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Comment by quelsolaar | Hacker News Reader

I license a fully automated UV unwrapping tool at MinistryOfFlat.com . UV mapping is the task of unwrapping a 3D model to a flat surface in order to put textures on it. Ive been at it for about 3 years, and last year I made 7 figures. I do sell directly to 3D artists. You probably know some VFX companies and game companies that have licensed my tool.

I make a good amount from people coming to the web site, but the majority is made licensing the technology to various companies. The online sales are mostly there to spread the word, and gather user feedback.

UV mapping is a very difficult problem mostly because artist have very specific ideas of what constitutes good UV mapping and it doesn't conform to any simple heuristics. Its about a megabyte of C code without any dependencies, and that makes very attractive to licensees.

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That’s really cool.

Do you worry about licensees keeping the code and using it without you knowing if they cancel? Or an employee at a licensee walking off with the code / binary etc?

We’ve talked about some of these risks at my current job which ships code as our product so curious how other people navigate this.

Congrats on the success!

Thanks!

First of all I sell perpetual licenses. For everything else I rely entirely on the honor system. I wont spend my time chasing some student who pirates a copy. The real money comes from the larger companies and they are terrified of getting in legal trouble for breaking any kind of license agreement, so they have no reason to screw me over.

I worry a lot more about making things complicated for licensees then I do about them taking advantage of me.

Love this! I wish more would share your take on this.

dude is obviously a fing genius and probably has calculated that its more worth his time playing in the stock market than tracking down legal cases.

glad to see a software guy use all the modern day tools to get out of the rat race. cheers

Thanks!

Its also much better for your health to focus on helping people who support you then, to worry about what a few bad apples might do without you ever noticing.

That's really cool. I have really hard time calculating the prospect price for commercial usage of software. can you share the average commercial license pricing range for a product? and how much does it differ from pricing for individuals? Thanks for sharing your stats.

Congrats! I’ve meant to ask you/Brent: what do you think holds ptex back in VFX and animation?

(For games, it’s clear that ptex is basically a nonstarter, since GPU texture mapping hardware can’t / won’t deal with it)

Lost of things. Lack of tools is one. Lack of hardware is another. Its incredibly useful to use 2D images as resources since there are so many tools, file formats and pipelines that support it. I have always seen Ptex as "UVs are hard, so lets reinvent everything to avoid solving that problem". Since I have solved the UV problem, there really isn't a need for Ptex.

Congrats! Sounds really amazing and great to see commercial success too!

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