that in all other stages of the pipeline where you might be using a different tool. Cineware is extremely important. We partner with all sorts of great companies on it. There's more people using Cineware than are listed here, and it's how we take our work and bring it to the rest of the industry.
With that, I've talked a lot, and it's probably relatively abstract. Simon's going to take a few minutes here and actually show you how some of these tools are used and how easy it is to create amazing content. Then we'll come back, and we can do a little bit of Q&A. With that, I'd like to introduce Simon Walker, who's a dear friend. I've had the pleasure of knowing him for a very long time, and he's quite a name in the industry for his ability to train the complex easily. He's going to try that today.
Thank you, Dave. Right. That's it. I should share my screen. Hello, everyone. My name's, as Dave says, I'm Simon Walker. I'm Head of Training and Learning at Maxon. There's a couple of things that Dave's been mentioning that I think are key, one of which is, we'll get onto the product stuff very shortly, the Maxonians thing, because it's not just me, it's the whole team that we train the customers, and we help people learn stuff more quickly.
I just wanted to give credit. Some of the things that I've been showing today have been put together by me, some by the team, but it's really that group of people that make this happen for us. About the product itself, Dave said, I wrote it down, in fact, to engage you to be more creative and make it easy and fun.
That's exactly what I'm going to show you. I'm going to pick out some of the key things out of more than 130 products that make it easy to be creative and are engaging and fun. Let's just have a look at this. I'm in Cinema 4D now. I'll start with a few Cinema 4D examples and then key up some things from Redshift and also from Red Giant as well. Here we go. Here's a scene, a very simple scene, and this is one of the things that Dave also mentioned. How do you create something when you've just got to build it up yourself? The key thing is that in side the asset browser, we have many gigabytes and thousands and thousands of objects that you can search through. Let's say I wanted to add some chairs into this scene.
You can just type chair, and you've got a whole range of them. The nice thing is there's technology inside Cinema that makes this easy because we can use a placement tool. That means that you can just drag a chair into a scene. Then it's automatically placed in that location. I can, in fact, I can just command drag and make multiple ones of them and just make multiple chairs here.
Let's just turn onto the rotational area here. There we go. We're beginning to populate the scene. The other interesting thing is that you can then duplicate those things even more easily. Let's just jump over into asset browser. I've got some favorites here, and I just want to drag a cup and saucer onto the table. I'll go back into my placement tool. Here we are.
Drag that onto the table and zoom in slightly. The thing about this is that these placement tools allow you to place anywhere. I could place it on the floor, I could place it on the wall, anywhere in the scene at all. I could even place it on the lights up above. You don't have to worry about things intersecting. When you're an artist and you're doing 3D stuff, you are worried about iteration, so that if you can not let the software get in between you and your creative design, then you're going to do more things more quickly. In this case, let's say I wanted more of these items on this surface of the table. I don't have to manually click those and add them individually.
I can use tools like the scatter tool, and I can just click and drag and make as many of them as I want on the screen. We're just thinking about the process as you're going forward. If you change your mind, you can just delete something, and in fact, what I'll do here is I'll just show you if I wanted to get some, let's see, I want some apples on the table here. I'm going to switch on my apples that I created earlier on. You can easily just select these as a group. In fact, let's just add something so I can put these into an item. I'm going to grab a bowl here. Let's grab this bowl. If I grab the placement tool, I can just plonk this bowl down onto the table here.
Just move around, size it up, and so on. Let's say the art director comes in and they said, "This is great, but I need you to put these apples in the bowl." It's very simple just to select these items. You can go into a mode where you can select multiple things together. Let's just zoom in slightly here. You can collect those. You can bring them all together as one series of objects. Notice here how, by the way, how they're not intersecting. They know that they're in 3D space. Here, in this case, I'm just going to drop them up and move them over above the bowl, roughly. Because inside Cinema, there's so many nice tools that we have things like physics in here. I could just drop these apples onto the screen here.
I missed the bowl slightly. That's the beauty of this, because you're not having to place these things manually. You can use the physics engine inside the software to actually make this more realistic, if you like. You're not having to spend time figuring out where to place stuff. You can use the tools in the software to help you work more quickly. This is just one example, and in 20 minutes, it's tempting to go into every particular tool and show you how much depth there is, but I just wanted to give you a brief overview of things. Mentioning this physics aspect inside Cinema, here's another very popular thing that we need to do all the time, which is working with text.
As a graphic artist, you have to be thinking about how you can communicate things to your audience all the time, and also gain their attention. In this case, I've got some concrete text here, and one of the classic things is to use the physics inside Cinema just to set it to crumble. There we go. That's the sort of thing that you think, looking at it, that's actually visually quite complex. How do you set something like that up? It's actually really, really easy. Inside Cinema, we have a whole series of motion graphics tools, and one of these is a fracture tool, Voronoi Fracture. What it does, it allows you to set up easily how many segments you've got. In fact, if I just click on colorize fragments here, you can see these segments.
These are the segments that are breaking apart when you just press play because the gravity is automatic. What if I wanted to increase the number of segments? Here we go. Instead of 30, I'm going to type in here 200. I'll also turn off the colorized fragments. You can see all the fragments here. You can see how they're set up. You can see this is now 200 or so. If I just jump in here and I turn off the colorize and then just press playback, we've got a different type of crumbling. This is in 3D, don't forget. This means that you can create these things really fast and then think, is that the right sort of crumbling I want? Take it to the next step, if you like.
What if you had a sphere in the scene? This is something I'd set up earlier on, and I can, instead of setting these to crumble automatically, I'm just going to click on Voronoi Fracture, and I'm going to choose this little drop-down, which says under Dynamics, rather than triggering it immediately, I'm going to trigger it on collision. This is the thing about the layout. You see, I haven't really talked much about the UI, but it's very intuitive software to use, and all the controls are immediately available. You're not thinking, where is this thing hidden? These are very easy to just, instead of that, I'll set this to be on collision, press playback on my timeline, and now I can have lots of fun just smashing things out the way with the sphere.
You can set this sphere to be invisible and still smash through. It's very interesting and fun. I know work's not supposed to be fun. Actually, it is for us. It's a really great way of just being able to set things up and play around with the sort of effects that you want to communicate to the audience.
