Yeah, I can’t complain too much as I bought the perpetual almost 20 years ago, but the fact that they’re forcing people onto a Redshift sub to use the GPU is a joke. I can write off the RS sub as a work expense, but on principle I will not be robbed by Maxon.
This upgrade price and ridiculously expensive sub prices will surely drive a lot of users to seek out alternatives like Blender and 3DC. For a lot of the rest, I imagine it’s the high seas too…
the problem with 3dc and blender, lovely as they are, you just can’t dish out .ztl files out of them (which are oft required by customers/inside teams)
Of course, but for newer users and people who don’t use Zbrush as part of a work pipeline.
Personally, I’m 100% in on Zbrush as there simply is no alternative that comes anywhere close for what I need.
Are you playing around with 3dcoat at all lately? I hope they do get a proper multiples support, not this triangulated something they rolled out and called multires :\
My first and last time using 3DC was in the beta around 15 years ago. Not an option for me. 
I’ve been a bit late to the party on this but I have been exploring Blender sculpting much more in the last couple of weeks.( New Years etc …
) and I am amazed how far it has developed. Right now I am finding it really fun and responsive to work with and the general feel and layout of everything really nice.
I can get to a quite nice high resolution with good performance play back with the multi res now on a mid range lap top with 16 gig of ram. Good enough at least to do some nice sculpting work and for fairly detailed alpha stamping and normals and displacement baking for a 4 to 8 K texture. I have been trying to stress test it as best I can with throwing stuff around in it a lot and figuring out the workflow.
A nice feature I have found of multi res in Blender is that you can turn it off and actually make real substantial topology remodeling and design changes to the base mesh and also reproject and re-work the UV’s. Then switch multi res back on and keep all the sculpting resolutions intact. Not sure how often this might ever be needed in a typical multi res workflow but fun to try all the same.
To be honest, I don’t get why I should render in ZBrush. I plan to get zBrush 2023 (I never had zBrush before) only for sculpting.
zBrush → Sculpting
Substance → Painting
Blender → Scene creation and rendering
Affinity → Postwork
So, I totally do not care if I can use Redshift or not.
The one thing that interests me is the apple silicon version. Wonder how well that does? 2022 on Rosetta does a lot better on my M1 Mac than on than on the intel Mac. Considering all the years of free upgrades I’d almost be tempted.
Hey bro i have a little question, do you know some good and probably in depth free tutorials about zremesher using poly groups (are those the guides used for remeshing right?) For hard surface oriented workflows, and also some good sculpting hard surface tutorials (advanced complex style)
Ugh to purchase the perpetual upgrade with the offered discount you have to ask “official resellers” like actual brick and mortar stores?? or ask maxon one team…
Of course the official resellers don´t have an offer and their websites are massively outdated.
I don´t get the backward thinking from Maxon.
This $659 upgrade price was actually leaked exactly a year ago if you look at the post by @toyxyz from January 2022. The Maxon business tactics are quite clear to former C4D and Redshift users such as myself.
They start by making the perpetual upgrades look ridiculous in comparison to the subs price. Then they cancel perpetuals in a year or two claiming that nobody wanted to use them. ZBrush perpetuals will be gone within 2 years, no doubt about it.
Yeah the upgrade price is ridicules. But if you update only 3 or 4 years or buy a new licence it‘s cheaper the the subscription.
As mentioned above, there will be no perpetual license to upgrade to within x years. Maxon will move to subs only, like all their other products.
Yes very likely, or they introduce drastic priceincreases for larger versionjumps, so that it doesnt differ from having subscribed.
Yes, they will pull out all the stops to make perpetual as unattractive as possible! Perpetual upgrade is already more expensive than a year of subs. The other thing that will piss people off is that they will do several mid year feature updates that will only be available to subscribers. Perpetual licenses will have to wait until the next year to get these new features, which is what they did with C4D before killing perpetual licenses completely.
Yet they’re still advertising perpetuals?
No free ones, mate. There’s a paid one modeling a helicopter rotor. It’s probably one of the most in-depth Zbrush hard-surface modelling tutorial.
https://www.artstation.com/marketplace/p/MggXA/hard-surface-zbrush-tutorial-modeling-a-uh-60-rotor
Then for a more sculpt-based hard-surface approach(the classic concept sculpt workflow) you should check out Marco Plouffe’s streams.
That is an older version, and I am surprised it is still even on there. You can only get R26 which is the latest via subscription. I stopped using it at R20, but I think they now call it C4D 2023 (which is R26). Since it is now “Software as a Service” the name is irrelevant, as they permanently have you on the hook!
Come on, the Maxon CEO deserves at least a second yacht, or he’ll stay behind the Autodesk CEO!
Jokes set aside, everything has unfolded exactly as we predicted in this thread after the ‘Maxologic’ takeover was announced. The once so charming Pixologic has been devoured by a hungry corporate monster.
I haven’t checked out 3D-Coat’s Multires implementation yet. It seems a bit quirky indeed, but 3DC has become quite a powerhouse during the past 10 years. The UI / UX needs some studying and practice, but that’s true for Blender and ZBrush as well.
If you’re interested in knowing more about 3D-Coat, have a look at this thread:
https://blenderartists.org/t/3d-coat-as-a-companion-to-blender/1353279/
Indeed. Our old perpetuals were always going to become obsolete. As @Jamez mentioned, we are in the era of services over products.
To me it seems that the Pixologic team are still in full creative control and have benefitted from the additional resources(same with the Substance team at Adobe), but who knows how long that will last? The Maxon sub prices are what they are, but the fact that Redshift isn’t part of the ZB sub is just laughable.