Adobe, uncontent with ruining Substance with their greed, has turned their lecherous gaze on Figma. We’ll see how long there’s still a free version of Figma 
I remember the “Figma vs XD” arguments from my UX colleagues in college, but I suppose that argument will be null and void going forward
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Damn.
(Post must be at least 10 characters. Fine.)
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F***, no! God damn you, Adobe! 
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I swear, Adobe would gobble up Blender in a heart beat if it could. 
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I will have to admit, I’ve never heard of Figma before, which given it seems to be a $20 Billion company is a little unusual.
But then on having a quick look, I don’t really do any of that sort of UI/UX prototype design sort of stuff and especially not online as part of a team.
However, I can see why Adobe would want it. Online and subscription based, so big check mark there. A view to a future where you do all the initial prototype design work within the ‘Figma’ environment and once all signed off on, automatically pull it all into the ‘Creative Cloud’ environment to ‘spruce’ things up in Illustrator/Photoshop or knock out a quick video in Premiere, etc with all those vector, etc design elements imported across and still fully editable.
Yeah, full blown 3D production software is about the only thing Adobe are now missing (outside of CAD/CAM engineering 3D software). Merge Adobe with Autodesk and it would be game over.
But outside of that, Blender would make for an excellent ‘second’ option, so basically Ton can’t die…
Tho seriously, while we hope he doesn’t, just like the Queen, it has to happen someday, I assume he has a succession plan in place.
You forgot the fact that Blender can be forked if Adobe did somehow find a way to circumvent the GPL on purchase and close the source. Though they would probably need to hire a magician to actually do the purchase part because a FOSS organization is a heck of a lot harder to take over than another commercial entity.
Besides that, the managers he hired in the last couple of years (who might become the new project owners) are much younger and are just as pro-FOSS as he is (ie. the actual program is always free and corporations will not be allowed to steer it).
Hands off from free software you greedy filthy corporations!
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What a surprise. 
That reminds me of the acquisition of Sculptris by Autodesk and how I felt then.
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Sculptris was purchased by Pixologic actually (back when they were a universally praised company for their innovation). What happened was that its functionality was implemented in Zbrush and then killed off (though it was ZBrush so there was not a whole lot of pushback from the 3D community).
It might be fitting that their most controversial move was their last big one before the Maxon acquisition, and that was making Zbrush Core Mini which was arguably targeted at us Blender users (in which they appeared to outright mock Blender’s sculpt mode by doing things like purposely making their drawing code slower)
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Sorry, I made a mess here. You are right, but the feeling was the same. I only know it was a long time ago so I messed up the names. I just thought at the time that Sculptris was something really nice coming to the free software community and the dream died soon.
I did not even look at the project anymore since I heard it was sold.
I think Blenders sculpt mode has long since far surpassed the original Sculptris. At the time it was incredible of course but that time was quite a long while back now.
Did Pixologic really slow down the draw speed in ZBrush Core. I never noticed any change in performance here. Simply that the poly count was reduced, But it was still a large enough poly count for reasonably advanced work and if intelligently managed could produce stunning highly detailed results. Core was a really great app in it’s own right and grew to become very complete and fully featured. Since it’s now subscription only it’s obviously lost a lot of it’s former appeal. Sigh.
That is Zbrush Core standard, there was a new freeware app. called Zbrush Core Mini that was also Zbrush and designed for additive dyntopo-like sculpting but crippled all the way to MS Paint levels (ie. nearly all features removed, an export feature designed to ruin models, maximum polygon count being around 100,000, and a purposely reduced sculpting speed). The only saving grace is that it allowed a path to upgrade it to Zbrush Core or even to Zbrush itself (so you don’t lose your scribbles if you bothered to save project files).
Sorry I seem to have missed the ZBrush Core Mini reference in your original post. My mistake.
Although I don’t think ZBrush Core Mini was ever intended to rival Blender’s sculpting or targeted towards Blender users specifically. It was far too limited for that. Blender sculpting is very advanced now. Besides which. Who or what is a typical Blender user anyway ? The target audience appeared to be aimed more toward total beginners and children who were interested in getting into digital sculpting. In particular it seemed to be aimed for entry level into sculpting original creations for 3D print. So it was a very lean and simple easy to understand app with that in mind. It also helped Pixologic to get a familiarity and connection with ZBrush out there to a wider audience as well of course but only the full commercial ZBrush Core offered a real costed upgrade path to the full version.
I don’t think exporting or saving the models out into other apps was ever really a problem as it exported optimised obj’s. These would preserve all of the essential detail and form in the sculpt but with an optimised reduced poly count. Which is precisely what you would need for 3D print or rendering and animation in another app. To me it appeared to make this essential step, automatic and easy to grasp for total novices. It didn’t actually ruin the original models but streamlined them for opening in other apps and for 3D print. These exported object’s could easily have poly density re-applied using in an open source app like Blender or Meshlab using features like voxelization if anybody wanted to add more detail or changes outside of ZCore Mini. I just thought it was a bit mean to only offer one subtool.
I don’t want to de rail the thread by going too far off the original topic though.
Ah, yes, sweet nostalgia.
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Crazy to think it’s not even been a full year.
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Getting back on topic. Here is a recent article I saw about this and thought it might be something to share here.
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What’s figma?
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What’s Google?
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From the get go I believed Adobe made a terrible decision. Sure, it seems like the right one in the moment. They acquired a huge chunk of users who had nowhere to go. Figma is arguably the best tool in its category.
But the hate for the Adobe is strong. Very strong! People would rather “cut off their leg” than stay in the Adobe “trap”. Meaning people immediately started to look for an alternative. And, oh boy, there is a good one - Penpot.
Penpot is having a surge of users now. Sure, the tool is a bit rough at the moment, but it’s very close to compete with Figma in functionality and it’s open source! I believe they’ll catch up pretty fast to Figma. Especially now, since they’ve secured a very decent funding.
I am now confident Adobe made a 20 billion mistake they’ll regret very soon. 2 years max.
They practically pushed Penpot to success in Figma space.
This is all very amusing to observe.
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From past experience and also reading through the article posted above I guess it is always best to assume that just about any favourite independent app and innovate costumer focused company eventually will be forced take that incredible offer they simply can’t refuse. So we enjoy them when times are good but that must always be in expectation of a sudden change somewhere in the future.
I am thinking that well managed open source projects seem to be the only way to try to avoid this … what seems to now be an inevitable cycle. A familiar cycle that we have seen play out so many times.