By the way, in training sessions, this is the bit where you set this up, and then you just walk away for half an hour and just let everyone have as much fun as they like playing around with smashing these things around. Cool. Talking of physics, connecting some of the items as well, you can use this physics to actually set up proper ads. This is an ad put together by Elly, one of the members of my team, to demonstrate just this.
Here we go. We've got the ability to take a logo and just automatically get the physics to help drop down these lemons. When life gives you lemons, you make lemonade soda. What I wanted to point out here is something really useful in terms of connecting the software together. As a designer, let's say you created this logo in Illustrator, and here we have this exact logo in Illustrator, and it has strokes along the edges. In fact, let's just show you this. I'm starting from scratch. The other key phrase Dave mentioned earlier on, which is starting from nothing, and if we just start with this, here it is, this lemon, I can just go in here, and I can just drag that into Cinema. Immediately, here we are in Cinema, and there is this 3D element.
In fact, what we'll do, if I go into this element itself and just extrude the depth slightly, you can see I've done nothing except drag it into Cinema. You could be working in Illustrator, or you could accept this file from one of your colleagues, and it takes those strokes in Illustrator, turns them into geometry, and colors them in those same colors as you had set up. That's a really interesting thing. It's not getting in the way of your creativity. You're able to branch in between different applications like that. One of the other core things about making 3D is that you want to see what it looks like. In this case, we've got a good 3D representation of what it looks like.
Traditionally, you have to then press render and render these things for a number of minutes so that you can see the photorealistic or the creative vision. That's where Redshift comes in, because Redshift makes this super easy. If I turn on the Redshift render view, in fact, let me make some space on the screen here so we can see the whole design. If I turn on the Redshift render view, here we go. Instead of having to wait half an hour, go make a coffee, and so on, you've instantly got the view of what it's going to look like in Redshift. This is the power of not only the coding of it and how it's built, but also the fact that it sits on the GPU.
You can do things like, I'll just scrub through the playback here. We're just looking at different frames in the scene, and instantly I can see what it's going to look like. I can see what these lemons are going to look like once they're rendered. That kind of real-time feedback means that you can do multiple iterations.
You can work with the creative team, you can take direction from the art director so that you can change stuff, and it's not getting in the way of production. In fact, let me show you how you can build this up on a particular scene. Let's swap over to Here we go. Here is a scene which obviously is in 3D but isn't rendered. If I add Redshift here, I just want to quickly show you this easy-to-use aspect.
If I turn on Redshift render view here, and then we'll see what the scene looks like. I can turn around. Here we go. I can turn around in 3D space. As I'm updating the scene or zooming in, this updates the render. I'm seeing in real time what it's actually going to look like. One of the hidden, well, it's not really hidden because it's famous for it, but one of the key values inside Redshift is its ability to manipulate lighting, and lighting is at the core of rendering. What we can do is we can go into Redshift, we can add a light. Let's add a dome light here.
Instantly, that dome light then causes the scene to update because then you can see it's beginning to look much more photorealistic or much more stylized in the way that you want it to look. You can go on from this. You can use back to the asset browser where we were talking about all those thousands of different assets. We've got the ability to search through.
Let's search through an HDR image. This is a wide gamut, high-resolution image, which has the ability. Here we go. Let's choose this one. It has the ability to light the image or light your scene. In here we've got a spherical image, and I want to use the lighting values of this captured image inside our scene.
In terms of easy to use, all you have to do is just drag it into the texture, and then that immediately updates. That is the power of it. It's the real-time update and ability to just quickly drag things on top of each other to be able to then create stuff from nothing. In fact, I would say this session is reverse training because what we usually do is we lead people through how to create scenes. In this particular case, I just want to give you a quick overview. We've looked at Cinema, we've looked at Redshift, and I just want to show you some of the other tools that complement them in the post-production area.
We've looked at being an artist, a 3D artist, creating things from scratch, and then perhaps working with the rest of your team who have to embellish things and create particles, for example. Let's jump over to After Effects, where I've got here Trapcode Particular set up, and this is where it lives inside After Effects.
After Effects is one of those programs that sits on everyone's desk in post-production, and this is why Red Giant is so hugely important to them because of the 100 and so tools that Red Giant provide to actually make things look better. The core concept is that these tools are incredibly powerful. Inside Particular we've got the ability to make particles. This is the default setup, and in the effects controls panels, there are more than 2,000 individual settings.
We know that you're a designer, we know that you want to get on quickly and create these things, so instead of having to sit through that whole panel, we created a visual interface for this, and that is the Designer. That looks like this. The Designer gives you the ability to be able to create things from nothing, and it's the same controls as you've got inside the main interface. It's the same physical controls, but in a much more interesting, unique or much more interesting visual way. You can change things around, and I'll show you this in a second, how you can create these particles from scratch. One of the key things, just like the asset browser inside Cinema 4D, are the extensive presets that you have in the Designer.
The Designer exists in multiple tools in the Red Giant product range. I just wanted to show you something here. Let's say you had to create standard things. You need to create fireworks. You need to take something from scratch. This takes into consideration not only the look, the color, the animation of the particles, the gravity.
This instantly gets you set up so you can do this, without having to think about, well, how do fireworks work? Do they have smoke? Do they dissipate in the wind? This is already set up for you in many cases. Here's a practical example. What if I needed to create an easy background? I'm a designer at a broadcaster, and many of our Media & Entertainment customers are needing to do these things in a few minutes at a time.
They've just got to create something quickly. In this case, I'm going to grab something from the nature presets. I'm just going to click on autumn leaves, and I've got a whole series of leaves set up, and they're flowing across the screen to the right. I don't really want them flowing that way. I'm just going to reset. It's easy to double click and reset things.
Instead of just collecting in the middle of the screen, I'm going to set them to be a fill the screen. I'll increase the emitter size. Here we are. I'll increase the number of them. Particles per second, might increase their size ever so slightly. We've got physics built into Particular as well. Inside the environment, I might add some gravity. They're now flowing down the screen.
I might also then, inside the simulations, enable meandering, which just gives a little more of that reality to particles. If next time you look at leaves falling, here's your homework, then go and see how leaves don't just fall down, they meander. There's air resistance. They meander, same happens with snow. It's these small details that help sell those particles to the audience.
