Sure!
I was thinking about the early days and even all through the years with Zbrush the number of artists/advocates who helped build awareness of the power of Zbrush.
With Blender it has been primarily driven by the Open films in the beginning, and of course, now you have a massive community showcasing great art.
It’s a good thing that is is at a hobby level for you, because of the fact that this gives you a kind of built-in funding model. Because, of course, you are contributing your time. Not that you want to do that forever.
3D coat is developed by one guy. Or it was. Not sure if he has brought on more people or not. He has people helping on the administrative side, of course.
But his success has been in being the first at a lot of things, kind of ahead of the curve in many ways.
Then of course a nice alternative to Zbrush.
And finally it is worth mentioning Mudbox - much to my surprise is still being developed and sold.
I found it my favorite workflow and interface, just right to the point, simple, easy to understand.
But for features I had to stick with Zbrush for heavy lifting. (I don’t model or sculpt anymore I have a team that does it).
A couple of more honorable mentions.
Zbrush Core and Core Mini.
Both targeting a similar user base as you.
You have a unique potential in that market to continue to grow your tool beyond the basics - potentially.
The trick in the long run as a commercial application will be how to carve out your niche.
I have no crystal ball there.
But I do have one more thing worth mentioning and you can take this or leave it. But here goes.
There is one main thing that some applications to this day succeed on. And that is being the first, the best, or the only.
That is a gem of you have that. For sculpting it would be hard to find what that would be, now, as that market is more or less sewn up.
But there is also one more thing that can circumvent this, or avoid it, or in fact if done well, be the “only” or the “first”.
I will explain.
I developed a little theory and formula based on observing a few grand a successes and failures of 5 major applications as use cases of study.
LightWave
Modo
Blender
Maya
Houdini
I theorize that the two applications that failed LightWave (yet to be acknowledged by the owners) and Modo (recent announcement of EOL by The Foundry) have something in common.
And three major successes in Blender Houdini and Maya have the same thing in common but with the polar opposite approach.
Modo and LightWave were developed under a model of closed source and limited SDK. Both took too long to develop, lost focus and in the end could not easily move with trends and change in technology. And lastly had limited development resources.
Maya was developed on Mel. It’s own scripting language. So that literally all of Maya was built with Mel. So what the developers used for development was the same tool released to the user base to extend Maya.
Immediate adaptation in the industry by being basically the first app to offer this, secured its future development because studios were not relying on the developers to add features but could write their own.
Worth mentioning its use in education, which secures a constant breed of new users.
But it was all on the backbone of this extensibility.
Houdini, is basically a tool building tool. By building its application as everything nodes, it gave users the power to extend the tools capabilities far beyond off-the-shelf effects and Houdini artists were more or less Houdini developers where art was not the only IP, the tools they made were another IP.
Again this secured its future and use in the industry.
Worth mentioning that they offered a free version so people could learn without the restrictions of trial.
And last but not least, Blender. Not just open source and therefore easily for studios and individuals to extend, but it became the first and only viable fully/featured free open source 3D tool.
Not that community development drove it in a large way, it did help, but Blender had good funding resources etc. and as long as they kept improving it and large studios like Tangent could extend it, the popularity grew.
And so here we are.
Now, one thing that has not ever been done, is a sculpting app that is modular or extendable by users in a big way.
It’s food for thought. And I don’t even know how it would be possible.
But if you could do the upfront work to make a tool building tool, but for average users. I have no idea how that would work.
But if there was such a tool, like a Houdini for sculpting, that users could learn how to build their own tools, special operators etc.
That would be a first!
