Got an personal e-mail from a Maxon employ asking me if I would switch to the subscription for a special price 
Hello, no 
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Hey, could any Zbrush user confirm something, because I heard this and I just can’t believe it’s true.
So, apparently Zbrush can’t sculpt on a mesh that has a subdivision modifier on it (dynamic subdivisions). You get a preview of the subdivided mesh with some “acupuncture needles” sticking out:
And you can move those points around to modify the mesh, but you can’t actually use any sculpting brushes on that thing.
IS THAT TRUE? In Blender I use this method 100% of the time during at least the blockout, it’s absolutely fundamental for me, and it’s just blowing my mind that Big Bad Z can’t (apparently?!) do it. It’s like learning that ED-209 can’t walk down stairs…
Yes you can… But you’ll be sculpting on the original mesh ofc…
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This. 
It’s just like sculpting on a mesh with a subdivision modifier in Blender.
The cube screenshot with the pins shows what you see when you activate the view mode that shows the polygon frame and polygroups. In that mode, the pinpoints show the location of the unsubdivided vertices, so you can easily manipulate them with ZModeler (comparable to Blender Edit Mode) while seeing the subdivided result.
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Thank you! I knew this couldn’t be true, but I didn’t have access to ZBrush to find out. I heard it during a stream and I guess I just misunderstood what was being said 
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Did you finally come to your senses? 
What’s more important is that (even if I liked working in the program, or was forced to do it) I couldn’t even afford Zbrush 
Did they completely remove the perpetual license and everything is now available only through the Maxon thing? The subscription prices look absurd, but I guess you can charge anything if you’re the only real choice on the market…
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Dynamic subdiv was never designed to be used for sculpting. Yes, you can use the brushes on it, but it’s not advised. It will bog the system and performance will suffer greatly. My advice is to stick to regular subdivs for sculpting. Dynamic subdiv for modeling.
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Yep…
Maxon is doing many stupid things lately… 
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The perpetual is no longer sold my Maxon. But there are many softwares shops which are offering for the 2023 version the perpetual licence. If there will be ever a perpetual update is unkown, but I wouldn’t bet on it.
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I’m 100% sure that the door is closed forever on that option. It was always Maxon’s eventual goal. That was very clear by their tactics immediately after the purchase of Pixologic.
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Yep, Maxon is like a sibling of Autodesk. They love to ask pricy subscriptions and keep the development progress relatively minimal (compared to Blender, to name an example 
).
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Indeed. Dev on ZB has almost become patch releases with the bare minimum. As we spoke about before, go and look at the ‘what’s new’ pdfs that ship with ZB, Pixologic Vs Maxon. We went from a 30 page booklet to a few sentences.
Maxon will continue to drip-feed the bare minimum for the annual release, with a few bug fix patches throughout the year. They are already doing this and it’s pretty sad to see. I wouldn’t be surprised if they have a lot more new features already built, but are under a Maxon directive to drip feed the minimum. Who knows? Either way, the Maxon buyout has gone exactly as we predicted it would. 
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yeah, sadly zbrush still has no real competitor, which is weird
Users were still shocked though because of how fast the changes were made.
The majority of conglomerates tend to introduce these changes slowly (over several years or more) to prevent user bleed and to reset their expectations. Maxon did the polar opposite and did not even wait for the ink to dry on the paperwork before the first major changes were done.
Perhaps it was their confidence that users had nowhere to go which was the reason for not following the usual playbook.
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It was Mudbox back in the day, but that got the corporate graveyard treatment too. That was a real shame. If Skymatter had kept on deving MB it could have even become better than ZB.
I think this was probably it. They obviously did their market research beforehand and knew which way the wind was blowing. Pretty much every every single 3D industry uses Zbrush in its pipeline all across the board.
A weird purchase for Maxon was Forger. It’s the only rival to Nomad, and despite not being as good as Nomad, they decided to put it on the sub plan when Nomad is really cheap and a once off payment for a perpetual? What was the thinking there, I wonder?
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A similar drama has just happened…
oh no… I really like Affinity. Let‘s hope the perpetual licence will stay for future updates.
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perpetual will stay… for now no change in business model https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/press/newsroom/canva-statement/