If I click apply here, everything I've done inside this interface is actually inside After Effects on the timeline. You're able to take those presets and make this into something which then you can practically use really quickly. A couple of other practical things. Whenever you think particles, you think pixie dust, you think fire, you think smoke and steam. Let's just look at this.
What if you are a designer, and you had to create some steam or some smoke, let's say some steam coming off a coffee cup. We can jump into the Designer, and it's really quick just to be able to set this up. There are tools in there to be able to speed this up. Indulge me, because I will make steam in 90 seconds with you. In this case, I want to have a cloudlet particle, which is a bit more steamy. I've got to increase the size of this somewhat considerably. I'll make it emit from a sphere rather than the points, and then I'll make these fade in, fade out using one of the presets on the tools. Even the tools have presets in Red Giant land.
I will reduce the opacity to be really small here and increase the number of particles. Here we go. There's some steam generally evolving. See, it didn't take 90 seconds. It took 30 seconds. One of the other next key things you can do is you can then add simulations to it. I'm going to enable fluid motion. Fluid motion gives you the ability to use real world physics on your particles.
Let's just move this towards the right here just to show you this. What we've got here, let's increase the number of particles. It's a bit more visible. We've got the ability to use these simulations to actually manipulate those particles and make them flow with those eddies and those vortexes that you would associate with steam. It makes it really quick to make something.
In this case, here's the result of doing this. Let's show you here. This is that same steam inside a coffee cup. Many, many graphic designers that I know get to work on really great, amazing imagery, and then sometimes they just have to create something which is animated in the background because also, next time you watch a Hollywood movie, notice how no one actually ever has any liquid in those hot coffee cups. They're empty, so you have to fake this. It's a standard thing to do to actually create steam on things. By the way, don't drink this coffee because I wouldn't drink this. This seems way too hot in this particular case. As well as steam, you can then use that same concept to create other visual effects.
For example, this is the exact same thing that I just set up. It's just got a wider emitter, and it's using that steam to actually, or rather it's using the simulations to create this really beautiful cloud effect, as if you're flying through the clouds.
There's no key frames on this. In fact, the only key frame is on the camera movement, but there's no key frames on the actual particles, and this took about two minutes to set up. This doesn't have any effects or any post-production or glowing on it. We're just using the standard particles inside Particular. It just makes it really easy to visualize things, and a lot of the artists we talk to also have to create visuals for trailers for movies, and sometimes if it's themed with the sky, they have to come up with clouds like this.
Being able to do this really quickly engages their creativity. Talking of creativity, what if you want to take this another step further? Let's just have a look at this. We have a technology which was introduced last year called flocking, and that's basically intelligent particles. What we can do, we can tell the particles to be aware of each other. The quickest way to show this is just to jump into the presets and just go to the behavior here, all these different areas, explosives, dust and debris. Here we go, flocking. If I choose one of these examples, if I choose this one here. Right. What is going on here? We have, let's just rotate this around back here.
We have two blocks, if you like, or two grids of red particles and blue particles, and the red particles are firing particles at the other block, and vice versa. What's happening here? We've got a predator and prey situation. Just let me show you this.
On the red particles that are firing over to the blue grid, they are set up as a predator, and what's happening is that they are set to kill both the particles that they are firing at and themselves. The whole point about this is that particles can then trigger events when they interact with something or at the end of their life. In this case, if I just play this back, what's happening is that all the grid then are attacked by these other particles, and then they disappear. Great. What if you don't want that to happen?
What if you want to change this and let's say, just do nothing? That's for these red particles going over to where the blue are. We'll do the same thing again, and what happens is that the blue particles aren't affected because we said, "Do nothing," but then the red grid disappears. You can be creative with this, and this is the core concept.
I'm going to show you something visually in a second that is much more useful, but I just want to get used to that core concept of things, because then you can create all sorts of really interesting things like this scene. This was created by one of our members of our training team, Hashi, and it shows exactly that same concept. Instead of the blue grid, you've got a grid of space invaders.
We've got those particles that are firing at each other, and that's what the squiggly red laser beams, if you like. Notice the dust here or the smoke trails. That's exactly the same process that I just showed you about how to create smoke particles. In fact, talking of games production, a lot of game productions are made using Particular as a design to see how these particles are going to look, but once they're in the game, and also as assets. I know one game developer who uses dust assets as sprites in a game so that they can be triggered when an event happens without actually having to use up CPU routines as people are playing the game. There's a number of interesting different ways where our tools are being used.
Here's that thing I wanted to mention, that as and when these laser beams hit the space invaders, they trigger another event. In this case, another series of particles, which is a mini explosion. That's the sort of creative thing you can set up really quickly in terms of creating a scene. What if you wanted to do this with just motion graphics and you want to set something up with text?
Let's just jump in here. This is a preset that is in Particular, and it's the same concept. We start with a 3D model, because you can use 3D models inside of Particular. You can use Cinema 4D models. I'm going to show you that in a second. In this case, this preset just has those particles eating away at that 3D model. In this case, it's a sphere.
What I want to do here is jump into the designer and show you how easy it is to then turn this into a really interesting title sequence or a text sequence, if you like. We've got this preset, and here it is down here. It's called sphere string erosion. Instead of having this preset, let's just rewind it here. I'm going to take a couple of these items. Here we go. If we look at these different systems, instead of that primary system, I'm going to change that sphere to be, let's change it to text. In text, I'm just going to jump down on the actual text itself and remove the middle density for the faces, and so we can just see the outline of the text. Now what's happening is that instead of eroding the sphere, it's eroding text.
If I press apply, then that applies it to the timeline, and we can see this on the timeline here. Within a few seconds, I've created a possible title sequence that could be added to one of the ideas. Maybe you're putting together a mood board as a designer. Maybe you're an editor and you just need something as a placeholder. This might become the end design.
It's just really quick to be able to create things which are more interesting than just blank white text. Right. Just thinking about that thing I just mentioned, which is using 3D elements from Cinema inside the rest of the Red Giant tools. We can do this very easily just by clicking buttons. Here we go. Cineware is the main technology, as Dave mentioned, that we can use to actually communicate between the different products.
