Since the end of the previous millennium, when I've gotten off my ass enough to do some 3D modeling, it's been done in Hash Animation:Master. It was buggy at times, and the ego of the company's founder drove me out of the user community, but overall the software itself was good, and easy to use. Due to various other things I was involved with, I didn't purchase the annual software upgrade last year. Upon discovering that they were starting to lay off their programmers, I decided to bite the bullet and get the 2008 upgrade this month, so that in case the company went under I would have the latest version.

So I called their sales line, as I always had in the past. They apparently don't have humans answer the phone anymore: the recorded message informed me that I could send them email, or upgrade online. Their Web site, alas, has gone through a redesign which leaves much to be desired from a usability standpoint, and I didn't see the link for upgrading right off the bat. So I sent an email.

No response.

A few days later, their annual "Buy our upgrade!" email arrived. "For more info, use [tech support email address]." So I sent an email to the given address, asking a few questions which had occurred to me based on the information I had finally found on their Web site.

No response.

This morning, I sent my questions again, prefacing the email with "I sent this to you a week ago, but I guess it got lost somewhere along the way (historically, you guys have been the most responsive tech support team I've ever dealt with)." Which is true; despite the founder's inability to deal rationally with anyone who publicly disagrees with him, he had put together a fantastic team of programmers and support staff.

That did finally get me a response. The new software is Internet-activated, so you can no longer just stick the CD or hardware dongle into whatever machine you want to use it on — you have to buy a separate license for every computer you want to run it. There's no longer a distributed rendering system, which lets a master server send individual frames out to multiple machines for faster rendering of animations. No, I may not upgrade my existing dongle to 2007, the last year to support the distributed rendering.

I guess it's time to finally ditch Animation:Master and struggle through learning the Blender interface in earnest.