Here in 3D space, I've got a series of grids. Instead of those grids, I can use a 3D model to describe these particles. We have a library of 3D models inside most of the Red Giant tools and also the ability to add them from Cinema. In fact, I save this as a preset just to speed things up. Here we go. Here is a car which was created inside Cinema 4D.
In fact, show don't tell, they say in training land. Let me just show you this. If I just jump into a recent project here, I've got a car set up, and this is exactly that same model. If we take this same model in Cinema, you've got a save project for Cineware that communicates directly, and so the same 3D models can then be used.
In this case, we've got this car design, and then we can do all sorts of things to this on the timeline. I'm just going to hit apply, and then it applies it onto the timeline inside After Effects. In fact, also another quick thing, you can do this with animation as well because here is an animation inside Cinema. This is something that you can easily bring into Cinema. There's many different motion capture elements that we've got as part of the asset browser. Let's do that same thing again. Show don't tell. Here is the animation. Here we go. Particular animation. Sorry, a Cinema animation. That direct animation, you can recognize the movement here, actually then as a Cineware file can be featured inside After Effects.
The reason why this is useful is because notice the particles that are being emitted as the character moves off. That's the sort of thing you can do. You've got your base movement, your base animation set up, and then you can embellish it inside different applications. Notice that we've also got a reflection in the floor here, and that's because the reflection is just one of the many effects inside VFX Suite, which is part of the Red Giant set of tools.
We can set this reflection on or off. We can increase the opacity, we can decrease it. You can be creative with items without having to re-render, without having to let any other aspect get in the way of your creative process. You can be thinking it and doing it at the same time. That's what I like best about this process.
So far, we've talked about the beauty of things and the speed of working. I just wanted to briefly talk about how you can take things. Here we go. Here's that car feature. How you can take your beautifully rendered items and, as Dave mentioned earlier, make them look terrible. That's the joke, but there is a big visual language between the process of taking something and then messing it up. Here we go. Here's an opening into Red Giant Universe, which has so many different types of effects where you can stylize things and you can add. Let's say we wanted to add a hologram to this. We can apply a hologram effect, and then that can begin to glitch this effect and begin to add scan lines and so on.
Then we can do all sorts of messing up and creating something visually interesting, which then suggests the story. There are more than 90 different ways to do this, 90 different tools inside Universe. Here's an example quickly of the sort of things where you could combine some of those, just to quickly create a heads-up display, something that we've seen in the movie examples beforehand.
I've got a couple of quick things before I hand back to everyone just to illustrate how you would then take those and then turn them into something which is composited. Just on the way, I couldn't not mention one of our most popular effects, which is something called VHS, where we can take a beautifully shot screen, and then using VHS, just turn it into something from back in the 1980s. Here we go.
All those complex effects, all the noise, the mismanaged channels, and so on, and also the edge of the screen, which doesn't quite match up. You can even make this four by three if necessary to go back into the 1980s. These things are easy to set up with literally clicking a few parameters here, but you're being able to look at your vision as you're doing it. Last couple of things. One of the key skills, if you like, is to make things sit together nicely. In this case, we have a robot that we need to make fit in with this video taken from the Angel Island ferry. Oh, taken from the ferry in San Francisco. This is the Angel Island in the background.
One of the beauties of VFX Suite, it has an effect called Supercomp, which layers up your effects as we can see on the right-hand side of the screen here, and allows you to work visually. Let's say I had to take this robot and I wanted to make it sit in the background. As a compositor, you'd know that you need to add haze. We can just, in that side, look, this visual tool. All the tools are right at your fingertips. We can just click on haze and then add some haze to that effect, and haze takes the image, takes the color to the background, and composite them together. You're not having to think about the background. It automatically recognizes the background. The same if you want to do some light wrap.
Let's just jump into light wrap and then add some of that environment onto the edges of that character. You can see this already. That's taking some of the blues from the background, and it's making it more seem as if it's fitting into the background. Of course, no composite like this would be complete if you didn't have a raging fire over the top. This fire isn't very convincing, is it, because this is just placed over the top. If only there were a wonderful series of tools, like in the presets inside Supercomp, where you could add in heat blur and glow to make this really change the background. In this case, we're changing the background. We're distorting it like you would in a heat haze.
You can add in some title text right at the last minute and make that title text also distort as well. All these tools are playing back. These are playing back off the GPU, we're able to do this in real time too. Last little thing I wanted to mention. We've talked about making things look terrible. Let's quickly make them look beautiful. In Magic Bullet Looks, the flagship tool that Dave mentioned, that we have the ability to as When you said this, I wrote this down as well, you said it, Dave, everyone can be a colorist. In this case, we've got images where we can very easily add color correction. Let's begin to manage the levels of here, increase the brightness, maybe make this seem as if it was like a really warm day.
Add some diffusion in to the scene as well. Here we go. Add some diffusion. Really quick to be able to change those settings and to be able to diffuse the scene and make it look like it's really warm. Here we are. Like a summer afternoon. The key thing is here, that not only is this creative, it's also technical because we have the ability to work in HDR space.
It doesn't matter how bright we make these images, they are being communicated to the rest of the workflow through a whole series of intelligent color handling. You can set up advanced color workflows for at the highest level, you can work with this. With the ACES Academy workflows for HDR images, you can work with that with Magic Bullet as well.
I did say this is the last thing, really this is the last thing. I wanted to jump over that technology that Dave mentioned just a few minutes ago. This is really fun. We've got the new technology that enables you to be able to. Is this the right one? Yep. Here's a video recording of being able to capture something on your iPhone specifically. You don't have to have a studio. This is somebody's room, very obviously. We can just go around this basket, we can create images which then are turned into 3D objects. This is the first stage. The second stage is to jump back over to. We've got the ability to go connect your phone with Cinema 4D.
It then imports that image. It also then lets you compute that image too. This is just really a screen recording of that connection between Moves by Maxon and Cinema 4D, and then here it is computing objects, and then it turns into an object in the browser. My very last thing to do is to show you that same basket that was just being scanned.
If I jump back over to Cinema, and I open that scene. Here we go. The fruit stand scene, that same exact scene, and I wanted to show you that basket as well. Here we go. Let's just zoom out slightly here. We want to just position that basket inside this scene. Let's just jump into the asset browser. Let's just type in basket. Basket. Here we go. Here is that exact same basket.
I can use a placement tool just to drag that into the scene here. What I'll do is I'll just size it up slightly. Remember, placement tools let you place this anywhere. Let's zoom in a little bit. What if we wanted to put this up on top of one of those other boxes or over here? Here we go. Size that up, size that down. Maybe we want it over here.
Maybe we wanted to just scatter a number of them around the scene. Really that's the easy way to do it. You've scanned your image, and then you're able just to throw it into Cinema, and you're not getting in the way of the creative process. Great. Thank you for letting me go two minutes over. It's just trying to encapsulate all those things just into 20 minutes is pretty tough. There's so many things in there.
Thank you very much, Simon. I think he's going to stop his screen here. That was a extremely fast boot camp into a number of the tools that Maxon brings with Maxon One, and that, I think Simon showed you maybe five of the 148 Red Giant tools, plus maybe one feature inside of Cinema 4D. There's just so much more in our product suite, so we had to give you a quick version of it. With that, I think Axel and I are more than happy to take questions. As you can see, Maxon's a very different company than maybe other groups in Nemetschek are. We're happy to take questions about it, and hopefully, that gave you a taste of what the Nemetschek M&E segment brings to the market.
Wonderful, Dave, and a big applause and thank you to both of you also, Simon. I think everyone could feel how passionate you are at the end of the day, and I think you could have gone on for the other 100 and x features and products. At the end of the day, Dave is right. This is different, but it's also very much the same for some other businesses under the Nemetschek umbrella.
All of you are covering Nemetschek as a group. It's important to the investor relations team and myself to once again remind us of what is the similarity at the end of the day, and that is that all of those businesses have to create return for our shareholders. At the end of the day, it's about value creation. I know your analyst life is about financial modeling, about market size, growth rates, profitability, and a lot of figures.
Therefore, thank you for your patience in the last hour to bear with us for deep diving a little bit, as many of your requests were in the last couple of years, to better understand the nature of this business, and give you some hints of whom could you potentially turn to and ask when you want to understand what are the customers, what is the differentiating factors to some of the competitive products that are out there, and come back to us and hopefully more and more engaged into what we would have not done so often in the past, the Media & Entertainment discussion. The floor is yours. We can go one by one. Just raise your hand.
Dave and I, Stefanie, we're at your disposal to answer questions. Simon, of course, as well. If we're not able or willing to answer the questions at this point in time, then please allow us a follow-up, or respect our non-disclosure on some of those. We're starting a series of a bit more communication about a segment that we believe some of the market participants have not fully understood, but there seems to be a lot of interest. I'm starting with Florian Treisch, I'll hand over the mic to you, Florian.
Great. Thank you very much. I hope you can hear me. Actually, I have some question, if I may. The first is more on the product itself. You mentioned these game engine providers like Unreal, Unity software. For me, it's interesting to learn how you are comparing or competing against these guys, or are you, and you mentioned the Cineware initiative. You are seeing themself more as a partner in the context of winning a client.
The second is then probably more for you, Axel, as you mentioned in the newspaper, this kind of 20% top-line growth in coming years or years as a target. What are the biggest driver for that, and how important really is this kind of a single client win, or is it really a well-diversified business here? The last one, it's not so big. As you mentioned, you're kind of internally using your software. Can you kind of quantify the benefits of it, i.e., what would maybe be the cost to do it externally? Thank you.
Yes, I guess I can go first on the Unity Unreal. From my perspective, I assume they probably take a similar perspective. I think they're actually fundamentally different businesses. Unity and Unreal make their money from playing back content, and they play back that content in games. They'll even play back architectural content. They'll play back AR, VR scenes. They're trying to create the metaverse you often hear them talk about.
They're about taking 3D content and presenting it to somebody, and that somebody can be a game player somewhere in goggles or someone who's looking at an architectural scene in playback. We are fundamentally not doing that. We're fundamentally creating content. If you were to go into Unreal and start with zero, you wouldn't get that far. They give you some amount of tools, but that's not what they try to do.
They try to take content that's been created and play it back beautifully and amazingly and fast. We create the content with them. That's why Epic actually gave us an Epic MegaGrants grant to create the Cineware integration. You can take those beautiful things that Simon created in Cinema 4D and bring them directly into Unreal, play them back inside of Unreal. You can go back into Cinema 4D to change them when you want them to behave differently.
We're doing the same thing coming up with Magic Bullet. Those things that you're in Unreal, maybe you're trying to play them back to a news broadcast, they don't look the color you want yet because Unreal doesn't have a color grading suite. You'd be able to then inside of Unreal apply Magic Bullet to make the color look correctly inside of Unreal. We're very, very much partners. We focus on creation. They focus on playback. That was the first question. I think the second one is over to you, Axel.
Yeah, thank you. Dave, feel free to jump in. I think the question from Florian was about this article where we would have mentioned the growth ambitions. I think I mentioned 15%-20%, at minimum 15%, which is an overproportional growth that we want to see and we're expecting from that division to be delivered as a contribution to the overall Group growth.
That alone, I think speaks for itself that where are the sources? I think that was part of the question as well. Where should the growth come from? I've always realized that in my discussions with Dave and his team, there's a couple of the effects and the fruits that we can harvest now from previous activities, such as smaller acquisitions, for example. We have been taking over a dealer, for example, in a particular country.
We would have acquired a small team with a particular feature on the sculpting, for example, as Dave was mentioning earlier. We can take advantage of the subscription transition that successfully is basically going to be completed as we speak here. 3D and people in the industry talk about the potential future explosion almost of 3D being everywhere. That, you remember that chart with the pyramid that Dave showed to you? That is more the top part of that pyramid. That's driving content actually more to the top. We have a couple of sources, I would say, from gaining a critical mass to popularity.
The combination, as I was speaking to end customers, which again, would be contracting with smaller agencies or creative studios, for example, to be then using our software, they would be talking about our potential where we would have integrated what used to be Maxon or Cinema 4D, the Redshift, the Red Giant, all of those features to be found now in a bundle if you want all of them or in a de-bundled offering.
Again, we're expecting after that call that at least all of you purchase a subscript. Just kidding. No, there's several sources, Florian. I think it's a very good question. We cannot nail it down to really just the one effect. I think it's a couple of those elements that we're currently observing, and we would project and forecast them to be also relevant going forward.
One of the last elements of your question, if I understood it correctly, was, you were wondering about how important is that single customer win or that new client. I think we have a very broad user base. If I'm not mistaken, opposite to construction projects, which can last two to three years, where our software gets used.
Dave would have shown me with his team a lot of examples of end cases that were just done for, let's say, this feature, this commercial, this illustration, this Hollywood blockbuster special effect. We're having a very balanced picture and customer base of many use cases, but they wouldn't last for several years. They might hop off and on basically and acquire additional features or, enrich their relationship with us. That might tie them even more into our offering.
Don't forget that Dave and the team, what we're bringing to the market almost every week, right, Dave? Every month in a frequency of new features, new capabilities, functionalities. It's much more than in the typical products that you're maybe used from Nemetschek. It's much more dynamic, and that keeps also the customers really interested and that's also the potential for upselling, up pricing in a certain way, as a win-win really for us and the customers.
Yeah. Axel, I think the only thing I'd add is there isn't sort of any single customer that we point to that is even sort of measurable percentage-wise in our revenue. We're growing in every country in the world, basically. We're growing across all those different segments I talked to. It's often in very small design shops. It's two, three, 10 seats at a time. We're growing across the industry. There is a really strong organic growth that Axel talks about, especially in this higher-end content, 2.5D, 3D.
There's a very strong organic growth, we believe we're going well beyond that, and that's leveraging the expertise of bringing multiple companies together, the expertise of bringing multiple products together. Someone who would've been a Red Giant customer is now introduced to Cinema 4D and vice versa. We're really leveraging that growth that we brought together and the strengths of all the different people at the company. We do believe this is a very sustainable growth.
Great. Super. I think there was one question for Simon, and given the many hands, maybe we can keep that short so that as many people as possible do have the opportunity to still ask questions.
Can you repeat that question for me?
I think the question was-
Florian-
To use it internally.
if you're okay with the answer, there was one particular in terms of, I think some of the product features.
The idea was to get a better feeling. As you said, you're using your Maxon software suite in other internal products in the construction space.
Right.
How much of a value add that really is, how this is really helping to offer a better product.
Those are the ties really. I think Dave was mentioning them in his presentation. I also tried to point them out in my intro part that it's roughly 15% today currently that we estimate the business overall size of the division is tied into the AEC, but it's an important feature. Dave was mentioning at the bottom of this one slide, you might remember, Allplan, Vectorworks, and Graphisoft, Archicad.
Those authoring tools, the design tools, I think it's fair to say that they benefit. They have a better possibility to really differentiate with something like, for example, the high-class state-of-the-art best-in-breed rendering functionality. It is important for them, absolutely. I think that was the original strategic intent, and I would always want to keep that really in-house.
Other competitors on the authoring design space in AEC might want to advise their customers to get that kind of feature from somewhere else. Here, from us, they really get it embedded as a plug-in, as an additional within the Vectorworks, within the Archicad, within the Allplan already. I think that's a great teamwork where the individual brands are teaming up and working together quite well.
Great. Thank you very much.
Okay. Thank you, Florian. We have Sven Merkt.
Great. Thank you very much, and thank you for the presentation. I was wondering if you could first talk a little bit about the subscription transition. It's obviously a big topic for the overall software suite, but also for Nemetschek at the moment.
I'm particularly interested of what were the main learning , that you had during your transition, and I'm particularly interested how many customers now after the transition are still on maintenance and kind of what your plans are to transition them also to a subscription model, what kind of incentives you really could give them. Just a second question, maybe. You now have done obviously a number of acquisitions. Would you say you have now pretty much a full portfolio of all the capabilities that you need, or is there still anything outstanding?
Well, Dave can walk you through the details and the good, bad, and uglies about how he transferred the business from perpetual to a subscription. I can just say, allow me, Dave, to just mention two or three things that are maybe relevant also for the end group, which is I have learned. Please take that also not for granted. Subscription does not equal subscription, and transition from perpetual to subscription does not equal transition from perpetual to subscription.
None of those transitions that I've seen, that we've seen at Nemetschek is alike, is going to be exactly the same, following the same pattern, the same logic, the same success. There is fundamentals that we have learned, which is one strength, that is the learning that we can do it with the right preparation.
There is a learning that also we should not. Enrique Glas, our Maxon CFO, is also here on the call. He can confirm that let's not underestimate the back-end processes, how ready the organization must be. It's not just launching the web store and announcing your subscription. You need to be smart about how to price and place and position the product out there, how to bundle or de-bundle, and be prepared with the back-end processes, and explain the value. The bottom line is we can do that, and I think it's fair to say that more than 2/3 of your business, Dave, in the meantime, have transferred already and gone through that transition. You can, again, you can describe that much better.
For Nemetschek, it is an important theme, and I think one of the last proof points that we really want to go in that direction, that we feel the strategy is the right one, was the success of Maxon in the last 18 months. Again, the duration of such a transition might vary. The success in terms of the magnitude, the accounting might vary. That's also important.
Your T& Cs that you've been dealing with in terms of the perpetual license business originally might differ from one perpetual license business to another. The IFRS accounting that would apply is somehow different, so there could be a smoother or a larger dip. Be careful that when people talk to you and say subscription and transition, check mark, it's all going to be the same. It's not.
Last word from my side is that subscription does not equal cloud as services and SaaS. That also is a confusion. We've been speaking with many of you many times about this, but there are still questions sometimes that we're getting that, now that this is all SaaS and cloud, it's not. For us, there is a difference, and there's also a different value proposition. This what Dave was talking about is subscription, but still on-prem, and it's going to be a huge success, and it's going to develop further, right? Dave, anything particular you think as a lesson learned you draw as conclusion?
Coming from our perspective, there is a nice thing is that our industry is prepared for subscriptions. We didn't have to start from zero. All of our competitors offer subscriptions to some amount. A lot of the conflict that you've maybe had with the industry when you're a first mover, we're able to avoid that to some extent.
What we really looked at is two factors when we wanted to lay on our subscription plan, and that is. What is the benefit to the customer? Why would we do this? One of the biggest reasons to do this was remove the barrier to entry. If you looked at doing video editing, when I started 25 years ago, which is a little bit scary, the software at the time would have all cost $3, $4, $5, $20,000, depending on which software you used.
As that became mainstream and more and more people did it, the price came down. When I got to Maxon, the price to get started with Cinema 4D and a service agreement was over EUR 4,000 just to get started. You had to convince yourself, I'm going to get into 3D, and I'm going to make this massive investment, and I don't get to really try it out.
What we said is, well, we're going to lower that barrier to entry. We're going to go into the competitive space. We're going to say everybody should do 3D, so we should price it correctly. We brought that barrier of entry down to EUR 60 a month or EUR 650 a year if you go on a subscription, somewhere around there. I'm estimating a little bit.
We said we're not going to make it EUR 4,000 to get started. We're going to make it EUR 650 to get started. That was the first thing. That gives you a bigger market to talk to, someone who's more willing to invest that money to get started. The second thing is, and this is what I love, I historically come from an engineering background. When you're dealing with a deferred revenue model in IFRS, you're allowed to develop your products differently. It's a very nice experience. You can bring out features whenever you want. You can add value to your customers whenever you want because you've already dealt with the accounting principles that allow you to do that.
We're allowed to go from maybe having once a year release if you're a Cinema 4D or every three years if you're a Trapcode or every 19 months or something if you're a Trapcode, to constantly bringing out new stuff every month, keeping your customers engaged, adding services like training or content that we're delivering every month, adding features when you want, integrating things when you want.
We can become flexible as a company, which allows us to move faster in the industry and actually change the way we're doing things based on what the market is telling us to do instead of waiting on an 18-month perpetual rollout. We were able to show the customer that value. You asked about how many people are left on service agreements.
Outside of Redshift, which we just brought subscriptions one month ago, there are no service agreements left. That's done. Axel gave you a number. I won't say anything other than what he said. He said two-thirds. That's fine with me. We don't go into that level of detail at this point. I can tell you we're basically there with our subscription transition. It's been extraordinarily successful. Our customers appreciate it. In the first year of Cinema 4D, we had more subscribers than we ever had on service.
Thank you. Very insightful. Looking at the time, maybe I go again, from left to right on my screen at least, Knut Woller should be there from Baader with a question.
Yeah. Hi, Axel. Sorry, I'm just getting the camera on so that you can see me.
Yeah.
I have two questions, actually. The first one, looking at the growth rates that you communicated for Maxon, that is quite clear. How should we think about margins? That would be the first one. The second one to Dave and Simon. You mentioned Capsules as one of the areas of growth. How should we think about the monetization of Capsules? Will you just try to drive the adoption and hence grow the user base? Is it also something where you believe that can be monetized individually?
To which extent can you leverage here also the assets from other brands? For example, I remember you had objects for Archicad, for example, and it looked a bit like what Simon showcased, that you used some elements like chairs, tables. To which extent can you leverage that? Thank you.
Thank you very much. That's a good proof point that some people follow us for quite a while and remember things very well. Thank you very much for the excellent question. On margins, let me say upfront, Knut, that we're committed to invest and to support Dave and his team in any going forward business opportunity that we would see there.
That could be organic, that could be R&D, that could be geographical. Again, when we talk about the over group average, a growth pace, and mentioning the 15% at minimum, then we're also probably looking at a minimum of 30% as a roundabout margin. Without going into one particular year, without going into one particular detail there, that's the expectation. That the business has the power to deliver over proportional growth, and an over group average potential margin.
Again, the commitment from our side is that whenever we see opportunities to grab market share, customers, geographics, organic, inorganic features, we're very committed to do so as we have done in the last couple of years. When the business really got more, as I think you can all feel it in the focus also from us on the exec team and the management team.
Thanks Axel.
Yeah. From the Capsules side, this is a new strategy we've been rolling out quite a bit. We've had assets for a while, but the Capsules specifically have been rolling out for a while. Most people in the industry who go into these areas actually try to resell other people's content, and it's a very difficult business to get into. They decide to. They have to put in management of how to look at the assets. Are they quality assets? Are they appropriate assets? They have to deal with all that, and it becomes a low-margin business, and you have to set up a shop. That's just not how we're looking at it. We're looking at it as basically saying, "Are you a subscriber to Maxon One?
If you are, we want to offer you the highest quality content that we're creating, that we're bringing into the group, that we think is useful for the workloads you're working on. We want to be able to then bring those assets or those Capsules to any of our customers, whether they're using Cinema 4D or using one of the products that integrates with Cineware. If we have these great amazing content, like trees and chairs and desks, when you use Cineware inside of Vectorworks and Graphisoft, we want to make it available that they can browse those same content of assets if they're a Maxon One subscriber. Now, we haven't gotten there yet, but this is something we do already in After Effects.
You could have saw it where Simon looked for a 3D object inside of After Effects and was able to find one from the asset browser in Cinema 4D. It is something we're rolling out and something we're building right now. We're actually building a team to bring the highest quality content out. This is something we truly believe that Maxon One is the place you should go for all of these, whether they're materials, presets, smart objects, normal objects, HDRIs that Simon showed.
They should be something that you should get. We're delivering on a monthly basis now for the last six to seven months. Every month, you get a new package of these. Maybe in December, it's going to be holiday pack, or in Halloween, you're going to get pumpkins. We don't know yet, but we're going to keep it fun, and we're going to keep bringing stuff that our customers want, and we believe it's part of the subscription.
Excellent. Thank you very much.
Thank you. George would be next. Hello, George. We can see you.
Hey. Thanks for the presentation and taking a question. I just wanted to take a step back and really get into, I think, a point you finished on, Dave, which is, and tell me if I'm wrong, because I'm not at all in tune with this industry. It feels to me like if you're a design artist or a graphics designer, there's a whole variety of different products you would use depending on your particular assignment, even from different vendors.
Clearly, you've done some M&A in recent years to bring some of those pieces together. Thinking about a much longer-term outlook, is there a big story that's going to happen in this industry where you're going to have simplification of the amount of products that people need to use to get things done? Is it very fragmented today, and will that change?
From that perspective, no, I don't necessarily think so. In fairness, you're almost seeing it go a little bit the other way at times. There are these kitchen sink-type applications, and I mean that in a positive way. If you're going to do anything with a photo, you're going to use Photoshop, most likely. If you're going to do anything illustration, you're going to use Illustrator.
They do really amazing things. I don't think you're going to see companies succeed if they try to put 3D inside of Microsoft Paint. They're just different tool sets. You want to keep the tool designed for what you're trying to do. Especially when you bring out iPads and phones where you're doing various pieces of the workflow, whether it's caption or facial animation like you can do with Moves by Maxon or captioning an object that we showed.
You're going to be using more specific tools for parts of your workflow, and therefore, it's much more important that they learn to work together. You're not going to lose those Cinema 4Ds and Photoshops and Illustrators. They're always going to be there. You're going to find places where you're going to need actually more interesting tools, and I think that makes it interesting in the acquisition space, is that there are people springing up who are just doing machine learning for color grading, or they're just doing keying on cloud computing. There's going to be more and more opportunities because there's so much to accomplish in this space.
That's helpful. I just wanted to add on to that. I guess thinking about that landscape and just thinking about what you've said around customer loyalty, it sounds like very sticky software that people probably don't want to shift between different vendors to use at different points in time. I guess that would have been borne out what you saw during the subscription shift. Is that?
We're absolutely seeing really sticky customers. We're really happy with our retention. We have very loyal customers. We've known them for years. We get to hang out with them when we're allowed to go to trade shows. Hopefully, that gets back to normal. We have very sticky customers. It is something that people invest their career in.
As you as a financial analyst, if you had to change the tools that you use every single day when you go to work to something else, whatever that something is and something else is, you probably would be grumpy for a while. It's no different than in our space. If you're going to be a creative every single day, you're going to learn how our tools work, and you're going to feel comfortable in them.
It's our job with subscription to convince them every day that it's amazing, because they could leave us immediately, and that's value for them of subscription. We love to make our products more amazing every single day so that they want to open it up and have fun with it.
Thank you very much. With a few minutes left, we have David and Uwe are left. Whoever wants to go first.
Okay, I'll go first then. Thanks. Just two questions on my side. Can you give us an idea of how many customers are using multiple Maxon products now, and if cross-selling has been working as expected between Maxon, the historical Maxon, Redshift, and now Red Giant? The second question is on M&A. What kind of assets are you looking at now? Are you looking more into the 3D DCC space or more going down the chain toward compositing or editing?
Yeah. For the first question, I just blanked. The first one was, sorry. Number of customers. We don't give out our number of customers. We just try to avoid that. It never seems to go well in the industry when people talk about actual customers. What I will tell you is in the last year, Maxon One, which is our combined subscription, has outgrown all of our other subscriptions massively. It's been a massive success. In that, we're seeing that so many of our customers are using multiple products.
Redshift, when we brought it out with Cinema 4D, the bundle was unbelievably successful. Our customers definitely see the value in using multiple products. That's been proven out this past year. It's definitely one of the key drivers for our growth is they're not bringing in just one product. They're bringing in Maxon One or they're bringing in two products. We don't talk about the actual numbers, but we're definitely seeing the value of the company's new products.
More and more, yeah.
As far as where we're looking at acquisitions, it's definitely a combination. We're not saying we really want to go and look at this thing. We're saying what technology is out there and what people are working with that technology. We want to find companies that fit. You can just go on and buy a bunch of companies and hope they fit together, and they're very different types of technology companies, and try to just maximize the growth.
That's not what we're doing. We're looking for specific companies that have that sort of intent where they've created the company with the artists, with the original people, where they would fit into our company, where the culture of our companies would combine well. Then it could be small, and it could be large.
Bang was an example of something we brought in that was a very small acquisition. It was a fun product that we knew about in the market. It fit directly into the way we think about the world, and then the person who did it fit directly into Maxon. It was a great fit. We brought them in. We're not actually saying we're going to go target this thing. We're looking for companies and technologies and products big and small that expand what we offer with Maxon One, but also fits culturally inside of Maxon because we're doing it as a single company.
I think it's fair to say, Dave, that the directional tendency is to really whatever we would find there as a complementary would be integrated. We're not considering anything organic as kind of a subpart of the organization or of the business or of the offering, right? That is also different. Uwe, last not least, the mic is yours.
Yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Axel. Again, thanks, guys, for the very passionate presentation. Just one last question, really. It's really meant less nasty than it may sound at first sight. Given the lots of M&A that you did as a segment, what does your internal R&D really do these days, and how happy are you with the R&D efficiency overall?
I think they're just utterly sort of separated, and I think that's the pleasure of it. We didn't acquire R&D into Cinema 4D. We didn't acquire R&D into Redshift. We acquired products that complement each other, and the R&D going on each of those products continued at full speed. Cinema 4D, just as an easy example, was the first product in the entirety of the industry to land on Apple's new computers with the Apple silicon. We were there on day one.
We were there with Metal on the shows with Apple, and Redshift was there on Metal. Those are massive engineering efforts. Our R&D teams are the best in the world, and they're working on the technology stack that they've been brought in to work on, but we're bringing in parallel technology tracks and then asking them to work together.
It's not that Cinema 4D stopped three years ago, and we just brought in Red Giant and Redshift. Cinema 4D has had hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of features in the last three years. Red Giant came in and worked on Red Giant products. Redshift came in and worked on Redshift products. We have these multiple parallel streams of R&D going forward. We haven't bought to fix problems. We've bought because the companies fit and the vision fit.
Don't worry, Uwe, there's no nasty question.
Yeah.
With this one, again, a big thank you to all of you who took the time, those ones that prepared, those ones that presented, Simon and Dave in particular. The offer that once you would walk away from this call, hopefully being able to having learned a little bit more about the insights, really, about the nature, the ecosystem, the dynamics, the fantasy, the passion that we all share when looking at this business, when running this business, then please turn to Stefanie and the investor rel team to follow up on any potential questions. We're at your disposal.
It is our philosophy to open up a little bit more because we have built a basis, which this was the phase I and phase II, maybe, to now be able to be a relevant player in a market that is somewhat becoming more and more different from the core business of what Nemetschek stands for. Therefore, we feel the need, we feel the interest, and we want to thank all of the inquirers to be given the chance here to present because that shows the appreciation for the business, for our work, for the team. Dave can also take that back. I think that's the credit that everyone deserves. We're passionate, we're optimistic. Thank you